The Changing Scope of the United States\u27 Trust Duties to American Indian Tribes: Navajo Nation v. United States

The mineral wealth beneath Native American lands has been an enduring source of controversy with respect to treaty relations between Indian Tribes and the United States government and the contours of the United States\u27 trust duties to the Tribes. Whereas in past years the process by which minerals like coal have been converted to capital amounted to blatant exploitation of America\u27s indigenous populations, Indian governments have acquired more control over the extraction of their minerals throughout the twentieth century. That this control remains severely limited both by federal regulations and the United States government\u27s complicity with powerful representatives of the mineral industry is exemplified by the Navajo Nation\u27s longstanding struggle to obtain a market rate for its coal resources. This Note examines the Navajo Nation\u27s claim that the United States breached its trust duties of care, candor, and loyalty by intervening to the Navajo\u27s detriment in the negotiation of a mining lease between the Navajo and Peabody Coal, the world\u27s largest private sector coal company. This litigation has stretched on for decades, but today the case is set to be heard, for the second time, by the United States Supreme Court. This Note seeks to examine the previous iterations of Navajo Nation v. United States in the context of the Federal-Tribal trust doctrine and in light of recent trends in the Supreme Court\u27s dispositions of cases implicating federal Indian law. Ultimately, it concludes that the Supreme Court\u27s current approach to the trust doctrine is inconsistent with controlling precedent and inimical to tribal sovereignty and self-determination

A Multilaboratory Comparison of Calibration Accuracy and the Performance of External References in Analytical Ultracentrifugation

Analytical ultracentrifugation (AUC) is a first principles based method to determine absolute sedimentation coefficients and buoyant molar masses of macromolecules and their complexes, reporting on their size and shape in free solution. The purpose of this multi-laboratory study was to establish the precision and accuracy of basic data dimensions in AUC and validate previously proposed calibration techniques. Three kits of AUC cell assemblies containing radial and temperature calibration tools and a bovine serum albumin (BSA) reference sample were shared among 67 laboratories, generating 129 comprehensive data sets. These allowed for an assessment of many parameters of instrument performance, including accuracy of the reported scan time after the start of centrifugation, the accuracy of the temperature calibration, and the accuracy of the radial magnification. The range of sedimentation coefficients obtained for BSA monomer in different instruments and using different optical systems was from 3.655 S to 4.949 S, with a mean and standard deviation of (4.304 ± 0.188) S (4.4%). After the combined application of correction factors derived from the external calibration references for elapsed time, scan velocity, temperature, and radial magnification, the range of s-values was reduced 7-fold with a mean of 4.325 S and a 6-fold reduced standard deviation of ± 0.030 S (0.7%). In addition, the large data set provided an opportunity to determine the instrument-to-instrument variation of the absolute radial positions reported in the scan files, the precision of photometric or refractometric signal magnitudes, and the precision of the calculated apparent molar mass of BSA monomer and the fraction of BSA dimers. These results highlight the necessity and effectiveness of independent calibration of basic AUC data dimensions for reliable quantitative studies

A multilaboratory comparison of calibration accuracy and the performance of external references in analytical ultracentrifugation.

Analytical ultracentrifugation (AUC) is a first principles based method to determine absolute sedimentation coefficients and buoyant molar masses of macromolecules and their complexes, reporting on their size and shape in free solution. The purpose of this multi-laboratory study was to establish the precision and accuracy of basic data dimensions in AUC and validate previously proposed calibration techniques. Three kits of AUC cell assemblies containing radial and temperature calibration tools and a bovine serum albumin (BSA) reference sample were shared among 67 laboratories, generating 129 comprehensive data sets. These allowed for an assessment of many parameters of instrument performance, including accuracy of the reported scan time after the start of centrifugation, the accuracy of the temperature calibration, and the accuracy of the radial magnification. The range of sedimentation coefficients obtained for BSA monomer in different instruments and using different optical systems was from 3.655 S to 4.949 S, with a mean and standard deviation of (4.304 ± 0.188) S (4.4%). After the combined application of correction factors derived from the external calibration references for elapsed time, scan velocity, temperature, and radial magnification, the range of s-values was reduced 7-fold with a mean of 4.325 S and a 6-fold reduced standard deviation of ± 0.030 S (0.7%). In addition, the large data set provided an opportunity to determine the instrument-to-instrument variation of the absolute radial positions reported in the scan files, the precision of photometric or refractometric signal magnitudes, and the precision of the calculated apparent molar mass of BSA monomer and the fraction of BSA dimers. These results highlight the necessity and effectiveness of independent calibration of basic AUC data dimensions for reliable quantitative studies

