Article III and Removal Jurisdiction: The Demise of the Complete Diversity Rule and a Proposed Return to Minimal Diversity

The complete diversity rule is broken. Although easily applied in theory (federal courts can exercise subject matter jurisdiction over an action on diversity grounds only when no party is of the same citizenship as any adverse party), over time the number of judicially and legislatively created exceptions to the rule, as well as their varying and inconsistent application by the federal courts, has created an environment in which similarly situated parties are treated differently based solely on the forum in which the litigation is brought. In the removal context, depending upon the forum in which an action is filed, a federal court may exercise diversity jurisdiction over a matter despite the presence of a nondiverse party where, for example, the defendant can show the plaintiff lacks a viable claim against the nondiverse party, or the plaintiff has improperly joined the claims of nondiverse parties to a completely diverse action, or, in mass actions, the plaintiffs have proposed trying the joined actions together (but not if they have not). In response, the federal judiciary (despite having brought this problem on itself through its myriad conflicting rulings on the subject) has cried out for order—requesting a revision to the current diversity jurisdiction regime that provides both uniformity in treatment and ease of application. This article proposes the adoption of a minimum diversity standard for all matters between citizens of different states. This proposal is supported by Article III of the Constitution and its framers. Further, it is easy to apply, and largely incapable of manipulation. To ensure, however, that this change does not flood the courts with diversity matters, this article further proposes an increase to the amount-in-controversy requirement to bring it into the twenty-first century, along with a mandatory abstention provision precluding the federal courts from hearing matters local in nature

The Impact of the American Community Band on Music Education

Community bands in the United States have increased in numbers since the late twentieth century. At the same time, music education in American schools has remained strong even with the serious funding issues that face many music programs in nearly every state. The purpose of this study was to find what impact American community bands have on music education. Eight directors/executive directors from eight community bands were interviewed with 37 questions. It was determined that the impact that American community bands have on music education is positive and far reaching but that more could be done with further research to discover the best and most effective ways to strengthen the relationship between these two important components in American cultur

Random strings and tt-degrees of Turing complete C.E. sets

We investigate the truth-table degrees of (co-)c.e.\ sets, in particular, sets of random strings. It is known that the set of random strings with respect to any universal prefix-free machine is Turing complete, but that truth-table completeness depends on the choice of universal machine. We show that for such sets of random strings, any finite set of their truth-table degrees do not meet to the degree~0, even within the c.e. truth-table degrees, but when taking the meet over all such truth-table degrees, the infinite meet is indeed~0. The latter result proves a conjecture of Allender, Friedman and Gasarch. We also show that there are two Turing complete c.e. sets whose truth-table degrees form a minimal pair.Comment: 25 page

If the Shoe Fits: A Historical Exploration of Gender Bias in the U.S. Sneaker Industry

In its short history, which barely spans 100 years, sneakers have quickly become a polarizing and captivating commodity, gaining the attention of consumers, fashion houses and major retailers everywhere. Unfortunately, the sneaker industry also has a history of implicit, unconscious bias towards women. A thorough examination of the history of sneakers has discovered three major social movements that can be identified as the key contributors to the growth of the sneaker industry: (1) physical activity, (2) professional sports, and (3) Hip-Hop—the culture not the music genre. Upon further examination, it became evident that each of these social factors have their own biases towards women. Thus, arriving at the conclusion that bias and discrimination in the United States sneaker industry is the result of bias in the proprietary social factors that are responsible for the growth of the sneaker industry

Probability Estimation from a Database Using a Gibbs Energy Model

We present an algorithm for creating a neural network which produces accurate probability estimates as outputs. The network implements a Gibbs probability distribution model of the training database. This model is created by a new transformation relating the joint probabilities of attributes in the database to the weights (Gibbs potentials) of the distributed network model. The theory of this transformation is presented together with experimental results. One advantage of this approach is the network weights are prescribed without iterative gradient descent. Used as a classifier the network tied or outperformed published results on a variety of databases