Precedent and Justice

Precedent is the cornerstone of common law method. It is the core mechanism by which the common law reaches just outcomes. Through creation and application of precedent, common law seeks to produce justice. The appellate courts\u27 practice of issuing unpublished, non-precedential opinions has generated considerable discussion about the value of precedent, but that debate has centered on pragmatic and formalistic values. This essay argues that the practice of issuing non-precedential opinions does more than offend constitutional dictates and present pragmatic problems to the appellate system; abandoning precedent undermines justice itself. Issuance of the vast majority of decisions as nonprecedential tears the justice-seeking mechanism of precedent from the heart of our common law system

A Brief Study of Open Source Graph Databases

With the proliferation of large irregular sparse relational datasets, new storage and analysis platforms have arisen to fill gaps in performance and capability left by conventional approaches built on traditional database technologies and query languages. Many of these platforms apply graph structures and analysis techniques to enable users to ingest, update, query and compute on the topological structure of these relationships represented as set(s) of edges between set(s) of vertices. To store and process Facebook-scale datasets, they must be able to support data sources with billions of edges, update rates of millions of updates per second, and complex analysis kernels. These platforms must provide intuitive interfaces that enable graph experts and novice programmers to write implementations of common graph algorithms. In this paper, we explore a variety of graph analysis and storage platforms. We compare their capabil- ities, interfaces, and performance by implementing and computing a set of real-world graph algorithms on synthetic graphs with up to 256 million edges. In the spirit of full disclosure, several authors are affiliated with the development of STINGER.Comment: WSSSPE13, 4 Pages, 18 Pages with Appendix, 25 figure

Stem cell mechanobiology

Stem cells are undifferentiated cells that are capable of proliferation, self-maintenance and differentiation towards specific cell phenotypes. These processes are controlled by a variety of cues including physicochemical factors associated with the specific mechanical environment in which the cells reside. The control of stem cell biology through mechanical factors remains poorly understood and is the focus of the developing field of mechanobiology. This review provides an insight into the current knowledge of the role of mechanical forces in the induction of differentiation of stem cells. While the details associated with individual studies are complex and typically associated with the stem cell type studied and model system adopted, certain key themes emerge. First, the differentiation process affects the mechanical properties of the cells and of specific subcellular components. Secondly, that stem cells are able to detect and respond to alterations in the stiffness of their surrounding microenvironment via induction of lineage-specific differentiation. Finally, the application of external mechanical forces to stem cells, transduced through a variety of mechanisms, can initiate and drive differentiation processes. The coalescence of these three key concepts permit the introduction of a new theory for the maintenance of stem cells and alternatively their differentiation via the concept of a stem cell 'mechano-niche', defined as a specific combination of cell mechanical properties, extracellular matrix stiffness and external mechanical cues conducive to the maintenance of the stem cell population.<br/

A Linear Time Algorithm for Finding Minimum Spanning Tree Replacement Edges

Given an undirected, weighted graph, the minimum spanning tree (MST) is a tree that connects all of the vertices of the graph with minimum sum of edge weights. In real world applications, network designers often seek to quickly find a replacement edge for each edge in the MST. For example, when a traffic accident closes a road in a transportation network, or a line goes down in a communication network, the replacement edge may reconnect the MST at lowest cost. In the paper, we consider the case of finding the lowest cost replacement edge for each edge of the MST. A previous algorithm by Tarjan takes $O(m \alpha(m, n))$ time, where $\alpha(m, n)$ is the inverse Ackermann's function. Given the MST and sorted non-tree edges, our algorithm is the first that runs in $O(m+n)$ time and $O(m+n)$ space to find all replacement edges. Moreover, it is easy to implement and our experimental study demonstrates fast performance on several types of graphs. Additionally, since the most vital edge is the tree edge whose removal causes the highest cost, our algorithm finds it in linear time