12 Confused Men: Using Flowchart Verdict Sheets To Mitigate Inconsistent Civil Verdicts

The finality of jury verdicts reflects an implicit societal acceptance of the soundness of the jury\u27s decision. Regardless, jurors are not infallible, and the questions they are often tasked with deciding are unfortunately neither obvious nor clear. The length of trial, complexity of subject matter, volume of factual background, and opaqueness of law can converge in a perfect storm that may confound even the most capable juror. Although the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure provide decision rules to resolve inconsistent verdicts, the current remedies authorized by Rule 49—notably, the resubmission of the verdict to the jury and the ordering of a new trial—impose time and money costs on the jury, litigants, and judicial system. The increasing complexity of civil litigation raises the stakes by increasing the likelihood of juror error and the costs of relitigating the case. This Note proposes the creation of flowchart verdict sheets as a prophylactic against juror confusion. The flowchart verdict sheet builds upon current legal reform proposals to increase juror understanding while decreasing juror confusion and incorporates principles of effective visual design. By mitigating the confusion that can result in inconsistencies before the verdict is rendered, the flowchart verdict sheet enables the judicial system to avoid the costs associated with remedying inconsistent verdicts

Multiband Emission from Pulsar Wind Nebulae: A Possible Injection Spectrum

A recent research shows that particles with a spectrum of a relativistic Maxwellian plus a high-energy tail can be accelerated by relativistic collisionless shocks. We investigate the possibility of the high-energy particles with this new spectrum injected in pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) from the terminate shock based on the study of multiwavelength emission from PWNe.} {The dynamics of a supernova remnant (SNR) and multiband nonthermal emission from the PWN inside the remnant are investigated using a dynamical model with electrons/positrons injected with the new spectrum. In this model, the dynamical and radiative evolution of a pulsar wind nebula in a non-radiative supernova remnant can be self-consistently described.} {This model is applied to the three composite SNRs, G0.9+0.1, MSH 15-52, G338.3-0.0, and the multiband observed emission from the three PWNe can be well reproduced.} {Our studies on the three remnant provide evidence for the new spectrum of the particles, which are accelerated by the terminate shock, injected into a PWN.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures, accepted by A&

Robust H∞ filter design with variance constraints and parabolic pole assignment

Copyright [2006] IEEE. This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Such permission of the IEEE does not in any way imply IEEE endorsement of any of Brunel University's products or services. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to [email protected]. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.In this letter, we consider a multiobjective filtering problem for uncertain linear continuous time-invariant systems subject to error variance constraints. A linear filter is used to estimate a linear combination of the system states. The problem addressed is the design of a filter such that, for all admissible parameter uncertainties, the following three objectives are simultaneously achieved: 1) the filtering process is P-stable, i.e., the poles of the filtering matrix are located inside a parabolic region; 2) the steady-state variance of the estimation error of each state is not more than the individual prespecified value; and 3) the transfer function from exogenous noise inputs to error state outputs meets the prespecified H∞ norm upper-bound constraint. An effective algebraic matrix inequality approach is developed to derive both the existence conditions and the explicit expression of the desired filters. An illustrative example is used to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed design approach

Bifurcation Boundary Conditions for Switching DC-DC Converters Under Constant On-Time Control

Sampled-data analysis and harmonic balance analysis are applied to analyze switching DC-DC converters under constant on-time control. Design-oriented boundary conditions for the period-doubling bifurcation and the saddle-node bifurcation are derived. The required ramp slope to avoid the bifurcations and the assigned pole locations associated with the ramp are also derived. The derived boundary conditions are more general and accurate than those recently obtained. Those recently obtained boundary conditions become special cases under the general modeling approach presented in this paper. Different analyses give different perspectives on the system dynamics and complement each other. Under the sampled-data analysis, the boundary conditions are expressed in terms of signal slopes and the ramp slope. Under the harmonic balance analysis, the boundary conditions are expressed in terms of signal harmonics. The derived boundary conditions are useful for a designer to design a converter to avoid the occurrence of the period-doubling bifurcation and the saddle-node bifurcation.Comment: Submitted to International Journal of Circuit Theory and Applications on August 10, 2011; Manuscript ID: CTA-11-016

