Emergency-Docket Experiments

This short Essay is the first to analyze the Court’s recent emer-gency-docket experiments and discuss their effectiveness. We conclude that the Court’s interventions have real benefits: giving emergency cases greater procedure improves transparency, boosts public confidence in the Court, and gives guidance to litigants and lower courts. But experiments are often iterative—it is unusual to hit the right result the first time. So too with the Court’s emergency-docket tinkering. In tweaking its stay factors, the Justices have failed to give suffi-cient guidance to litigants about how those factors will apply in the future. Plus, in transferring Ramirez from the emergency docket to the merits docket, the Court made new law in an emergency posture and entered a remedy that the district court had not passed on. Those moves may well have stretched the bounds of the Court’s appellate jurisdiction. Yet those problems are not insuperable. We suggest that the Court should continue to argue emergency cases or transfer them to its merits docket. But in doing so, it should keep in mind the constraints on its authority and should provide greater guidance to lower courts and litigants. The remainder of this Essay digs into the Court’s emergency-docket experiments. Part I summarizes criticism of the emergency docket. Part II explains how the Court’s recent experiments address those criticisms. Part III flags questions about these experiments. Finally, Part IV suggests tweaks to those experiments going forward

A method to reveal workload weak-resilience-signals at a rail control post

Reorganization of a rail control post may affect its ability to cope with unexpected disruptions. The term ‘resilience’, the ability to manage spare adaptive capacity when unexpected events occur, encapsulates this situation. This paper focuses on the workload adaptive capacity through a method for revealing workload weak-resilience-signals (WRS). Three different workload measurements are adapted to identify structural changes in workload. The first, executed cognitive task load, targets system activities. The second, integrated workload scale, is a subjective measure. The last, heart rate variability, identifies physiological arousal because of workload. An experiment is designed to identify the workload change and distribution across group members during disruptions. A newly defined Stretch, the reaction of the system to an external cluster-event, is used to reveal a workload WRS. The method is suitable for real-time usage and provides the means for the rail signaler to influence the system through his subjective workload perception

Skeleton-based canonical forms for non-rigid 3D shape retrieval

The retrieval of non-rigid 3D shapes is an important task. A common technique is to simplify this problem to a rigid shape retrieval task by producing a bending invariant canonical form for each shape in the dataset to be searched. It is common for these techniques to attempt to ``unbend'' a shape by applying multidimensional scaling to the distances between points on the mesh, but this leads to unwanted local shape distortions. We instead perform the unbending on the skeleton of the mesh, and use this to drive the deformation of the mesh itself. This leads to a computational speed-up and less distortions of the local details of the shape. We compare our method against other canonical forms and our experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art retrieval accuracy in a recent canonical forms benchmark, and only a small drop in retrieval accuracy over state-of-the-art in a second recent benchmark, while being significantly faster

Predicting local adaptation in fragmented plant populations: Implications for restoration genetics

Understanding patterns and correlates of local adaptation in heterogeneous landscapes can provide important information in the selection of appropriate seed sources for restoration. We assessed the extent of local adaptation of fitness components in 12 population pairs of the perennial herb Rutidosis leptorrhynchoides (Asteraceae) and examined whether spatial scale (0.7-600 km), environmental distance, quantitative (QST) and neutral (FST) genetic differentiation, and size of the local and foreign populations could predict patterns of adaptive differentiation. Local adaptation varied among populations and fitness components. Including all population pairs, local adaptation was observed for seedling survival, but not for biomass, while foreign genotype advantage was observed for reproduction (number of inflorescences). Among population pairs, local adaptation increased with QST and local population size for biomass. QST was associated with environmental distance, suggesting ecological selection for phenotypic divergence. However, low FST and variation in population structure in small populations demonstrates the interaction of gene flow and drift in constraining local adaptation in R. leptorrhynchoides. Our study indicates that for species in heterogeneous landscapes, collecting seed from large populations from similar environments to candidate sites is likely to provide the most appropriate seed sources for restoration

Effect of silver content on the structure and antibacterial activity of silver-doped phosphate-based glasses

