OUTLOOK FOR U.S. TOBACCO

Demand and Price Analysis,

Governing the financial or bank holding company: how legal infrastructure can facilitate consolidated risk management

On October 25, 2002, Thomas C. Baxter, Jr., General Counsel and Executive Vice President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, presented the following remarks at the Puerto Rico Bankers Association conference "Financial Transparency and Corporate Governance of Financial Institutions after the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002" in San Juan, Puerto Rico.Corporate governance ; Financial institutions - Law and legislation ; Risk management ; Bank holding companies

Ignition and combustion in a laminar mixing zone

The analytic investigation of laminar combustion processes which are essentially two- or three-dimensional present some mathematical difficulties. There are, however, several examples of two-dimensional flame propagation which involve transverse velocities that are small in comparison with that in the principal direction of flow. Such examples occur in thc problem of flame quenching by a cool surface, flame stabilization on a heated flat plate, combustion in laminar mixing zones, etc. In these cases the problem may be simplified by employing what is known in fluid mechanics as the boundary-layer approximation, since it was applied first by Prandtl in his treatment of the viscous flow over a flat plate. Physically it consists in recognizing that if the transverse velocity is small, the variations of flow properties along the direction of main flow are small in comparison with those in a direction normal to the main flow. The analytic description of the problem simplifies accordingly. The present analysis considers the ignition and combustion in the laminar mixing zone between two parallel moving gas streams. One stream consists of a cool combustible mixture, the second is hot combustion products. The two streams come into contact at a given point and a laminar mixing process follows in which the velocity distribution is modified by viscosity, and the temperature and composition distributions by conduction, diffusion, and chemical reaction. The decomposition of the combustible stream is assumed to follow first-order reaction kinetics with temperature dependence according to the Arrhenius law. For a given initial velocity, composition, and temperature distribution, the questions to be answered are: (1) Does the combustible material ignite; and (2) how far downstream of the initial contact point does the flame appear and what is the detailed process of development. Since the hot stream is of infinite extent, it is found that ignition always takes place at some point of the stream. However, when the temperature of the hot stream drops below a certain value, the distance required for ignition increases so enormously that it essentially does not occur in a physical apparatus of finite dimension. The complete development of the laminar flame front is computed using an approximation similar to the integral technique introduced by von Kármán into boundary layer theory

Aerodynamic characteristics of an all-body hypersonic aircraft configuration at Mach numbers from 0.65 to 10.6

Aerodynamic characteristics of a model designed to represent an all body, hypersonic cruise aircraft are presented for Mach numbers from 0.65 to 10.6. The configuration had a delta planform with an elliptic cone forebody and an afterbody of elliptic cross section. Detailed effects of varying angle of attack (-2 to +15 deg), angle of sideslip (-2 to +8 deg), Mach number, and configuration buildup were considered. In addition, the effectiveness of horizontal tail, vertical tail, and canard stabilizing and control surfaces was investigated. The results indicate that all configurations were longitudinally stable near maximum lift drag ratio. The configurations with vertical tails were directionally stable at all angles of attack. Trim penalties were small at hypersonic speeds for a center of gravity location representative of the airplane, but because of the large rearward travel of the aerodynamic center, trim penalties were severe at transonic Mach numbers

An annotated checklist of the Coleoptera (Insecta) of the Cayman Islands, West Indies

A faunal list of 605 species of Coleoptera in 396 genera in 63 families is presented for the Cayman Islands. For most species, island and locality within island collecting information is provided

TOBACCO AND THE ECONOMY: FARMS, JOBS, AND COMMUNITIES

Public health policies intended to reduce the incidence of smoking-related disease adversely affect thousands of tobacco farmers, manufacturers, and other businesses that produce, distribute, and sell tobacco products. This report assesses the likely impacts of declining tobacco demand, and identifies the types of workers, farms, businesses, and communities that are most vulnerable to loss of tobacco income and jobs. The dollar impact on the farm sector of a reduction in cigarette demand will be smaller than that experienced by manufacturing, wholesale, retail, and transportation businesses, but tobacco farms and their communities may have the most difficulty adjusting. Many tobacco farmers lack good alternatives to tobacco, and they have tobacco-specific equipment, buildings, and experience. Most communities will make the transition to a smaller tobacco industry with little difficulty, because tobacco accounts for a small share of the local economy. However, a number of counties depend on tobacco for a significant share of local income.Community/Rural/Urban Development, Crop Production/Industries,

Continued Conflation Confusion in Louisiana Negligence Cases: Duty and Breach

Negligence has five elements: duty, breach, cause-in-fact, scope of risk, and damages. Logic dictates that courts, lawyers, scholars, and law students should keep them separate. But they consistently fail to do so. Courts continue to conflate or collapse elements; they combine duty and scope of risk and they combine duty and breach. In combining duty and breach courts purport to determine duty based on the facts of the particular case but, in fact, they are really deciding a question of breach-whether the defendant exercised the care of a reasonable person under the circumstances. In conflating duty and breach courts are turning a mixed question of fact and law—breach—into a question of law. Concomitantly, those courts are taking the breach question away from the factfinder—often the jury--and improperly making it a judicial decision. Even Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. notoriously combined duty and breach in his writings and in his articulation of the short-lived stop, look, and listen at grade-crossings “rule.” Sadly, Louisiana courts have frequently followed Justice Holmes’ perilous lead and combined duty and breach in a number of significant instances. The most unfortunate line of jurisprudence manifesting this conflation of duty and breach is the Louisiana Supreme Court’s “open and obvious” risk cases. Herein, building on my prior work on separating duty and scope of risk, I review the jurisprudence from Holmes to the Louisiana open and obvious cases to other Louisiana decisions manifesting the same error. I propose that henceforward courts and scholars clearly separate duty and breach thereby properly allocating the breach decision to the factfinder, unless reasonable minds could disagree