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Individuals with tetraplegia face many obstacles with activities of daily living. Although approximately 65% to 75% of individuals with tetraplegia would benefit from upper extremity surgery that could make many of their activities of daily living more spontaneous, only 14% of patients who are surgical candidates undergo tendon transfer procedures. A good surgical candidate has an injury at one of the cervical spine levels and an International Classification for Surgery of the Hand in Tetraplegia group of 1 or better, has functional goals, and is committed to the postoperative rehabilitation process. Surgery primarily consists of tendon transfers, tenodesis, and arthrodesis to restore elbow extension and hand pinch, grasp, and release. Nerve transfers and functional electrical stimulation are also options for treatment.

Recently, in the multidistrict breast implant litigation, Judge Pointer entered a series of orders relating to the establishment of a Federal Evidence Rule 706 science panel. In re: Silicone Gel Breast Implant Products Liability Litigation, MDL 926, CV92-P-10000-S (N.D. Ala.). Judge Pointer's Order No. 31 specifies that appointments are to be made on a national basis for potential use in all federal courts and as permitted in state courts. Federal Evidence Rule 706 gives a district court the authority to appoint experts to provide helpful testimony. The policy justification behind Rule 706 is to guarantee that the trier of fact has access to impartial experts. The parties to the litigation, however, must be informed of the court appointed experts' opinions in advance and be given the opportunity to depose and cross-examine any expert. Once those requirements are satisfied, all other aspects of appointing the experts are left to the sound discretion of the trial judge. In fact, bias or qualification of experts may not be considered when the Court appoints experts. Bias or qualification may affect not only the weight of the experts' opinions but also the admissibility of their testimony. Parties confronted with harmful testimony presented by court appointed experts may want to challenge the admissibility of that testimony. This is particularly true in multidistrict proceedings where the opinions issued by a science panel could affect multiple cases. Although Rule 706 has notbeen used with any frequency in the past, that could be changing as Rule 706 and court appointed experts are playing important roles in a number of recent high profile cases. Furthermore, when used properly Rule 706 poses little threat to the American trial system and the adversarial process. This article discusses Federal Evidence Rule 706, its history and structure, and several recent cases involving court appointed experts to demonstrate the development and impact that experts, particularly scientific experts, are having in modern courts.

In rats, food restriction during lactation extends lactational infertility, an effect that is in part due to attenuated luteinizing hormone (LH) responses to the positive feedback effects of estradiol (E2). In cycling rats, rising endogenous E2 levels not only induce a surge in LH release, but also increase the expression of the immediate early gene Fos in the anteroventral preoptic area (AVPV) and within gonadotropin releasing hormone (GnRH) neurons. This experiment examined whether the induction of Fos expression in the AVPV and within GnRH neurons after E2 treatment varied with stage of lactation and nutritional status. Brains of estrogen-treated ad lib fed and food-restricted lactating rats were processed for Fos or Fos/GnRH immunocytochemistry on days 15, 20, or 25 postpartum (pp). Cell counts from both labeling studies showed that on day 15 pp, neuronal activation in the AVPV and within GnRH neurons was low and did not differ between ad lib fed and food-restricted dams. On day 20 pp, levels of Fos-like immunoreactivity (FOS-IR) in the AVPV remained low in all dams but were significantly higher in ad lib fed dams. By day 25 pp, the ability of E2 to induce FOS-IR in the AVPV of food-restricted dams remained compromised. The proportion of GnRH cells expressing FOS-IR following E2 stimulation was restored to baseline levels by day 20 pp regardless of the nutritional status of the dam. These results show that the effects of E2 on neuronal events that correlate with the LH surge, are attenuated during lactation. Furthermore, food restriction during lactation selectively alters neuronal activation in the AVPV suggesting that this area integrates nutritional information to regulate LH release.

This paper describes a novel approach to the problems of state estimation in linear, discrete-time systems which switch randomly between two sets of parameters, indicated by a random switching variable. A non-linear approximate model for the switching variable is developed and used for the joint estimation of the state vector and the switching variable via a single extended Kalman filter. The performance of the filter is compared with that of other suboptimal filters known to date. The proposed approach provides comparable accuracy, and saves computational effort in systems of order three or more. In large systems the computational effort is halved.

Interrupted service, which may occur in fading radio channels, in low-priority channels which can be preempted or in systems with failures may make severe demands on buffer size if overflow is to be avoided. This paper analyzes a buffer with a Markov-interrupted timeslotted server, generalizing earlier work on independent random interruptions. An equivalent service distribution is defined for use in an approximate M/G/1 model, which in turn gives buffer probabilities and overflow probabilities. For very small overflow probabilities, the necessary buffer size is found from a further analytic approximation to the tail of the buffer size distribution. The accuracy of the two approximations together is good, shown by an example of a fading radio channel.

The execution workload of a protocol often limits the data communications throughput in local area and wide area networks. The handling of buffers is one of the implementation factors that affects the execution workload of a protocol implementation: if possible, copying of user data should be avoided. Two buffer cut-through strategies for avoiding copying higher-level data are described, with some of the mechanisms necessary to implement them. The resulting execution workload in a transport protocol (similar to the ISO class 4 protocol) is studied in detail. Individual protocol actions are modeled for a wide range of data-stream parameters. The improvement when copying is avoided is shown to be relatively insensitive to the parameter values and to be as high as 80% when the checksum is not computed at the transport level. >

A second-order nonlinear model of steel refining in an electric are furnace is formulated and optimized. Iterative computation using steepest descent shows the existence of an optimal singular arc, which is then found more precisely by directly applying necessary conditions for such an arc. When a soft (penalty-function) constraint on state is replaced by a hard constraint, a state-constrained arc is found which corresponds directly to the singular arc. The dependence of the singular arc on problem parameters is explored.

Information gathered for your defense could end up in the plaintiff's hands, under some recent court rulings.

The use of dynamic optimization should be to guide, not to command the economic policymaker. This paper develops previous work on the Bank of Canada's national econometric model RDX2, to define an indifference set for the optimal policy based on a confidence set for selected model disturbances and a sensitivity analysis of the calculated optimum. Within the indifference set a policy may be chosen on other grounds, and still represent whatever wisdom is embodied in the model and the optimization.

A cattle genetic linkage map was constructed which covers more than 95 percent of the bovine genome at medium density. Seven hundred and forty six DNA polymorphisms were genotyped in cattle families which comprise 347 individuals in full sibling pedigrees. Seven hundred and three of the loci are linked to at least one other locus. All linkage groups are assigned to chromosomes, and all are orientated with regards to the centromere. There is little overall difference in the lengths of the bull and cow linkage maps although there are individual differences between maps of chromosomes. One hundred and sixty polymorphisms are in or near genes, and the resultant genome-wide comparative analyses indicate that while there is greater conservation of synteny between cattle and humans compared with mice, the conservation of gene order between cattle and humans is much less than would be expected from the conservation of synteny. This map provides a basis for high-resolution mapping of the bovine genome with physical resources such as Yeast and Bacterial Artificial Chromosomes as well as providing the underpinning for the interpolation of information from the Human Genome Project.

An algorithm is described by which TDM slots in many links of a network can be optimally allocated between voice and data. It is an adaptation of a convex-programming method due to Fox, by which a pool of resources is allocated to minimize a convex separable criterion function such as blocking probability for voice subject to a single convex separable constraint such as specified maximum mean delay to data. In our case the single pool of resources is the total of the available slots. The necessary adaptation of Fox's algorithm is described for the minimum blocking problem, and for minimum data delay subject to a blocking constraint.