Unification, Funding, Discipline and Administration: Cornerstones for a New Judicial Article

Need for adjustments in the structure and operation of the judiciary is occasioned by the same factors that require modification of other institutions and is more accurately described as a continuing process than as a response to a specific crisis. In recent years, however, demands upon existing judicial resources have burgeoned, and it has been said that the old ways of doing things are clearly inadequate to meet the burdens imposed on our courts by the \u27law explosion\u27 of the mid-20th century. The legitimacy of these demands already has been recognized in Washington. Partial reform of the courts of limited jurisdiction was accomplished in 1961, and a court of appeals was created in 1969. Since no one assumed those two steps alone would resolve all the problems presented, Washington became an active participant in the National Center for State Courts when it was organized. The state also has been aided twice by the citizen conference series sponsored in part by the American Judicature Society. It was during the second of these two conferences that S.J.R. 113, the proposal to place a new judicial article in the state constitution, was developed. The purpose of this article is to discuss some of the provisions of that proposal

Alienation of the Skid-Road Tramp

A book review essay considering You Owe Yourself a Drunk: An Ethnography of Urban Nomads, by James P. Spradley (1970)

The Antimonopoly Law of Japan and Its Enforcement

The Antimonopoly Law of Japan became effective in July 1947, less than two decades ago. The act was extravagantly endorsed by the U.S. occupation forces as a charter for the economic future of Japan. It was indeed a significant undertaking, designed to implant democratic practices where none had existed before, and it required basic, almost revolutionary, changes in the economic structure of the nation. Equally important was the circumstance that this law was neither sought nor desired by the Japanese. It was imposed upon a defeated people, a device entirely alien to the history and culture of those who were expected to make it work. The purpose of this article is to examine the act and to attempt an evaluation

Phase locking below rate threshold in noisy model neurons

The property of a neuron to phase-lock to an oscillatory stimulus before adapting its spike rate to the stimulus frequency plays an important role for the auditory system. We investigate under which conditions neurons exhibit this phase locking below rate threshold. To this end, we simulate neurons employing the widely used leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) model. Tuning parameters, we can arrange either an irregular spontaneous or a tonic spiking mode. When the neuron is stimulated in both modes, a significant rise of vector strength prior to a noticeable change of the spike rate can be observed. Combining analytic reasoning with numerical simulations, we trace this observation back to a modulation of interspike intervals, which itself requires spikes to be only loosely coupled. We test the limits of this conception by simulating an LIF model with threshold fatigue, which generates pronounced anticorrelations between subsequent interspike intervals. In addition we evaluate the LIF response for harmonic stimuli of various frequencies and discuss the extension to more complex stimuli. It seems that phase locking below rate threshold occurs generically for all zero mean stimuli. Finally, we discuss our findings in the context of stimulus detection

Real-time 3D Tracking of Articulated Tools for Robotic Surgery

In robotic surgery, tool tracking is important for providing safe tool-tissue interaction and facilitating surgical skills assessment. Despite recent advances in tool tracking, existing approaches are faced with major difficulties in real-time tracking of articulated tools. Most algorithms are tailored for offline processing with pre-recorded videos. In this paper, we propose a real-time 3D tracking method for articulated tools in robotic surgery. The proposed method is based on the CAD model of the tools as well as robot kinematics to generate online part-based templates for efficient 2D matching and 3D pose estimation. A robust verification approach is incorporated to reject outliers in 2D detections, which is then followed by fusing inliers with robot kinematic readings for 3D pose estimation of the tool. The proposed method has been validated with phantom data, as well as ex vivo and in vivo experiments. The results derived clearly demonstrate the performance advantage of the proposed method when compared to the state-of-the-art.Comment: This paper was presented in MICCAI 2016 conference, and a DOI was linked to the publisher's versio

A bias in optical observations of high redshift luminous infrared galaxies

We present evidence for the dramatically different morphology between the rest frame UV and 7micron mid-IR emission of VV114 and Arp299, two nearby (z~0) violently interacting infrared luminous galaxies (LIRGs). Nearly all LIRGs are interacting systems and it is currently accepted that they dominate the IR emission at z>1. Luminous IR galaxies located at z=1-2 could easily be detected as unresolved sources in deep optical/near-IR ground based surveys, as well as in upcoming 24micron surveys with the Space Infrared Telescope Facility. We demonstrate that the spatial resolution of these surveys will result in blending of the emission from unresolved interacting components. An increased scatter will thus be introduced in the observed optical to mid-IR colors of these galaxies, leading to a systematic underestimation of their dust content.Comment: To appear in the Astrophysical Journal Letters (4 pages 1 figure