Crimes Defining Our Time: Notable Criminal Cases from the First Fifty Years of the Middle Distric of Florida

Since the inception of the Middle District of Florida in 1962, the breadth of cases prosecuted in the District during the first five decades has covered the spectrum of the federal criminal code. The courthouses in the District have certainly housed many nationally significant and high profile cases, all worthy of extensive discussion and debate. Given the nature and scope of the many significant prosecutions, it is a difficult task to select just a few notable criminal cases. The nine cases discussed below have not been selected based upon the success of the government or defense in the case, but rather have been selected to be briefly summarized based upon the nature of the charges and the national significance of the prosecution

Preclusive Effect of Pre-Petition State Court Judgments in Nondischargeability Proceedings

(Excerpt) A central purpose of the Bankruptcy Code is to provide a “fresh start” for the “honest but unfortunate debtor.” Subject to various exceptions, section 727 of the Bankruptcy Code provides that the court shall grant the debtor a discharge, which permanently enjoins the debtor’s creditors from attempting to collect any prepetition debts. This “fresh start” policy is not absolute, however, and section 523 of the Bankruptcy Code lists various types of debts that are nondischargeable. Under section 523(a)(2), (4), and (6), a debtor will not be discharged from debts which are “(2) . . . obtained by-- (A) false pretenses, a false representation or actual fraud . . .” and “(4) for fraud or defalcation while acting in a fiduciary capacity, embezzlement, or larceny . . .” and “(6) for willful and malicious injury by the debtor to another entity or to the property of another entity[.]” Yet, the types of debts specified in section 523(a)(2), (4), and (6) will be automatically discharged unless the creditor obtains a judgment from a bankruptcy court that the debt is nondischargeable. Nondischargeability actions are adversary proceedings and often involve legal issues that have previously been litigated by the parties. Therefore, to avoid re-litigating matters already decided prior to bankruptcy, a party, often the creditor, may seek to apply collateral estoppel. Collateral estoppel “treats as final only those questions actually and necessarily decided in a prior suit[,]” and prevents parties from re-litigating matters already subject to a judicial decision. Bankruptcy courts have split as to whether collateral estoppel applies in a nondischargeability action if the prior court issued a consent or default judgment

Solving Nonlinear Systems of Equations Via Spectral Residual Methods: Stepsize Selection and Applications

Spectral residual methods are derivative-free and low-cost per iteration procedures for solving nonlinear systems of equations. They are generally coupled with a nonmonotone linesearch strategy and compare well with Newton-based methods for large nonlinear systems and sequences of nonlinear systems. The residual vector is used as the search direction and choosing the steplength has a crucial impact on the performance. In this work we address both theoretically and experimentally the steplength selection and provide results on a real application such as a rolling contact problem

Gyrofluid simulations of collisionless reconnection in the presence of diamagnetic effects

The effects of the ion Larmor radius on magnetic reconnection are investigated by means of numerical simulations, with a Hamiltonian gyrofluid model. In the linear regime, it is found that ion diamagnetic effects decrease the growth rate of the dominant mode. Increasing ion temperature tends to make the magnetic islands propagate in the ion diamagnetic drift direction. In the nonlinear regime, diamagnetic effects reduce the final width of the island. Unlike the electron density, the guiding center density does not tend to distribute along separatrices and at high ion temperature, the electrostatic potential exhibits the superposition of a small scale structure, related to the electron density, and a large scale structure, related to the ion guiding-center density

Gyrofluid simulations of collisionless reconnection in the presence of diamagnetic effects

The effects of the ion Larmor radius on magnetic reconnection are investigated by means of numerical simulations, with a Hamiltonian gyrofluid model. In the linear regime, it is found that ion diamagnetic effects decrease the growth rate of the dominant mode. Increasing ion temperature tends to make the magnetic islands propagate in the ion diamagnetic drift direction. In the nonlinear regime, diamagnetic effects reduce the final width of the island. Unlike the electron density, the guiding center density does not tend to distribute along separatrices and at high ion temperature, the electrostatic potential exhibits the superposition of a small scale structure, related to the electron density, and a large scale structure, related to the ion guiding-center density

Gyrofluid simulations of collisionless reconnection in the presence of diamagnetic effects

The effects of the ion Larmor radius on magnetic reconnection are investigated by means of numerical simulations, with a Hamiltonian gyrofluid model. In the linear regime, it is found that ion diamagnetic effects decrease the growth rate of the dominant mode. Increasing ion temperature tends to make the magnetic islands propagate in the ion diamagnetic drift direction. In the nonlinear regime, diamagnetic effects reduce the final width of the island. Unlike the electron density, the guiding center density does not tend to distribute along separatrices and at high ion temperature, the electrostatic potential exhibits the superposition of a small scale structure, related to the electron density, and a large scale structure, related to the ion guiding-center density

Microstructured soft devices for the growth and analysis of populations of homogenous multicellular tumor spheroids

: Multicellular tumor spheroids are rapidly emerging as an improved in vitro model with respect to more traditional 2D culturing. Microwell culturing is a simple and accessible method for generating a large number of uniformly sized spheroids, but commercially available systems often do not enable researchers to perform complete culturing and analysis pipelines and the mechanical properties of their culture environment are not commonly matching those of the target tissue. We herein report a simple method to obtain custom-designed self-built microwell arrays made of polydimethylsiloxane or agarose for uniform 3D cell structure generation. Such materials can provide an environment of tunable mechanical flexibility. We developed protocols to culture a variety of cancer and non-cancer cell lines in such devices and to perform molecular and imaging characterizations of the spheroid growth, viability, and response to pharmacological treatments. Hundreds of tumor spheroids grow (in scaffolded or scaffold-free conditions) at homogeneous rates and can be harvested at will. Microscopy imaging can be performed in situ during or at the end of the culture. Fluorescence (confocal) microscopy can be performed after in situ staining while retaining the geographic arrangement of spheroids in the plate wells. This platform can enable statistically robust investigations on cancer biology and screening of drug treatments

Software design for the control system for Small-Size Telescopes with single-mirror of the Cherenkov Telescope Array

The Small-Size Telescope with single-mirror (SST-1M) is a 4 m Davies-Cotton telescope and is among the proposed telescope designs for the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). It is conceived to provide the high-energy ($>$ few TeV) coverage. The SST-1M contains proven technology for the telescope structure and innovative electronics and photosensors for the camera. Its design is meant to be simple, low-budget and easy-to-build industrially. Each device subsystem of an SST-1M telescope is made visible to CTA through a dedicated industrial standard server. The software is being developed in collaboration with the CTA Medium-Size Telescopes to ensure compatibility and uniformity of the array control. Early operations of the SST-1M prototype will be performed with a subset of the CTA central array control system based on the Alma Common Software (ACS). The triggered event data are time stamped, formatted and finally transmitted to the CTA data acquisition. The software system developed to control the devices of an SST-1M telescope is described, as well as the interface between the telescope abstraction to the CTA central control and the data acquisition system.Comment: In Proceedings of the 34th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2015), The Hague, The Netherlands. All CTA contributions at arXiv:1508.0589