Concentric tubes cold-bonded by drawing and internal expansion

Metal tubes bonded together without heat application or brazing materials retain strength at elevated temperatures, and when subjected to constant or cyclic temperature gradients. Combination drawing and expansion process produces residual tangential tensile stress in the outer tube and tangential compressive stress in the inner tube

Railroads Running Roughshod: The Preemptive Power of the InterstateCommerce Commission Termination Act on Tort Claims

Justice Ginsburg argued that the displacement of state tort law with no substantive federal standard of conduct to fill the void creates an outcome that defies common sense and sound policy. The preemptive power of the Interstate Commerce Commission Termination Act (ICCTA) creates such an outcome. To ensure the Surface Transportation Board (STB) has exclusive regulatory control over railroads, the ICCTA preempts any local or state laws that have a regulatory impact on railroads. If a railroad\u27s activity causes harm to a plaintiff, the plaintiff will likely bring a state tort cause of action against the railroad. Railroads argue that these tort claims have a regulatory impact on their activities and are thus preempted. Plaintiffs, in turn, believe that such claims have only an incidental impact on railroads. Courts have not reached a consensus on whether state tort causes of action are preempted by the ICCTA. When plaintiffs\u27 tort claims are preempted, individuals are left without any remedy. These individuals enter a legal limbo where their state tort claims are preempted by the ICCTA, but where no substitute federal causes of action exist. Consequently, railroads are not held accountable for their tortious behavior, and plaintiffs are left without any legal recourse. The key issue for analysis, then, is how to correct this injustice in the face of the ICCTA\u27s preemptive power. This Comment argues that the legal limbo created by the ICCTA must be corrected. In the past, when a statute had this unjust effect on innocent plaintiffs, Congress amended the statute and reined in the statute\u27s preemptive force. The ICCTA needs similar amending. Alternatively, courts should focus on notions of equity and fairness rather than quibbling over congressional intent. A focus on fairness aligns with the Supreme Court\u27s view of tort preemption and ensures that plaintiffs can seek justice

Epilogue: A Hypothesis on the East Asian Beginnings of the Yersinia pestis Polytomy

The work of Cui et al. (2013)—in both dating the polytomy that produced most existing strains of Yersinia pestis and locating its original home to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau—offers a genetically derived specific historical proposition for historians of East and Central Asia to investigate from their own sources. The present article offers the hypothesis that the polytomy manifests itself in the Mongol invasion of the Xia state in the Gansu corridor in the early thirteenth century and continues in the Mongols’ expansion into China and other parts of Eurasia. The hypothesis relies to a considerable extent on work of Cao Shuji (1995), but argues for a different means and direction for the spread of plague than either Cao or William McNeill have previously posited

Survivors and Renewers

Article

Ethnopoetics, Oral-Formulaic Theory, and Editing Texts

"Oral-formulaic theory and ethnopoetics are both concerned with composition in the course of performance, and with constraints that must be met in doing so. In the epics and other poetry studied in terms of oral formulaic theory, the constraint is a metrical line, commonly a sung metrical line. In oral narratives the constraint is commonly a relation among lines."--Constraints within and along lines

Front End Specifications and the Propagation of Construction Claims

Front End Specifications represent the administrative, organizational, performance and payment requirements for construction projects. The vast majority of construction contracts use Front End Specifications, either from an independent source or prepared in-house. In spite of the crucial role of Front End Specifications, little is known regarding whether Front End Specifications increase or decrease claims in construction. Further, no published reports to date have investigated whether construction claims are systematically related to Front End Specification complexity, partnering, business size or document authorship. In the present quantitative study, participants: n = 150) from the construction industry, including contractors, subcontractors, designers and owners, completed an on-line survey of sixteen multi-part questions detailing common Front End Specifications and the impact of those specifications on claims. Results indicate that disputes and claims from Front End Specifications impose significant costs on construction projects, with scheduling specifications/requirements, summary: scope) of the work and coordination being the most common causes of claims. Perceptions of claims were not related to business size or document authorship. Partnering participants trended towards perceiving Front End Specifications as decreasing claims. Regulatory Requirements were generally perceived as too complex and participants who perceived Front End Specifications Regulatory Requirements as too complex were significantly more likely to believe that Front End Specifications would cause more claims. Results are discussed in the context of ConsensusDOCS® library of construction forms, practical implications for construction project management, limitations of the present study and areas for future research