Civil RICO Reform: The Gatekeeper Concept

Since coming into vogue in the mid-1980s, civil RICO has often been criticized and targeted for reform. Critics claim that civil RICO is too broad because it potentially applies to all commercial transactions.More specifically, opponents claim that RICO\u27s inclusion of mail and wire fraud as predicate acts unjustly subjects all legitimate businesses to liability.For example, Representative Rick Boucher, sponsor of the 1989 RICO reform legislation, has stated: Fraud allegations are commonly made in contract situations, and all that is needed to convert a simple contract dispute into a civil RICO case is the allegation that there was a contract and the additional allegation that either the mails or the telephones were used more than once in either forming or breaching the contract. Such criticism has led to numerous attempts by courts and legislators to curtail civil RICO. For the most part, these efforts have sought to emasculate civil RICO rather than to rectify isolated problems of abuse or over breadth

Design, implementation, and evaluation of parallell pipelined STAP on parallel computers

Performance results are presented for the design and implementation of parallel pipelined space-time adaptive processing (STAP) algorithms on parallel computers. In particular, the issues involved in parallelization, our approach to parallelization, and performance results on an Intel Paragon are described. The process of developing software for such an application on parallel computers when latency and throughput are both considered together is discussed and tradeoffs considered with respect to inter and intratask communication and data redistribution are presented. The results show that not only scalable performance was achieved for individual component tasks of STAP but linear speedups were obtained for the integrated task performance, both for latency as well as throughput. Results are presented for up to 236 compute nodes (limited by the machine size available to us). Another interesting observation made from the implementation results is that performance improvement due to the assignment of additional processors to one task can improve the performance of other tasks without any increase in the number of processors assigned to them. Normally, this cannot be predicted by theoretical analysis

Incentive based Routing Protocol for Mobile Peer to Peer Networks

Incentive models are becoming increasingly popular in Mobile Peer to Peer Networks (M-P2P) as these models entice node participation in return for a virtual currency to combat free riding and to effectively manage constraint resources in the network. Many routing protocols proposed are based on best effort data traffic policy, such as the shortest route selection (hop minimization). Using virtual currency to find a cost effective optimal route from the source to the destination, while considering Quality of Service (QoS) aspects such as bandwidth and service capacity constraints for data delivery, remains a challenging task due to the presence of multiple paths and service providers. Modeling the network as a directed weighted graph and using the cost acquired from the price function as an incentive to pay the intermediate nodes in M-P2P networks to forward data, we develop a Game theoretic approach based on stochastic games to find an optimal route considering QoS aspect. The performance of our routing protocol is evaluated and compared with some existing routing protocols and the result shows that our protocol proves to be efficient compared to shortest-path DSR and multiple paths SMR in terms of average response time, energy and bandwidth utilization in the network

Fault-Tolerant Control of a Distributed Database System

Optimal state information-based control policy for a distributed database system subject to server failures is considered. Fault-tolerance is made possible by the partitioned architecture of the system and data redundancy therein. Control actions include restoration of lost data sets in a single server using redundant data sets in the remaining servers, routing of queries to intact servers, or overhaul of the entire system for renewal. Control policies are determined by solving Markov decision problems with cost criteria that penalize system unavailability and slow query response. Steady-state system availability and expected query response time of the controlled database are evaluated with the Markov model of the database. Robustness is addressed by introducing additional states into the database model to account for control action delays and decision errors. A robust control policy is solved for the Markov decision problem described by the augmented state model

Simple transporter trafficking model for amphetamine-induced dopamine efflux

Amphetamine and its derivatives are important drugs of abuse causing both short-term excitatory and long-term addictive effects. The short-term excitatory effects are linked to amphetamine's ability to maintain high levels of dopamine (DA) outside the cell both by inhibiting DA reuptake after synaptic transmission and by enhancing the efflux of DA from the dopaminergic cells. The molecular mechanisms by which amphetamine elicits the efflux of DA and similar monoamines are still unclear. Recent literature data suggest that trafficking of the monoamine transporters is a phenomenon that underlies observed changes in amphetamine-induced monoamine reuptake and efflux. We develop an ordinary differential equation model incorporating the diverse mechanistic details behind amphetamine-induced DA efflux and demonstrate its utility in describing our experimental data. We also demonstrate an experimental method to track the time-varying concentration of membrane-bound transporter molecules from the DA efflux data. The good fit between our model and the experimental data supports the hypothesis that amphetamine-induced transporter trafficking is necessary to produce extended efflux of DA. This model can explain the relative significance of different processes associated with DA efflux at different times and at different concentration ranges of amphetamine and DA. Synapse 61:500–514, 2007. © 2007 Wiley-Liss, Inc.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/56075/1/20390_ftp.pd

A comparison of random vs. chemotaxis-driven contacts of T cells with dendritic cells during repertoire scanning

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/83669/1/JTB_article.pd