The Changing Scope of the United States\u27 Trust Duties to American Indian Tribes: Navajo Nation v. United States

The mineral wealth beneath Native American lands has been an enduring source of controversy with respect to treaty relations between Indian Tribes and the United States government and the contours of the United States\u27 trust duties to the Tribes. Whereas in past years the process by which minerals like coal have been converted to capital amounted to blatant exploitation of America\u27s indigenous populations, Indian governments have acquired more control over the extraction of their minerals throughout the twentieth century. That this control remains severely limited both by federal regulations and the United States government\u27s complicity with powerful representatives of the mineral industry is exemplified by the Navajo Nation\u27s longstanding struggle to obtain a market rate for its coal resources. This Note examines the Navajo Nation\u27s claim that the United States breached its trust duties of care, candor, and loyalty by intervening to the Navajo\u27s detriment in the negotiation of a mining lease between the Navajo and Peabody Coal, the world\u27s largest private sector coal company. This litigation has stretched on for decades, but today the case is set to be heard, for the second time, by the United States Supreme Court. This Note seeks to examine the previous iterations of Navajo Nation v. United States in the context of the Federal-Tribal trust doctrine and in light of recent trends in the Supreme Court\u27s dispositions of cases implicating federal Indian law. Ultimately, it concludes that the Supreme Court\u27s current approach to the trust doctrine is inconsistent with controlling precedent and inimical to tribal sovereignty and self-determination

Examples for the determination of radial magnification errors.

<p>(A) Radial intensity profile measured in scans of the precision mask. Blue lines are experimental scans, and shaded areas indicate the regions expected to be illuminated on the basis of the known mask geometry. In this example, the increasing difference between the edges corresponds to a calculated radial magnification error of -3.1%. (B—D) Examples for differences between the experimentally measured positions of the light/dark transitions (blue circles, arbitrarily aligned for absolute mask position) and the known edge distances of the mask. The solid lines indicate the linear or polynomial fit. (B) Approximately linear magnification error with a slope corresponding to an error of -0.04%. Also indicated as thin lines are the confidence intervals of the linear regression. (C) A bimodal shift pattern of left and right edges, likely resulting from out-of-focus location of the mask, with radial magnification error of -1.7%. (D) A non-linear distortion leading to a radial magnification error of -0.53% in the <i>s</i>-values from the analysis of back-transformed data. The thin grey lines in C and D indicate the best linear fit through all data points.</p

Analysis of the rotor temperature.

<p>(A) Temperature values obtained in different instruments of the spinning rotor, as measured in the iButton at 1,000 rpm after temperature equilibration, while the set point for the console temperature is 20°C (indicated as dotted vertical line). The box-and-whisker plot indicates the central 50% of the data as solid line, with the median displayed as vertical line, and individual circles for data in the upper and lower 25% percentiles. The mean and standard deviation is 19.62°C ± 0.41°C. (B) Correlation between iButton temperature and measured BSA monomer <i>s</i>-values corrected for radial magnification, scan time, scan velocity, but not viscosity (symbols). In addition to the data from the present study as shown in (A) (circles), also shown are measurements from the pilot study [<a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0126420#pone.0126420.ref027" target="_blank">27</a>] where the same experiments were carried out on instruments not included in the present study (stars). The dotted line describes the theoretically expected temperature-dependence considering solvent viscosity.</p

Distributions of calculated BSA monomer signals for the different kits and the different optical systems.

<p>The box-and-whisker plots indicate the central 50% of the data as solid line and draw the smaller and larger 25% percentiles as individual circles. The median for each group is displayed as vertical line.</p