COURTS-VALIDITY OF CONTRACTS RESTRICTING VENUE IN ACTIONS UNDER THE FEDERAL EMPLOYERS\u27 LIABILITY ACT

Petitioner suffered injuries in the course of his duties as an employee of respondent railroad. Subsequently, respondent advanced money to petitioner and the latter agreed in writing that if his claim could not be settled he would sue only in the county or district where he resided at the time of the injury, or in the county or district where the injury was sustained. This agreement restricted petitioner\u27s choice of venue to either a state or federal court sitting in Michigan. Ignoring the contract, petitioner sued in an Illinois court. Respondent then brought suit in the Michigan courts to enjoin the Illinois proceeding and the injunction was granted. On certiorari, held, reversed. The contract restricting venue was void since it conflicted with the provisions of sections 5 and 6 of the Federal Employers\u27 Liability Act. Boyd v. Grand Trunk Western Railroad Company, (U.S. 1949) 70 S.Ct. 26

Presenting dynamic information on mobile computers

A problem with mobile computing devices is the output of dynamic information owing to their small screens. This paper describes an experiment to investigate the use of non-speech sounds to present dynamic information without using visual display space. Results showed that non-speech sound could be used in a simple share-dealing scenario to present a “sound graph” of share prices. This allowed participants to reduce the workload they had to invest in share-price monitoring as they could listen to the graph whilst they worked in a share accumulation window

Successes of the Intuitive Psychologist: Observers make reasonable judgments inthe role conferred advantage paradigm

In a now classic experiment Ross, Amabile & Steinmetz (1977) showed that observers think that a participant who israndomly assigned to invent questions has more general knowledge than a participant assigned to answer these questions.This is taken to be an error arising from a reasoning process in which observers ignore social roles, and instead rely onsurface behavior to make social judgments. Here we test two potential explanations for this observation: (1) observers areusing a flawed reasoning process in which they do not consider the advantages and disadvantages that different social rolesmay confer, or (2) observers are using an unbiased reasoning process in which they do consider the influence of socialrole, but they are simply operating with an imperfect estimate of the advantage afforded the questioner. In a series of fivestudies, we show that not only is reasoning in this task consistent with an unbiased inference account, but, that observersare also surprisingly well calibrated to the influence of the social roles used in this paradigm

Police bail without charge: The human rights implications

Whilst the power of the police to release a person on bail prior to trial has existed for centuries, the power to release on bail a person suspected of but not charged with a criminal offence has been available to the police only since 1925. The power to attach conditions to pre-charge bail is of very recent origin, having been introduced for the first time in 2003 but rapidly expanded since then. Whilst imposing restrictions on the liberty of a person should, constitutionally, be reserved to the judiciary, the fact that it was originally conceived, in part at least, as a mechanism for enhancing liberty reduced the constitutional tension created by allowing members of the executive such powers. However, the changing role of arrest in the investigation of crime and the granting of extensive powers to the police to impose bail conditions means that the police now have the ability to place controls on people not charged with a criminal offence for extended periods of time. It is argued here that this is in breach of the right to liberty under Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights and, in practice, may also breach other Convention rights

How do people with chronic low back pain perceive specific and general exercise? A mixed methods survey

Purpose: Exercise prescriptions for chronic low back pain (CLBP) often utilize reductionistic, trunk-focused exercise aimed at addressing proposed pain mechanisms. It is unknown if the use of these trunk-focused exercises imply beliefs to people with CLBP about the rationale for their use (e.g., etiology), even without concurrent biomedical narratives. This study aimed to explore people's perceptions of specific and general exercise without an accompanying narrative when experiencing CLBP. Methods: An anonymous online survey was distributed. Mixed methods were utilized for analysis. Six-point Likert scales categorized people's beliefs about individual exercises. Open-ended questions were used to gather further beliefs which were then coded into themes. Results: People with CLBP perceived specific exercise as more beneficial than general exercise. Eight themes and five subthemes were defined. A high volume of positive beliefs were centered around strengthening the low back and abdominal musculature, emphasizing the importance of correct technique. Negative beliefs were held against spinal flexion and external load. Both positive and negative beliefs were underpinned by spinal/pelvic stability being important as well as certain exercises being achievable or not. Conclusion: This study demonstrated that people with CLBP consider specific exercises to be more beneficial than general exercises for CLBP. Specific exercises irrespective of an accompanying narrative can imply meaning about the intent of an exercise. Understanding this requires practitioners to be mindful when prescribing and communicating exercise

Software Architecture of Sensor Data Distribution In Planetary Exploration

Data from mobile and stationary sensors will be vital in planetary surface exploration. The distribution and collection of sensor data in an ad-hoc wireless network presents a challenge. Irregular terrain, mobile nodes, new associations with access points and repeaters with stronger signals as the network reconfigures to adapt to new conditions, signal fade and hardware failures can cause: a) Data errors; b) Out of sequence packets; c) Duplicate packets; and d) Drop out periods (when node is not connected). To mitigate the effects of these impairments, a robust and reliable software architecture must be implemented. This architecture must also be tolerant of communications outages. This paper describes such a robust and reliable software infrastructure that meets the challenges of a distributed ad hoc network in a difficult environment and presents the results of actual field experiments testing the principles and actual code developed

Multi-view self-supervised deep learning for 6D pose estimation in the Amazon Picking Challenge

Robot warehouse automation has attracted significant interest in recent years, perhaps most visibly in the Amazon Picking Challenge (APC) [1]. A fully autonomous warehouse pick-and-place system requires robust vision that reliably recognizes and locates objects amid cluttered environments, self-occlusions, sensor noise, and a large variety of objects. In this paper we present an approach that leverages multiview RGB-D data and self-supervised, data-driven learning to overcome those difficulties. The approach was part of the MIT-Princeton Team system that took 3rd- and 4th-place in the stowing and picking tasks, respectively at APC 2016. In the proposed approach, we segment and label multiple views of a scene with a fully convolutional neural network, and then fit pre-scanned 3D object models to the resulting segmentation to get the 6D object pose. Training a deep neural network for segmentation typically requires a large amount of training data. We propose a self-supervised method to generate a large labeled dataset without tedious manual segmentation. We demonstrate that our system can reliably estimate the 6D pose of objects under a variety of scenarios. All code, data, and benchmarks are available at http://apc.cs.princeton.edu

One filter, one sample and the N- and O-glyco(proteo)me: towards a system to study disorders of protein glycosylation. : Toward a System to Study Disorders of Protein Glycosylation

A method has been developed for release/isolation of O-glycans from glycoproteins in whole cell lysates for mass spectrometric analysis. Cells are lysed in SDS, which is then exchanged for urea and ammonium bicarbonate in a centrifugal filter, before treating with NH4OH to release O-glycans. Following centrifugation, O-glycans are recovered in the filtrate. Sonication achieves O-glycan release in 1 h. Combining the established protocol for filter-aided N-glycan separation, here optimized for enhanced PNGase F efficiency, with the developed O-glycan release method allows analysis of both N- and O-glycans from one sample, in the same filter unit, from 0.5 to 1 million cells. The method is compatible with subsequent analysis of the residual protein by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) after glycan release. The medium throughput approach is amenable to analysis of biological replicates, offering a simple way to assess the often subtle changes to glycan profiles accompanying differentiation and disease progression, in a statistically robust way