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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.

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. >

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.