Cleaning Up Punitive Damages: A Statutory Solution for Unguided Punitive-Damages Awards in Maritime Cases

Intentionally destroying property-boundary markers by sawing down the posts.\u27 Causing environmental disasters. Fraudulently refusing to settle insurance claims within coverage limits. Bad-faith dealing in big oil contracts. Hiding mild weather damage to new vehicles. Creating and marketing cigarettes while knowing about their carcinogenic risks. Contributing to automobile accidents. No, these are not items on some nefarious villain\u27s to-do list. These are all examples of cases where courts have awarded punitive damages against the tortfeasors on top of their compensatory liability. While each tort is unquestionably wrong, some certainly appear more wrong than others. In recent years, punitive damages have become a fashionable topic in the legal community-and unsurprisingly so, given their prevalence and gaudy statistics. After all, civil plaintiffs in state courts of general jurisdiction win over $40 billion each year in punitive-damages awards,8 and this figure doesn\u27t even include money recovered in federal court. Needless to say, such high figures draw attention. Commentators, judges, and even nonlawyers have all pointed to punitive-damages awards as evidence of a runaway judicial system that throws out fiscal penalties like Monopoly money. First to respond were the state legislatures. As of 2005, twenty- nine states have instituted statutory caps on punitive-damages recovery, and thirty-four states have amended their state codes to reduce the magnitudes and frequencies of punitive-damages awards. Most of these limitations were implemented within the last twenty years. The Supreme Court has also noticed the trend in punitive- damages awards. In a series of decisions from 1991 to 2003, the Court implemented procedural- and substantive-due-process restrictions on punitive-damages awards, culminating in a holding that punitive- damages awards more than nine times the magnitude of compensatory rewards would rarely satisfy due process requirements. More recently, in the litigation stemming from the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Court used its common-law-making authority to place a more stringent ratio cap of one-to-one for punitive- to-compensatory damages in maritime cases

Hydroxyl as a Tracer of H2 in the Envelope of MBM40

We observed 51 positions in the OH 1667 MHz main line transitions in the translucent, high latitude cloud MBM40. We detected OH emission in 8 out of 8 positions in the molecular core of the cloud and 24 out of 43 in the surrounding, lower extinction envelope and periphery of the cloud. Using a linear relationship between the integrated OH line intensity and E(B-V), we estimate the mass in the core, the envelope, and the periphery of the cloud to be 4, 8, and 5 solar masses. As much as a third of the total cloud mass may be found in the in the periphery (E(B-V) $<$ 0.12 mag) and about a half in the envelope (0.12 $\le$ E(B-V) $\le$ 0.17 mag). If these results are applicable to other translucent clouds the OH 1667 MHz line is an excellent tracer of gas in very low extinction regions and high-sensitivity mapping of the envelopes of molecular clouds may reveal the presence of significant quantities of molecular mass.Comment: 26 pages, 3 figures, and 5 table

Commensal transient searches in eight short gamma-ray burst fields

A new generation of radio telescopes with excellent sensitivity, instantaneous uv coverage, and large fields of view, are providing unprecedented opportunities for performing commensal transient searches. Here, we present such a commensal search in deep observations of short gamma-ray burst fields carried out with the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa at 1.3 GHz. These four hour observations of eight different fields span survey lengths of weeks to months. We also carry out transient searches in time slices of the full observations, at time-scales of 15 min and 8 s. We find 122 variable sources on the long time-scales, of which 52 are likely active galactic nuclei, but there are likely also some radio flaring stars. While the variability is intrinsic in at least two cases, most of it is consistent with interstellar scintillation. In this study, we also place constraints on transient rates based on state-of-the-art transient simulations codes. We place an upper limit of 2 × 10-4 transients per day per square degree for transients with peak flux of 5 mJy, and an upper limit of 2.5 × 10-2 transients per day per square degree for transients with a fluence of 10 Jy ms, the minimum detectable fluence of our survey

Identifying wildlife reservoirs of neglected taeniid tapeworms : non-invasive diagnosis of endemic Taenia serialis infection in a wild primate population

Despite the global distribution and public health consequences of Taenia tapeworms, the life cycles of taeniids infecting wildlife hosts remain largely undescribed. The larval stage of Taenia serialis commonly parasitizes rodents and lagomorphs, but has been reported in a wide range of hosts that includes geladas (Theropithecus gelada), primates endemic to Ethiopia. Geladas exhibit protuberant larval cysts indicative of advanced T. serialis infection that are associated with high mortality. However, non-protuberant larvae can develop in deep tissue or the abdominal cavity, leading to underestimates of prevalence based solely on observable cysts. We adapted a non-invasive monoclonal antibody-based enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) to detect circulating Taenia spp. antigen in dried gelada urine. Analysis revealed that this assay was highly accurate in detecting Taenia antigen, with 98.4% specificity, 98.5% sensitivity, and an area under the curve of 0.99. We used this assay to investigate the prevalence of T. serialis infection in a wild gelada population, finding that infection is substantially more widespread than the occurrence of visible T. serialis cysts (16.4% tested positive at least once, while only 6% of the same population exhibited cysts). We examined whether age or sex predicted T. serialis infection as indicated by external cysts and antigen presence. Contrary to the female-bias observed in many Taenia-host systems, we found no significant sex bias in either cyst presence or antigen presence. Age, on the other hand, predicted cyst presence (older individuals were more likely to show cysts) but not antigen presence. We interpret this finding to indicate that T. serialis may infect individuals early in life but only result in visible disease later in life. This is the first application of an antigen ELISA to the study of larval Taenia infection in wildlife, opening the doors to the identification and description of infection dynamics in reservoir populations

A Quantitative Content Analysis of Mercer University Theses

Quantitative content analysis of a body of research not only helps budding researchers understand the culture, language, and expectations of scholarship, it helps identify deficiencies and inform policy and practice. Because of these benefits, an analysis of a census of 980 Mercer University M.Ed., Ed.S., and doctoral theses was conducted. Each thesis was coded on 10 variables. The descriptive characteristics of the theses, the predictors of the length of the theses, and the predictors of the type of research method used were investigated. The main results were that: (a) the vast majority of thesis authors was female, (b) the number of qualitative theses was on the rise, (c) there were slight variations in research method and length based on location of publication, (d) the page length of M.Ed. theses had been slightly decreasing over time, (e) mathematics instruction was the most frequent subject descriptor of theses, and (f) the proportion of male authors increased over time