Civil Procedure—Availability of Class Actions to Consumers for Fraudulent Misrepresentation by Seller

Vasquez v. Superior Court of San Joaquin County, 4 Cal. 3d 800, 484 P.2d 964, 94 Cal. Rptr. 796 (1971)

Additive decompositions for rings of modular forms

We study rings of integral modular forms for congruence subgroups as modules over the ring of integral modular forms for the full modular group. In many cases these modules are free or decompose at least into well-understood pieces. We apply this to characterize which rings of modular forms are Cohen--Macaulay and to prove finite generation results. These theorems are based on decomposition results about vector bundles on the compactified moduli stack of elliptic curves.Comment: Complete revision. Comments welcome. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1609.0926

Assumptions and guarantees for compositional noninterference

The idea of building secure systems by plugging together "secure" components is appealing, but this requires a definition of security which, in addition to taking care of top-level security goals, is strengthened appropriately in order to be compositional. This approach has been previously studied for information-flow security of shared-variable concurrent programs, but the price for compositionality is very high: a thread must be extremely pessimistic about what an environment might do with shared resources. This pessimism leads to many intuitively secure threads being labelled as insecure. Since in practice it is only meaningful to compose threads which follow an agreed protocol for data access, we take advantage of this to develop a more liberal compositional security condition. The idea is to give the security definition access to the intended pattern of data usage, as expressed by assumption-guarantee style conditions associated with each thread. We illustrate the improved precision by developing the first flow-sensitive security type system that provably enforces a noninterference-like property for concurrent programs. \ua9 2011 IEEE

Thermodynamic Entropy And The Accessible States of Some Simple Systems

Comparison of the thermodynamic entropy with Boltzmann's principle shows that under conditions of constant volume the total number of arrangements in simple thermodynamic systems with temperature-independent heat capacities is TC/k. A physical interpretation of this function is given for three such systems; an ideal monatomic gas, an ideal gas of diatomic molecules with rotational motion, and a solid in the Dulong-Petit limit of high temperature. T1/2 emerges as a natural measure of the number of accessible states for a single particle in one dimension. Extension to N particles in three dimensions leads to TC/k as the total number of possible arrangements or microstates. The different microstates of the system are thus shown a posteriori to be equally probable, with probability T-C/k, which implies that for the purposes of counting states the particles of the gas are distinguishable. The most probable energy state of the system is determined by the degeneracy of the microstates.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figur

Vertical Carbon Nanotube Devices With Nanoscale Lengths Controlled Without Lithography

Vertical single-walled carbon nanotubes (vSWCNTs) are synthesized within highly ordered porous anodic alumina (PAA) templates supported on Si substrates. A process for obtaining thin-film PAA with long-range ordered nanopores is presented in this paper. Each nanopore contains at most one v-SWCNT that is supported by a dielectric and addressed by electrochemically formed Pd nanowire source contacts and evaporated Pd drain contacts. Characteristics of these completely vertical, two-terminal nanotube devices are presented. Control of the v-SWCNT length is demonstrated using a straightforward etching process with lengths of less than 100 nm achieved without the need for complex/expensive lithography. This effective nanoscale length control of highly ordered v-SWCNTs provides a practical basis for the realization of CNT-based nanoelectronics

Microbiology and atmospheric processes: an upcoming era of research on bio-meteorology

International audienceFor the past 200 years, the field of aerobiology has explored the abundance, diversity, survival and transport of micro-organisms in the atmosphere. Micro-organisms have been explored as passive and severely stressed riders of atmospheric transport systems. Recently, an interest in the active roles of these micro-organisms has emerged along with proposals that the atmosphere is a global biome for microbial metabolic activity and perhaps even multiplication. As part of a series of papers on the sources, distribution and roles in atmospheric processes of biological particles in the atmosphere, here we describe the pertinence of questions relating to the potential roles that air-borne micro-organisms might play in meteorological phenomena. For the upcoming era of research on the role of air-borne micro-organisms in meteorological phenomena, one important challenge is to go beyond descriptions of abundance of micro-organisms in the atmosphere toward an understanding of their dynamics in terms of both biological and physico-chemical properties and of the relevant transport processes at different scales. Another challenge is to develop this understanding under contexts pertinent to their potential role in processes related to atmospheric chemistry, the formation of clouds, precipitation and radiative forcing. This will require truly interdisciplinary approaches involving collaborators from the biological and physical sciences, from disciplines as disparate as agronomy, microbial genetics and atmosphere physics, for example

Respiratory pathogen colonisation of dental plaque, the lower airways and endotracheal tube biofilms during mechanical ventilation

Purpose In mechanically ventilated patients, the endotracheal tube is an essential interface between the patient and ventilator, but inadvertently, it also facilitates the development of ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) by subverting pulmonary host defenses. A number of investigations suggest that bacteria colonizing the oral cavity may be important in the etiology of VAP. The present study evaluated microbial changes that occurred in dental plaque and lower airways of 107 critically ill mechanically ventilated patients. Materials and Methods Dental plaque and lower airways fluid was collected during the course of mechanical ventilation, with additional samples of dental plaque obtained during the entirety of patients' hospital stay. Results A “microbial shift” occurred in dental plaque, with colonization by potential VAP pathogens, namely, Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa in 35 patients. Post-extubation analyses revealed that 70% and 55% of patients whose dental plaque included S aureus and P aeruginosa, respectively, reverted back to having a predominantly normal oral microbiota. Respiratory pathogens were also isolated from the lower airways and within the endotracheal tube biofilms. Conclusions To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest study to date exploring oral microbial changes during both mechanical ventilation and after recovery from critical illness. Based on these findings, it was apparent that during mechanical ventilation, dental plaque represents a source of potential VAP pathogens