Unfair and Deceptive Legislation: The Case for Finding North Carolina General Statutes Section 75-1.1 Unconstitutionally Vague as Applied to an Alleged Breach of a Commercial Contract

The North Carolina General Assembly enacted the Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices Act in 1969. The original purpose of the act was to protect consumers from predatory business practices. Nonetheless, the North Carolina Supreme Court has sanctioned an expanded application of the act to cases involving sophisticated commercial parties. This article will attempt to demonstrate that it is poor public policy to apply section 75-1.1 to cases based upon an alleged breach of a commercial contract and that in at least those instances section 75-1.1 is unconstitutionally vague

Unfair and Deceptive Legislation: The Case for Finding North Carolina General Statutes Section 75-1.1 Unconstitutionally Vague as Applied to an Alleged Breach of a Commercial Contract

The North Carolina General Assembly enacted the Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices Act in 1969. The original purpose of the act was to protect consumers from predatory business practices. Nonetheless, the North Carolina Supreme Court has sanctioned an expanded application of the act to cases involving sophisticated commercial parties. This article will attempt to demonstrate that it is poor public policy to apply section 75-1.1 to cases based upon an alleged breach of a commercial contract and that in at least those instances section 75-1.1 is unconstitutionally vague

Geologic remote sensing with radar

Viewgraphs on geologic remote sensing with radar are presented. Ongoing studies concentrate on: weathering processes, volcanic processes, land degradation, tectonic processes, and surface and subsurface mapping

A Parameter-Free Tour of the Binary Black Hole Population

The continued operation of the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo gravitational-wave detectors is enabling the first detailed measurements of the mass, spin, and redshift distributions of the merging binary black hole population. Our present knowledge of these distributions, however, is based largely on strongly parameteric models; such models typically assume the distributions of binary parameters to be superpositions of power laws, peaks, dips, and breaks, and then measure the parameters governing these "building block" features. Although this approach has yielded great progress in initial characterization of the compact binary population, the strong assumptions entailed leave it often unclear which physical conclusions are driven by observation and which by the specific choice of model. In this paper, we instead model the merger rate of binary black holes as an unknown autoregressive process over the space of binary parameters, allowing us to measure the distributions of binary black hole masses, redshifts, component spins, and effective spins with near-complete agnosticism. We find the primary mass spectrum of binary black holes to be doubly-peaked, with a fairly flat continuum that steepens at high masses. We identify signs of unexpected structure in the redshift distribution of binary black holes: a uniform-in-comoving volume merger rate at low redshift followed by a rise in the merger rate beyond redshift $z\approx 0.5$. Finally, we find that the distribution of black hole spin magnitudes is unimodal and concentrated at small but non-zero values, and that spin orientations span a wide range of spin-orbit misalignment angles but are also unlikely to be truly isotropic.Comment: 24 pages, 14 figures; code can be found at http://github.com/tcallister/autoregressive-bbh-inference and data can be download from https://zenodo.org/record/761609

Uncertainty in marine weather routing

Weather routing methods are essential for planning routes for commercial shipping and recreational craft. This paper provides a methodology for quantifying the significance of numerical error and performance model uncertainty on the predictions returned from a weather routing algorithm. The numerical error of the routing algorithm is estimated by solving the optimum path over different discretizations of the environment. The uncertainty associated with the performance model is linearly varied in order to quantify its significance. The methodology is applied to a sailing craft routing problem: the prediction of the voyaging time for an ethnographic voyaging canoe across long distance voyages in Polynesia. We find that the average numerical error is $0.396\%$, corresponding to $1.05$ hours for an average voyage length of $266.40$ hours. An uncertainty level of $2.5 \%$ in the performance model is seen to correspond to a standard deviation of $\pm 2.41-3.08\%$ of the voyaging time. These results illustrate the significance of considering the influence of numerical error and performance uncertainty when performing a weather routing study

Digging the population of compact binary mergers out of the noise

Coalescing compact binaries emitting gravitational wave (GW) signals, as recently detected by the Advanced LIGO-Virgo network, constitute a population over the multi-dimensional space of component masses and spins, redshift, and other parameters. Characterizing this population is a major goal of GWobservations and may be approached via parametric models.We demonstrate hierarchical inference for such models with a method that accounts for uncertainties in each binary merger’s individual parameters, for mass-dependent selection effects, and also for the presence of a second population of candidate events caused by detector noise. Thus, the method is robust to potential biases from a contaminated sample and allows us to extract information from events that have a relatively small probability of astrophysical origin