Age spreads and the temperature dependence of age estimates in Upper Sco

Past estimates for the age of the Upper Sco Association are typically 11-13 Myr for intermediate-mass stars and 4-5 Myr for low-mass stars. In this study, we simulate populations of young stars to investigate whether this apparent dependence of estimated age on spectral type may be explained by the star formation history of the association. Solar and intermediate mass stars begin their pre-main sequence evolution on the Hayashi track, with fully convective interiors and cool photospheres. Intermediate mass stars quickly heat up and transition onto the radiative Henyey track. As a consequence, for clusters in which star formation occurs on a similar timescale as the transition from a convective to a radiative interior, discrepancies in ages will arise when ages are calculated as a function of temperature instead of mass. Simple simulations of a cluster with constant star formation over several Myr may explain about half of the difference in inferred ages versus photospheric temperature; speculative constructions that consist of a constant star formation followed by a large supernova-driven burst could fully explain the differences, including those between F and G stars where evolutionary tracks may be more accurate. The age spreads of low-mass stars predicted from these prescriptions for star formation are consistent with the observed luminosity spread of Upper Sco. The conclusion that a lengthy star formation history will yield a temperature dependence in ages is expected from the basic physics of pre-main sequence evolution and is qualitatively robust to the large uncertainties in pre-main sequence evolutionary models.Comment: 13 pages, accepted by Ap

Understanding Overbidding in Second Price Auctions: An Experimental Study

This paper presents results from a series of second price private value auction (SPA) experiments in which bidders are either given for free, or are allowed to purchase, noisy signals about their opponents' value. Even though theoretically such information about opponents' value has no strategic use in the SPA, it provides us with a convenient instrument to change bidders' perception about the "strength" (i.e., the value) of their opponent. We argue that the empirical relationship between the incidence and magnitude of overbidding and bidders' perception of the strength of their opponent provides the key to understand whether overbidding in second price auctions are driven by "spite" motives or by the "joy of winning." The experimental data show that bidders are much more likely to overbid, though less likely to submit large overbid, when they perceive their rivals to have similar values as their own. We argue that this empirical relationship is more consistent with a modified "joy of winning" hypothesis than with the "spite" hypothesis. However, neither of the non-standard preference explanations are able to fully explain all aspects of the experimental data, and we argue for the important role of bounded rationality. We also find that bidder heterogeneity plays an important role in explaining their bidding behavior.Overbidding, Second price auctions, Spite, Joy of winning, Bounded rationality

Tri-Dirac Surface Modes in Topological Superconductors

We propose a new type of topological surface modes having cubic dispersion in three-dimensional topological superconductors. Lower order dispersions are prohibited by the threefold rotational symmetry and time-reversal symmetry. Cooper pairing in the bulk changes sign under improper rotations, akin to$^{3}$He-B. The surface manifestations are a divergent surface density of states at the Fermi level and isospins that rotate three times as they circle the origin in momentum space. We propose that Heusler alloys with band inversion are candidate materials to harbor the novel topological superconductivity.Comment: Five-page main text plus five-page supplementary materials; three figure

Nonadiabatic quantum transition-state theory in the golden-rule limit. I. Theory and application to model systems

We propose a new quantum transition-state theory for calculating Fermi's golden-rule rates in complex multidimensional systems. This method is able to account for the nuclear quantum effects of delocalization, zero-point energy and tunnelling in an electron-transfer reaction. It is related to instanton theory but can be computed by path-integral sampling and is thus applicable to treat molecular reactions in solution. A constraint functional based on energy conservation is introduced which ensures that the dominant paths contributing to the reaction rate are sampled. We prove that the theory gives exact results for a system of crossed linear potentials and also the correct classical limit for any system. In numerical tests, the new method is also seen to be accurate for anharmonic systems, and even gives good predictions for rates in the Marcus inverted regime.Comment: 18 pages and 6 figure