Patriarch, Shah and Caliph: A Study of the Relationships of the Church of the East with the Sassanid Empire and the Early Caliphates up to 820 A.D. with Special Reference to Available Translated Syriac Sources, with Handbook of Source-Materials for Students of Church History up to 650 A.D

Abstract Not Provided

A Lament for What Was Once and Yet Can Be

In the wake of 9/11, the American people showed unwavering faith in justice, fairness, and the rule of law through their steadfast service to the legal system. Yet one of the Bush administration’s first orders in the new “war on terror” was effectively to strip the courts and the juries of their role in the “trials” of our enemies, instead creating streamlined military tribunals. This diminished role of the judiciary is unfortunately just the latest feature in a disturbing trend in the federal district courts, which has seen the process of fact-finding in open court exchanged for a reflective in-chambers review of written submissions, and the trial of actual disputes replaced with “litigation management.” Most shocking is that the diminishment of the traditional American trial has been facilitated by the judiciary’s own institutional policies. Judge William G. Young of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts makes a plea to all branches of government and the American people to halt the erosion of the judiciary and return to the founding principles of our democracy

TLR1-induced chemokine production is critical for mucosal immunity against Yersinia enterocolitica.

Our gastrointestinal tract is a portal of entry for a number of bacteria and viruses. Thus, this tissue must develop ways to induce antigen-specific T cell and antibody responses quickly. Intestinal epithelial cells are a central player in barrier function and also in communicating signals from invading pathogens to the underlying immune tissue. Here we demonstrate that activation of Toll-like receptor 1 (TLR1) in the epithelium leads to the upregulation of the chemokine CCL20 during oral infection with Yersinia enterocolitica. Further, both neutralization of CCL20 using polyclonal antibody treatment and deletion of TLR1 resulted in a defect in CCR6+ dendritic cells (DCs), which produce innate cytokines that help to induce anti-Yersinia-specific T helper 17 (TH17) cells and IgA production. These data demonstrate a novel role for TLR1 signaling in the intestinal epithelium and demonstrate that together TLR1 and CCL20 are critical mediators of TH17 immunity through the activation and recruitment of DCs

The Nusselt numbers of horizontal convection

We consider the problem of horizontal convection in which non-uniform buoyancy, $b_{\rm s}(x,y)$, is imposed on the top surface of a container and all other surfaces are insulating. Horizontal convection produces a net horizontal flux of buoyancy, $\mathbf{J}$, defined by vertically and temporally averaging the interior horizontal flux of buoyancy. We show that $\overline{\mathbf{J}\cdot\mathbf{\nabla}b_{\rm s}}=-\kappa\langle|\boldsymbol{\nabla}b|^2\rangle$; overbar denotes a space-time average over the top surface, angle brackets denote a volume-time average and $\kappa$ is the molecular diffusivity of buoyancy $b$. This connection between $\mathbf{J}$ and $\kappa\langle|\boldsymbol{\nabla}b|^2\rangle$ justifies the definition of the horizontal-convective Nusselt number, $Nu$, as the ratio of $\kappa \langle|\boldsymbol{\nabla}b|^2\rangle$ to the corresponding quantity produced by molecular diffusion alone. We discuss the advantages of this definition of $Nu$ over other definitions of horizontal-convective Nusselt number currently in use. We investigate transient effects and show that $\kappa \langle|\boldsymbol{\nabla}b|^2\rangle$ equilibrates more rapidly than other global averages, such as the domain averaged kinetic energy and bottom buoyancy. We show that $\kappa\langle|\boldsymbol{\nabla} b|^2\rangle$ is essentially the volume-averaged rate of Boussinesq entropy production within the enclosure. In statistical steady state, the interior entropy production is balanced by a flux of entropy through the top surface. This leads to an equivalent "surface Nusselt number", defined as the surface average of vertical buoyancy flux through the top surface times the imposed surface buoyancy $b_{\rm s}(x,y)$. In experiments it is likely easier to evaluate the surface entropy flux, rather than the volume integral of $|\mathbf{\nabla}b|^2$ demanded by $\kappa\langle|\mathbf{\nabla}b|^2\rangle$.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figure

Bench Presence: Toward a More Complete Model of Federal District Court Productivity

This Article considers what it means for a federal district court to be productive, and how such productivity might be assessed. Previous studies have focused almost exclusively on the speed of case processing, equating a court\u27s productivity (explicitly or implicitly) with the court\u27s rate of docket clearance or a case\u27s average time from filing to disposition. This thin definition of productivity, however, is not consistent with either classical economic understandings of the term or common public expectations of the courts. In particular, analyzing the speed or efficiency of a court says nothing about whether the parties or the public view the adjudicative process as accurate, fair, transparent, and dignified. We seek to bridge the disconnect between existing measures of court productivity and real-world expectations of the district courts by offering a more robust model of district court productivity that explicitly incorporates measures of accuracy and procedural fairness. We then introduce a new metric for procedural fairness called bench presence. Bench presence is a measure of the time that a district judge spends on the bench, presiding over the adjudication of issues in a public forum. Bench presence provides a rough but meaningful proxy for many components of procedural fairness, by quantitatively capturing the degree to which parties and the public are directly exposed to the judge\u27s practices and procedural safeguards. It also refocuses the discussion of court productivity on the core role of the district judge: presiding over trials and open hearings

Measuring Bench Presence: Federal District Judges in the Courtroom, 2008-2012

In a companion piece, the authors argued for a more comprehensive model of federal district court productivity that included, among other things, a measure of each court\u27s capacity and commitment to provide procedural fairness to litigants. The authors further proposed a new procedural fairness metric called bench presence, a measure of the time that district judges spend adjudicating issues in an open forum. This Article examines real-world bench presence data from the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. On the surface, the numbers are disappointing for those who view courtroom time as integral to procedural fairness protections. Specifically, the data reveal a decline in total courtroom hours in more than two-thirds of the federal district courts between FY 2008 and FY 2012, and an overall national decline in total courtroom hours of more than eight percent during that same period. But there is encouraging news in the data as well. Strong levels of bench presence are not restricted to courts of a particular size, circuit, or docket composition, suggesting that there are no persistent structural barriers to any district court increasing the amount of time that its judges spend in the courtroom. In addition, there is only a weak correlation between a district court\u27s average courtroom hours per judge and its average time to case disposition, indicating that district courts need not choose between efficiency and procedural fairness in addressing their caseloads. Based on these findings, the authors urge judges to increase courtroom hours in their own districts, and invite scholars and court administrators to further investigate the potential of the bench presence metric