Litigating a Fair Housing Case in the 90\u27s

Recent statutory amendments to the Federal Fair Housing Act of 1968, 42 U.S.C. Sections 3601 et seq., will be the impetus for substantial litigation in this decade. The Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988, which was enacted on September 13, 1988 and became effective on March 12, 1989, established new protected classes, created an administrative law judge system to enforce the law, and strengthened many of the original provisions of the Act. This article will review the Amendments, their impact on litigating a fair housing case, and recent case law in the area

Ohio Landlord-Tenant Reform Revisited

The gentle readers may be surprised by the analogy suggested between the reform of landlord-tenant law and the experience of Alice and the Queen. However, the events surrounding the enactment of Amended Substitute Senate Bill 103 were as perplexing as those in Lewis Carroll\u27s story. Those opposing real reform, principally the real estate industry, were successful in weakening the proposed legislation. Consequently, the primary goal of the sponsors of landlord-tenant legislation in Ohio was not met by the legislation finally enacted. As this Article will demonstrate, the interpretation of the Act by the courts of Ohio has proven true the claims of some of the proponents of the reform legislation who likened the final enacted bill to the March Hare: a little bit late and somewhat confusing. The purpose of this Article is to review this legislation and its interpretation by the Ohio courts over the past thirteen years. Like Alice, the gentle reader may conclude that despite all this running, everything\u27s just as it was. For this reason, the authors will propose legislative amendments to the Act necessary to bring into more equitable balance the landlord-tenant relationship in Ohio

Monte Carlo Study of Crystalline Order and Defects on Weakly Curved Surfaces

We numerically study the ground states of particles interacting via a repulsive Yukawa potential on two rigid substrates shaped as isolated and periodically arranged bumps characterized by a spatially varying Gaussian curvature. Below a critical aspect ratio that describes the substrate deformation, the lattice is frustrated, but defect free. A further increase of the aspect ratio triggers defect unbinding transitions that lower the total potential energy by introducing dislocations either in isolation or within grain boundaries. In the presence of very strong deformations, isolated disclinations are nucleated. We show that the character and spatial distribution of defects observed in the ground state reflect the symmetries and periodicity of the two model surfaces investigated in this study

Ohio Landlord-Tenant Reform Revisited

The gentle readers may be surprised by the analogy suggested between the reform of landlord-tenant law and the experience of Alice and the Queen. However, the events surrounding the enactment of Amended Substitute Senate Bill 103 were as perplexing as those in Lewis Carroll\u27s story. Those opposing real reform, principally the real estate industry, were successful in weakening the proposed legislation. Consequently, the primary goal of the sponsors of landlord-tenant legislation in Ohio was not met by the legislation finally enacted. As this Article will demonstrate, the interpretation of the Act by the courts of Ohio has proven true the claims of some of the proponents of the reform legislation who likened the final enacted bill to the March Hare: a little bit late and somewhat confusing. The purpose of this Article is to review this legislation and its interpretation by the Ohio courts over the past thirteen years. Like Alice, the gentle reader may conclude that despite all this running, everything\u27s just as it was. For this reason, the authors will propose legislative amendments to the Act necessary to bring into more equitable balance the landlord-tenant relationship in Ohio

Processing liquid metal for conformable electronics

Future generations of robots, electronics, and assistive medical devices will include systems that are soft, elastically deformable, and may adapt their functionality in unstructured environments. This will require soft active materials for power circuits and sensing of deformation and contact pressure. Liquid-embedded elastomer electronics offer one solution as key elements of highly deformable and soft robotic systems. Several designs for stretchable conductors and soft sensory skins (including strain, pressure, and curvature sensors) based on a liquid-embedded-elastomer approach have been developed. Many of these fluid–elastomer composites utilize liquid metal alloys due to their high conductivities and inherent compliance. Understanding how these alloys can be processed for high-yield manufacturability is critical to the development of parallel processing technology, which is needed to create more complex and low-cost systems. This discussion will highlight surface interactions between droplets of gallium–indium alloys and elastomeric substrates, and the implementation of this study to selective patterning, direct-writing, and inkjet printing of hyperelastic electronic components

