Separating Judicial Power

Currie outlines the development of the status of judges in England and in the US, with a brief reference to the German system. He also discusses some of the more important controversies over judicial independence and accountability that have arisen under the US Constitution

The Constitution in the Supreme Court: Contracts and Commerce, 1836-1864

Continuing a study of the first hundred years of constitutional litigation, Professor Currie explores the decisions of the Taney period respecting the Contract and Commerce Clauses. Though early decisions of the Taney Court seemed to portend a departure from the nationalism of its predecessor, the author argues that the impression was largely misleading. In general, for example, the Court under Taney proved rather sympathetic to contract rights. In Commerce Clause cases, after being badly split, the Court was able to agree on a longlasting formula that acknowledged an implicit limitation on state power; and although in the Taney period the Court never clearly struck down a state law on Commerce Clause grounds, it found other ways to protect the interest in unobstructed commerce

Automated reduction of submillimetre single-dish heterodyne data from the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope using ORAC-DR

With the advent of modern multi-detector heterodyne instruments that can result in observations generating thousands of spectra per minute it is no longer feasible to reduce these data as individual spectra. We describe the automated data reduction procedure used to generate baselined data cubes from heterodyne data obtained at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. The system can automatically detect baseline regions in spectra and automatically determine regridding parameters, all without input from a user. Additionally it can detect and remove spectra suffering from transient interference effects or anomalous baselines. The pipeline is written as a set of recipes using the ORAC-DR pipeline environment with the algorithmic code using Starlink software packages and infrastructure. The algorithms presented here can be applied to other heterodyne array instruments and have been applied to data from historical JCMT heterodyne instrumentation.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figures, submitted to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societ

Endemic invasive amoebiasis in northern Australia

In October 2000, a 10-year-old Aboriginal boy from the Darwin region of the Northern Territory was referred to hospital with a 24-hour history of abdominal pain, initially generalised, but then localising to the right iliac fossa. The pain was accompanied by occasional vomiting, but no fever or diarrhoea was noted. At laparotomy, a gangrenous, unruptured appendix was removed. Postoperatively, the patient made a good recovery. Neither he nor any family members had travelled outside the Northern Territory.Histological sections of the surgical specimen showed changes typical of acute suppurative appendicitis. Closer examination, however, revealed numerous round-to-oval structures resembling trophozoites (see Box). When the possibility of invasive amoebiasis was raised, staining of the section with Entamoeba histolytica-specific sera confirmed the diagnosis. E. histolytica serology was negative