On Minimal Surfaces and Their Representations

We consider the problem of representation of minimal surfaces in the euclidean space and provide a proof of Bernstein’s theorem. This pa- per serves as a concise and self-contained reference to the theory of minimal surfaces

UMass Amherst Sustainability Plan

This document is arranged in accordance with the guidelines specified in the Agency Sustainability Planning and Implementation Guide for the Massachusetts State Sustainability Program. The State Sustainability Program was established in July 2002 by Executive Order No. 438, which requires state agencies to “work diligently and expeditiously to develop and implement policies and procedures to promote environmentally sustainable practices.” The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMA) is in the unique position to educate the next generation of the professional workforce in sustainable practices. The University feels that it is important for us to first have a firm understanding of sustainable development in the workplace in order to educate future inhabitants of the workforce. For this reason the University has embraced the idea of sustainability planning and has established this document to detail University information, long term goals, short term actions, management systems, and tracking progress

Originalism and Summary Judgment

Over the last several years, the Supreme Court has revolutionized modern criminal procedure by invoking the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial to strike down several sentencing innovations. This revolution has been led by members of the Supreme Court who follow an originalist method of constitutional interpretation. Recent work by the legal historian Suja Thomas has raised the question whether a similar originalist revolution may be on the horizon in civil cases governed by the Seventh Amendment’s right to a jury trial. In particular, Professor Thomas has argued that the summary judgment device is unconstitutional because it permits judges to resolve a set of cases - those where the sufficiency of a party’s evidence is in dispute - that could only be resolved by juries at the time the Seventh Amendment was ratified. In this Article, I argue that Professor Thomas’s historical findings are an insufficient basis from which an originalist might conclude that summary judgment is unconstitutional. Professor Thomas\u27s analysis more or less rests on a comparison of jury practices in 1791 with jury practices today. But outside a context where one is trying to establish that a practice that existed at the time of the founding is still constitutional today, originalism cannot rest on a mere comparison of founding-era practices to modern practices. Not everything that juries did in 1791 was understood to be unchangeable absent a constitutional amendment. In order to separate the things that juries did that were important to the Seventh Amendment from the things that they did that were not, one must assemble a frame of reference external to the jury practices themselves. This external frame of reference might be assembled from many places - a comparison of founding-era lexicons to the constitutional text, an examination of founding-era statements on the question, an assessment of the original purposes of the Seventh Amendment, etc. - but it has to be assembled from somewhere. Professor Thomas has not yet focused her energies here. As such, more work needs to be done before an originalist can conclude summary judgment is unconstitutional

The End of Class Actions?

In this Article, I give a status report on the life expectancy of class action litigation following the Supreme Court\u27s decisions in Concepcion and American Express. These decisions permitted corporations to opt out of class action liability through the use of arbitration clauses, and many commentators, myself included, predicted that they would eventually lead us down a road where class actions against businesses would be all but eliminated. Enough time has now passed to make an assessment of whether these predictions are coming to fruition. I find that, although there is not yet solid evidence that businesses have flocked to class action waivers and that one big category of class action plaintiffs (shareholders) remain insulated from Concepcion and American Express altogether I still see every reason to believe that businesses will eventually be able to eliminate virtually all class actions that are brought against them, including those brought by shareholders

Determining the Optimal Work Breakdown Structure for Government Acquisition Contracts

The optimal level of Government Contract Work Breakdown Structure (G-CWBS) reporting for the purposes of Earned Value Management was inspected. The G-Score Metric was proposed, which can quantitatively grade a G-CWBS, based on a new method of calculating an Estimate At Completion (EAC) cost for each reported element. A random program generator created in R replicated the characteristics of DOD program artifacts retrieved from the Cost Analysis Data Enterprise (CADE) system. The generated artifacts were validated as a population, however validation at the demographic combination level using an artificial neural network was inconclusive. Comparative WBS forms were created for a sample of the generated programs, and used to populate a decision tree. Utility theory tools were applied using three utility perspectives, and optimal WBSs were identified. Results demonstrated that reporting at WBS level 3 is the most common optimal structure, however 75 of the time a different optimal structure exists