Preventing Successor Liability for Defective Products: Safeguards for Acquiring Corporations

In recent years, many courts have determined longstanding limitations on successor liability to be insufficiently sensitive to the compensation needs of products liability claimants. In response, courts in several jurisdictions have eroded traditional corporate law immunities to successor liability for defective products. Although this liberalization of the principles of successor liability has expanded the range of potential defendants in many tort lawsuits, the expansion of liability has caused an increase in uncertainty in corporate transactions, and an increase in complex legal and logistical maneuvering to avoid the growing liability web. This Article seeks to outline the expansion of successor liability in the products area, note the negative implications of that expansion, and identify mechanisms to prevent the attachment of successor liability under both the traditional and expanded regimes. The Article also prescribes a statutory alternative to create much needed stability and certainty in this area through a straightforward allocation of liabilities between purchasers and sellers

Enabling effective tree exploration using visual cues

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd This article presents a new interactive visualization for exploring large hierarchical structures by providing visual cues on a node link tree visualization. Our technique provides topological previews of hidden substructures with three types of visual cues including simple cues, tree cues and treemap cues. We demonstrate the visual cues on Degree-of-Interest Tree (DOITree) due to its familiar mapping, its capability of providing multiple focused nodes, and its dynamic rescaling of substructures to fit the available space. We conducted a usability study with 28 participants that measured completion time and accuracy across five different topology search tasks. The simple cues had the fastest completion time across three of the node identification tasks. The treemap cues had the highest rate of correct answers on four of the five tasks, although only reaching statistical significance for two of these. As predicted, user ratings demonstrated a preference for the easy to understand tree cues followed by the simple cue, despite this not consistently reflected in performance results

Adventitious Agents and Smallpox Vaccine in Strategic National Stockpile

In keeping with current standards, we urge that old smallpox vaccines that were made in animal skin and are still a key part of our strategic national stockpile be tested for adventitious infectious agents. The advisory especially applies to viruses that have the potential for zoonotic transmission to human vaccine recipients

Evaluation on interactive visualization data with scatterplots

Scatterplots and scatterplot matrix methods have been popularly used for showing statistical graphics and for exposing patterns in multivariate data. A recent technique, called Linkable Scatterplots, provides an interesting idea for interactive visual exploration which provides a set of necessary plot panels on demand together with interaction, linking and brushing. This article presents a controlled study with a mixed-model design to evaluate the effectiveness and user experience on the visual exploration when using a Sequential-Scatterplots who a single plot is shown at a time, Multiple-Scatterplots who number of plots can be specified and shown, and Simultaneous-Scatterplots who all plots are shown as a scatterplot matrix. Results from the study demonstrated higher accuracy using the Multiple-Scatterplots visualization, particularly in comparison with the Simultaneous-Scatterplots.​ While the time taken to complete tasks was longer in the Multiple-Scatterplots technique, compared with the simpler Sequential-Scatterplots, Multiple-Scatterplots is inherently more accurate. Moreover, the Multiple-Scatterplots technique is the most highly preferred and positively experienced technique in this study. Overall, results support the strength of Multiple-Scatterplots and highlight its potential as an effective data visualization technique for exploring multivariate data