Staphylococcus aureus can cause a range of diseases, such as osteomyelitis, as well as colonize implanted medical devices. In most instances the organism forms biofilms that not only are resistant to the body's defense mechanisms but also display decreased susceptibilities to antibiotics. In the present study, we have examined the effect of increasing silver contents in phosphate-based glasses to prevent the formation of S. aureus biofilms. Silver was found to be an effective bactericidal agent against S. aureus biofilms, and the rate of silver ion release (0.42 to 1.22 µg·mm–2·h–1) from phosphate-based glass was found to account for the variation in its bactericidal effect. Analysis of biofilms by confocal microscopy indicated that they consisted of an upper layer of viable bacteria together with a layer (20 µm) of nonviable cells on the glass surface. Our results showed that regardless of the silver contents in these glasses (10, 15, or 20 mol%) the silver exists in its +1 oxidation state, which is known to be a highly effective bactericidal agent compared to that of silver in other oxidation states (+2 or +3). Analysis of the glasses by 31P nuclear magnetic resonance imaging and high-energy X-ray diffraction showed that it is the structural rearrangement of the phosphate network that is responsible for the variation in silver ion release and the associated bactericidal effectiveness. Thus, an understanding of the glass structure is important in interpreting the in vitro data and also has important clinical implications for the potential use of the phosphate-based glasses in orthopedic applications to deliver silver ions to combat S. aureus biofilm infections

Variation in sexual dimorphism in a wind-pollinated plant: The influence of geographical context and life-cycle dynamics

Understanding the mechanisms causing phenotypic differences between females and males has long fascinated evolutionary biologists. An extensive literature exists on animal sexual dimorphism but less information is known about sex differences in plants, particularly the extent of geographical variation in sexual dimorphism and its life‐cycle dynamics. Here, we investigated patterns of genetically based sexual dimorphism in vegetative and reproductive traits of a wind‐pollinated dioecious plant, Rumex hastatulus, across three life‐cycle stages using open‐pollinated families from 30 populations spanning the geographic range and chromosomal variation (XY and XY1Y2) of the species. The direction and degree of sexual dimorphism was highly variable among populations and life‐cycle stages. Sex‐specific differences in reproductive function explained a significant amount of temporal change in sexual dimorphism. For several traits, geographical variation in sexual dimorphism was associated with bioclimatic parameters, likely due to the differential responses of the sexes to climate. We found no systematic differences in sexual dimorphism between chromosome races. Sex‐specific trait differences in dioecious plants largely result from a balance between sexual and natural selection on resource allocation. Our results indicate that abiotic factors associated with geographical context also play a role in modifying sexual dimorphism during the plant life‐cycle

Improved Lattice Spectroscopy of Minimal Walking Technicolor

We present a numerical study of spectroscopic observables in the SU(2) gauge theory with two adjoint fermions using improved source and sink operators. We compare in detail our improved results with previous determinations of masses that used point sources and sinks and we investigate possible systematic effects in both cases. Such comparison enables us to clearly assess the impact of a short temporal extent on the physical picture, and to investigate some effects due to the finite spatial box. While confirming the IR-conformal behaviour of the theory, our investigation shows that in order to make firm quantitative predictions, a better handle on finite size effects is needed.Comment: 33 pages, 30 figures, 18 table

α5β1-Integrin promotes tension-dependent mammary epithelial cell invasion by engaging the fibronectin synergy site.

Tumors are fibrotic and characterized by abundant, remodeled, and cross-linked collagen that stiffens the extracellular matrix stroma. The stiffened collagenous stroma fosters malignant transformation of the tissue by increasing tumor cell tension to promote focal adhesion formation and potentiate growth factor receptor signaling through kinase. Importantly, collagen cross-linking requires fibronectin (FN). Fibrotic tumors contain abundant FN, and tumor cells frequently up-regulate the FN receptor α5β1 integrin. Using transgenic and xenograft models and tunable two- and three-dimensional substrates, we show that FN-bound α5β1 integrin promotes tension-dependent malignant transformation through engagement of the synergy site that enhances integrin adhesion force. We determined that ligation of the synergy site of FN permits tumor cells to engage a zyxin-stabilized, vinculin-linked scaffold that facilitates nucleation of phosphatidylinositol (3,4,5)-triphosphate at the plasma membrane to enhance phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K)-dependent tumor cell invasion. The data explain why rigid collagen fibrils potentiate PI3K activation to promote malignancy and offer a perspective regarding the consistent up-regulation of α5β1 integrin and FN in many tumors and their correlation with cancer aggression

Span of control in supervision of rail track work

The supervision of engineering work on the railways has received relatively little examination despite being both safety-critical in its own right and having wider implications for the successful running of the railways. The present paper is concerned with understanding the factors that make different engineering works perceived as easier or harder to manage. We describe an approach building on notions of ‘span of control’, through which we developed the TOECAP inventory (Team, Organisation, Environment, Communication, Activity and Personal). This tool was validated through both interviews and questionnaires. As well as identifying the physical factors involved, the work also emphasised the importance of collaborative and attitudinal factors. We conclude by discussing limitations of the present work and future directions for development