Telephone Justice, Pandering, and Judges Who Speak Out of School

This Article addresses the growing influence of outside forces on the judiciary. The Article details four situations in which a judge may feel the pressure of outside forces: confirmation hearings, subsequent political pressure, election campaigns, and situations involving the media. It criticizes the actions taken by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson in the Microsoft antitrust case, most notable the numerous public remarks made while the trial was still in progress. The author concludes that judges set the standards for the way law is practiced and must therefore ignore the external pressures and strive to be models of integrity and justice

Discretizing Gravity in Warped Spacetime

We investigate the discretized version of the compact Randall-Sundrum model. By studying the mass eigenstates of the lattice theory, we demonstrate that for warped space, unlike for flat space, the strong coupling scale does not depend on the IR scale and lattice size. However, strong coupling does prevent us from taking the continuum limit of the lattice theory. Nonetheless, the lattice theory works in the manifestly holographic regime and successfully reproduces the most significant features of the warped theory. It is even in some respects better than the KK theory, which must be carefully regulated to obtain the correct physical results. Because it is easier to construct lattice theories than to find exact solutions to GR, we expect lattice gravity to be a useful tool for exploring field theory in curved space.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures; references adde

Biodiesel Feasibility Study: An Evaluation of Biodiesel Feasibility in Wisconsin

There has been considerable interest focused on the further development and expansion of a domestic bio-fuels industry. While most early attention from the commercial sector focused on ethanol, interest is now growing in the area of biodiesel production. Reasons for growing interest in biodiesel include its potential for reducing noxious emissions, potential contributions to rural economic development, as an additional demand center for agricultural commodities, and as a way to reduce reliance on foreign oil. Despite interest over the past decade or so, however, experience with biodiesel production in the US is limited. According to the Energy Information Administration, participants in the federal Bioenergy program produced only 18.6 million gallons of biodiesel in fiscal 2003. This compares with the production of almost 2.5 billion gallons of ethanol.

A Study of Costs of Compliance Related to Non-point Pollution Rules for Wisconsin Crop Producers

The non-point pollution rules proposed by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) have generated questions regarding the costs of compliance for Wisconsin agriculture. It is clear that some agricultural practices will have to change if the proposed rules are enacted, but the costs of these changes are less clear. The DNR proposals include cost sharing for the introduction of best management practices, but constrain the cost share program to essentially out of-pocket expenses. In general, there is no compensation for costs associated with additional management time, or lost revenue. The purpose of this project is to generate a set of estimates relating to net costs of compliance for Wisconsin crop producers. The intent is to develop a baseline for discussion of rule adoption and the share of total costs paid by producers.

Canavanine Inhibits Vimentin Assembly But Not Its Synthesis in Chicken Embryo Erythroid Cells

In chicken embryo erythroid cells, newly synthesized vimentin first enters a Triton X-100 (TX-100)-soluble pool and subsequently assembles posttranslationally into TX-100-insoluble vimentin filaments (Blikstad I., and E. Lazarides, J. Cell Biol., 96:1803-1808). Here we show that incubation of chicken embryo erythroid cells in a medium in which arginine has been substituted by its amino acid analogue, canavanine, results in the inhibition of the posttranslational assembly of vimentin into the TX-100-insoluble filaments. Immunoprecipitation and subsequent SDS gel electrophoresis showed that the synthesis of canavanine-vimentin is not inhibited and that it accumulates in the TX-100-soluble compartment. Pulse-chase experiments with [35S]methionine demonstrated that while arginine-vimentin can be rapidly chased from the soluble to the cytoskeletal fraction, canavanine-vimentin remains in the soluble fraction, where it turns over. The effect of canavanine on the assembly of vimentin did not prevent the assembly of arginine-vimentin, as cells labeled with [35S]methionine first in the presence of canavanine and then in the presence of arginine contained labeled canavanine-vimentin only in the soluble fraction, and arginine-vimentin in both the soluble and cytoskeletal fractions. These results suggest that arginine residues play an essential role in the assembly of vimentin in vivo