Does Russia Need a Securities Law?

The question in the title of this article is not necessarily rhetorical. Perhaps a more appropriate inquiry is, does Russia need its current securi- ties law?\u27 The response to the titular question is, as I will argue, clearly yes. The answer to the second question is to a large extent negative. Given the prevailing economic conditions in Russia, the course of enterprise pri- vatization, and the principal institutions shaping Russian capital markets, there is good reason to think that rather than assisting the growth and en- trenchment of a market in securities, much of the current Russian securities legislation will be superfluous and possibly hinder such growth

Genetic Testing and Government Regulation: The Growing Significance of Pharmacogenomics

Genetic testing, currently a diagnostic tool used by only a small fraction of the population, promises to become a routine and critical part of medical care and drug prescription in the near future. This change will come chiefly through improvements in pharmacogenomics, the use of genetic testing to tailor medical care to an individual's unique genetic makeup. Current regulation of genetic testing is inadequate to meet the challenges of this new regime. Federal regulatory agencies, and in particular the FDA, are currently unprepared for the dramatic increase in scope and complexity of both the prescription drug market and the genetic testing market that is likely to result from the rise of pharmacogenomics. Although government advisory committees and legal scholars have long called for reform of genetic testing regulation, they have focused excessively on the moral dilemmas raised by predictive genetic testing at the expense of the increasingly significant area of pharmacogenomic research. This article provides a brief description of genetic testing, pharmacogenomics, and the current regulatory system, and highlights several areas where change is long overdue

Diamond v. Chakrabarty: Gauging Congress’ Response to Dynamic Statutory Interpretation by the Supreme Court

In this article, I consider the 1980 Supreme Court decision, Diamond v. Chakrabarty, and Congress’ response to it in light of several contemporary views on statutory interpretation. I conclude that in science and technology-related cases in which delay could significantly hamper the advancement of the field, the Supreme Court should interpret federal statutes dynamically in response to a changing social context, but should also attempt to conform its interpretations to legislative preferences in order to avoid a legislative override

Final Report for the DARPA/NSF Interdisciplinary Study on Human–Robot Interaction

As part of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency/National Science Foundation study on human–robot interaction (HRI), over sixty representatives from academia, government, and industry participated in an interdisciplinary workshop, which allowed roboticists to interact with psychologists, sociologists, cognitive scientists, communication experts and human–computer interaction specialists to discuss common interests in the field of HRI, and to establish a dialogue across the disciplines for future collaborations. We include initial work that was done in preparation for the workshop, links to keynote and other presentations, and a summary of the findings, outcomes, and recommendations that were generated by the participants. Findings of the study include— the need for more extensive interdisciplinary interaction, identification of basic taxonomies and research issues, social informatics, establishment of a small number of common application domains, and field experience for members of the HRI community. An overall conclusion of the workshop was expressed as the following— HRI is a cross-disciplinary area, which poses barriers to meaningful research, synthesis, and technology transfer. The vocabularies, experiences, methodologies, and metrics of the communities are sufficiently different that cross-disciplinary research is unlikely to happen without sustained funding and an infrastructure to establish a new HRI community

Decentralized motion planning for multiple mobile robots: The cocktail party model

Abstract. This paper presents an approach for decentralized real-time motion planning for multiple mobile robots operating in a common 2-dimensional environment with unknown stationary obstacles. In our model, a robot can see (sense) the surrounding objects. It knows its current and its target’s position, is able to distinguish a robot from an obstacle, and can assess the instantaneous motion of another robot. Other than this, a robot has no knowledge about the scene or of the paths and objectives of other robots. There is no mutual communication among the robots; no constraints are imposed on the paths or shapes of robots and obstacles. Each robot plans its path toward its target dynamically, based on its current position and the sensory feedback; only the translation component is considered for the planning purposes. With this model, it is clear that no provable motion planning strategy can be designed (a simple example with a dead-lock is discussed); this naturally points to heuristic algorithms. The suggested strategy is based on maze-searching techniques. Computer simulation results are provided that demonstrate good performance and a remarkable robustness of the algorithm (meaning by this a virtual impossibility to create a dead-lock in a “random ” scene). Keywords: mobile robots, autonomous agents, decentralized intelligence, robot motion plannin