A Modular Strategy for Fully Conjugated Donor–Acceptor Block Copolymers

A novel strategy for the synthesis of fully conjugated donor–acceptor block copolymers, in a single reaction step employing Stille coupling polymerization of end-functional polythiophene and AA + BB monomers, is presented. The unique donor–acceptor structure of these block copolymers provides a rich self-assembly behavior, with the first example of a fully conjugated donor–acceptor block copolymer having two separate crystalline domains being obtained

The Near-Linear Regime of Gravitational Waves in Numerical Relativity

We report on a systematic study of the dynamics of gravitational waves in full 3D numerical relativity. We find that there exists an interesting regime in the parameter space of the wave configurations: a near-linear regime in which the amplitude of the wave is low enough that one expects the geometric deviation from flat spacetime to be negligible, but nevertheless where nonlinearities can excite unstable modes of the Einstein evolution equations causing the metric functions to evolve out of control. The implications of this for numerical relativity are discussed.Comment: 10 pages, 2 postscript figures, revised tex

Comparative Developmental Neurotoxicity of Organophosphate Insecticides: Effects on Brain Development Are Separable from Systemic Toxicity

A comparative approach to the differences between systemic toxicity and developmental neurotoxicity of organophosphates is critical to determine the degree to which multiple mechanisms of toxicity carry across different members of this class of insecticides. We contrasted neuritic outgrowth and cholinergic synaptic development in neonatal rats given different organophosphates (chlorpyrifos, diazinon, parathion) at doses spanning the threshold for impaired growth and viability. Animals were treated daily on postnatal days 1–4 by subcutaneous injection so as to bypass differences in first-pass activation to the oxon or catabolism to inactive products. Evaluations occurred on day 5. Parathion (maximum tolerated dose, 0.1 mg/kg) was far more systemically toxic than was chlorpyrifos or diazinon (maximum tolerated dose, 1–5 mg/kg). Below the maximum tolerated dose, diazinon impaired neuritic outgrowth in the forebrain and brainstem, evidenced by a deficit in the ratio of membrane protein to total protein. Diazinon also decreased choline acetyltransferase activity, a cholinergic neuronal marker, whereas it did not affect hemicholinium-3 binding to the presynaptic choline transporter, an index of cholinergic neuronal activity. There was no m(2)-muscarinic acetylcholine receptor down-regulation, as would have occurred with chronic cholinergic hyper-stimulation. The same pattern was found previously for chlorpyrifos. In contrast, parathion did not elicit any of these changes at its maximum tolerated dose. These results indicate a complete dichotomy between the systemic toxicity of organophosphates and their propensity to elicit developmental neurotoxicity. For parathion, the threshold for lethality lies below that necessary for adverse effects on brain development, whereas the opposite is true for chlorpyrifos and diazinon

WISE/NEOWISE Preliminary Analysis and Highlights of the 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko Near Nucleus Environs

On January 18-19 and June 28-29 of 2010, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft imaged the Rosetta mission target, comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. We present a preliminary analysis of the images, which provide a characterization of the dust environment at heliocentric distances similar to those planned for the initial spacecraft encounter, but on the outbound leg of its orbit rather than the inbound. Broad-band photometry yields low levels of CO2 production at a comet heliocentric distance of 3.32 AU and no detectable production at 4.18 AU. We find that at these heliocentric distances, large dust grains with mean grain diameters on the order of a millimeter or greater dominate the coma and evolve to populate the tail. This is further supported by broad-band photometry centered on the nucleus, which yield an estimated differential dust particle size distribution with a power law relation that is considerably shallower than average. We set a 3-sigma upper limit constraint on the albedo of the large-grain dust at <= 0.12. Our best estimate of the nucleus radius (1.82 +/- 0.20 km) and albedo (0.04 +/- 0.01) are in agreement with measurements previously reported in the literature