A Test of Sovereignty: Franchise Tax Board of the State of California v. Gilbert P. Hyatt

In Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt, the Supreme Court considers whether to overrule Nevada v. Hall, a 1979 Supreme Court decision. Hall permitted a State to be haled into the court of another State without its consent. In 2016, an evenly divided Supreme Court affirmed Hall 4-4 when faced with the same question, and following a remand to the Nevada Supreme Court, the Court has granted certiorari on this question once again. This Commentary contends that Hall was wrongly decided and should be overruled. The Constitution’s ratification did not alter the status of common-law State sovereign immunity, leaving intact not only State sovereign immunity in a State’s own court but also a State’s immunity to suits in the courts of another State without consent. However, this case, in which the Petitioner has already appeared in the court of another State, is not the appropriate vehicle for overruling Hall. State sovereign immunity should be restored at the next possible opportunity, when a State properly asks a federal court to enforce its common-law immunity from the courts of a sister State. Sovereigns should enjoy immunity not only in their own courts, but also in the courts of their peers

Opposing Pressures of Speed and Efficiency Guide the Evolution of Molecular Machines.

Many biomolecular machines need to be both fast and efficient. How has evolution optimized these machines along the tradeoff between speed and efficiency? We explore this question using optimizable dynamical models along coordinates that are plausible evolutionary degrees of freedom. Data on 11 motors and ion pumps are consistent with the hypothesis that evolution seeks an optimal balance of speed and efficiency, where any further small increase in one of these quantities would come at great expense to the other. For FoF1-ATPases in different species, we also find apparent optimization of the number of subunits in the c-ring, which determines the number of protons pumped per ATP synthesized. Interestingly, these ATPases appear to more optimized for efficiency than for speed, which can be rationalized through their key role as energy transducers in biology. The present modeling shows how the dynamical performance properties of biomolecular motors and pumps may have evolved to suit their corresponding biological actions

OBSERVATIONS ON THE IMPACT OF MERGERS ON INDEPENDENT RETAILERS

Agribusiness,

COMPUTER-FACILITATED COMMUNICATION NEEDS AND VALUES

Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Paving The Way: Recruiting Students into the Transportation Professions, MTI Report 08-03

The transportation industry faces a growing shortage of professional engineers and planners. One key strategy in solving this problem will be to encourage more civil engineering and urban planning students to specialize in transportation while completing their degrees, so that employers have a larger pool of likely recruits. However, very little is known about how these students choose a specialization. To help fill that gap, this report examines the factors that lead civil engineering undergraduates and urban planning masters students to specialize in transportation, as opposed to other sub-disciplines within the two fields. The primary data collection methods were web-based surveys of 1,852 civil engineering undergraduates and 869 planning masters students. The study results suggest steps the transportation community can take to increase the number of civil engineering and planning students who choose to specialize in transportation

Protein evolution speed depends on its stability and abundance and on chaperone concentrations.

Proteins evolve at different rates. What drives the speed of protein sequence changes? Two main factors are a protein's folding stability and aggregation propensity. By combining the hydrophobic-polar (HP) model with the Zwanzig-Szabo-Bagchi rate theory, we find that: (i) Adaptation is strongly accelerated by selection pressure, explaining the broad variation from days to thousands of years over which organisms adapt to new environments. (ii) The proteins that adapt fastest are those that are not very stably folded, because their fitness landscapes are steepest. And because heating destabilizes folded proteins, we predict that cells should adapt faster when put into warmer rather than cooler environments. (iii) Increasing protein abundance slows down evolution (the substitution rate of the sequence) because a typical protein is not perfectly fit, so increasing its number of copies reduces the cell's fitness. (iv) However, chaperones can mitigate this abundance effect and accelerate evolution (also called evolutionary capacitance) by effectively enhancing protein stability. This model explains key observations about protein evolution rates

Transition States in Protein Folding Kinetics: The Structural Interpretation of Phi-values

Phi-values are experimental measures of the effects of mutations on the folding kinetics of a protein. A central question is which structural information Phi-values contain about the transition state of folding. Traditionally, a Phi-value is interpreted as the 'nativeness' of a mutated residue in the transition state. However, this interpretation is often problematic because it assumes a linear relation between the nativeness of the residue and its free-energy contribution. We present here a better structural interpretation of Phi-values for mutations within a given helix. Our interpretation is based on a simple physical model that distinguishes between secondary and tertiary free-energy contributions of helical residues. From a linear fit of our model to the experimental data, we obtain two structural parameters: the extent of helix formation in the transition state, and the nativeness of tertiary interactions in the transition state. We apply our model to all proteins with well-characterized helices for which more than 10 Phi-values are available: protein A, CI2, and protein L. The model captures nonclassical Phi-values 1 in these helices, and explains how different mutations at a given site can lead to different Phi-values.Comment: 26 pages, 7 figures, 5 table

Ethnic Residential Segregation and Immigrants' Perceptions of Discrimination in West Germany

Using survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, this study shows that immigrants living in segregated residential areas are more likely to report discrimination because of their ethnic background. This applies to both segregated areas where most neighbors are immigrants from the same country of origin as the surveyed person and segregated areas where most neighbors are immigrants from other countries of origin. The results suggest that housing discrimination rather than self-selection plays an important role in immigrant residential segregation.Segregation, immigrants, housing discrimination, self-selection