Ethan A. Nadelmann, Cops Across Borders: The Internationalization of U.S. Criminal Law Enforcement

This book review asserts that Cops Across Borders: The Internationalization of U.S. Criminal Law Enforcement ( Cops Across Borders ) is the first book to attempt a systematic analysis of the role that the United States has played in the field of international law enforcement. For that reason, the book represents a major step forward in understanding this rapidly evolving area. While many people have examined different aspects of international law enforcement, such as extraterritorial jurisdiction, extradition, and international evidence gathering, not until this book has the entire field been subjected to historical and scholarly research. Mr. Nadelmann\u27s book has forged a new road in this rapidly growing, but often confusing, area. The book is not without defects, however. The basic problem with Cops Across Borders is that the general theme of international law enforcement is not strong enough to hold together the different chapters to form a cohesive whole. Each chapter is a self-contained study of a particular facet of law enforcement, and the reader is left with the feeling that Mr. Nadelmann has forced the parts together to form a single text. Given the importance of his endeavor, however, the effort can be readily defended as the exercise of justifiable force. Indeed, the sections of the book are well-suited to use in an academic setting as the basis for an extended study of the issues raised

Evaluation of Proposed Rocket Engines for Earth-to-Orbit Vehicles

The objective is to evaluate recently analyzed rocket engines for advanced Earth-to-orbit vehicles. The engines evaluated are full-flow staged combustion engines and split expander engines, both at mixture ratios at 6 and above with oxygen and hydrogen propellants. The vehicles considered are single-stage and two-stage fully reusable vehicles and the Space Shuttle with liquid rocket boosters. The results indicate that the split expander engine at a mixture ratio of about 7 is competitive with the full-flow staged combustion engine for all three vehicle concepts. A key factor in this result is the capability to increase the chamber pressure for the split expander as the mixture ratio is increased from 6 to 7

Structural and mutagenic analysis of the RM controller protein C.Esp1396I

Bacterial restriction-modification (RM) systems are comprised of two complementary enzymatic activities that prevent the establishment of foreign DNA in a bacterial cell: DNA methylation and DNA restriction. These two activities are tightly regulated to prevent over-methylation or auto-restriction. Many Type II RM systems employ a controller (C) protein as a transcriptional regulator for the endonuclease gene (and in some cases, the methyltransferase gene also). All high-resolution structures of C-protein/DNA-protein complexes solved to date relate to C.Esp1396I, from which the interactions of specific amino acid residues with DNA bases and/or the phosphate backbone could be observed. Here we present both structural and DNA binding data for a series of mutations to the key DNA binding residues of C.Esp1396I. Our results indicate that mutations to the backbone binding residues (Y37, S52) had a lesser affect on DNA binding affinity than mutations to those residues that bind directly to the bases (T36, R46), and the contributions of each side chain to the binding energies are compared. High-resolution X-ray crystal structures of the mutant and native proteins showed that the fold of the proteins was unaffected by the mutations, but also revealed variation in the flexible loop conformations associated with DNA sequence recognition. Since the tyrosine residue Y37 contributes to DNA bending in the native complex, we have solved the structure of the Y37F mutant protein/DNA complex by X-ray crystallography to allow us to directly compare the structure of the DNA in the mutant and native complexes

Lipid-laden alveolar macrophages and pH monitoring in gastroesophageal reflux-related respiratory symptoms

Lipid-laden alveolar macrophages and pH monitoring have been used in the diagnosis of chronic aspiration in children with gastroesophageal reflux (GER). This study was conducted to prove a correlation between the detection of alimentary pulmonary fat phagocytosis and an increasing amount of proximal gastroesophageal reflux. It was assumed that proximal gastroesophageal reflux better correlates with aspiration than distal GER. Patients from 6 months to 16 years with unexplained recurrent wheezy bronchitis and bronchial hyperreactivity, or recurrent pneumonia with chronic cough underwent 24-hour double-channel pH monitoring and bronchoscopy with bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL). Aspiration of gastric content was determined by counting lipid laden alveolar macrophages from BAL specimens. There were no correlations between any pH-monitoring parameters and counts of lipid-laden macrophages in the whole study population, even when restricting analysis to those with abnormal reflux index expressing clinically significant GER. Quantifying lipid-laden alveolar macrophages from BAL in children with gastroesophageal-related respiratory disorders does not have an acceptable specificity to prove chronic aspiration as an underlying etiology. Therefore, research for other markers of pulmonary aspiration is needed

Soil investigation -- proposed Roadway "A," Makai Development, Kamehameha Highway and Kalauao Stream, Aiea, Hawaii

tax map key: 9-8-16 & 9-8-17Sections: scope of service, proposed roadway, recommendations, vicinity map, plot plan, field investigation, and laboratory testing.Community Planning, Inc

The electronic Hamiltonian for cuprates

A realistic many-body Hamiltonian for the cuprate superconductors should include both copper d and oxygen p states, hopping matrix elements between them, and Coulomb energies, both on-site and inter-site. We have developed a novel computational scheme for deriving the relevant parameters ab initio from a constrained occupation local density functional. The scheme includes numerical calculation of appropriate Wannier functions for the copper and oxygen states. Explicit parameter values are given for La2CuO4. These parameters are generally consistent with other estimates and with the observed superexchange energy. Secondly, we address whether this complicated multi-band Hamiltonian can be reduced to a simpler one with fewer basis states per unit cell. We propose a mapping onto a new two-band effective Hamiltonian with one copper d and one oxygen p derived state per unit cell. This mapping takes into account the large oxygen-oxygen hopping given by the ab initio calculations

Forecasting Seismic Signatures of Stellar Magnetic Activity

For the Sun, a tight correlation between various activity measures and oscillation frequencies is well documented. For other stars, we have abundant data on magnetic activity and its changes but not yet on its seismic signature. A prediction of the activity induced frequency changes in stars based on scaling the solar relations is presented. This seismic signature of the activity should be measurable in the data expected within few years.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, to appear in proceedings of "Unsolved Problems in Stellar Physics" conference (Cambridge, UK, July 2007