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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.

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.