Where Are the Gatekeepers? Challenging Utah’s Threshold Standard for Admissibility of Expert Witness Testimony

Utah’s Rule 702 on the admissibility of expert witness testimony is far too low. Utah trial courts cannot to fulfill their role as gatekeepers because the threshold standard forces them to admit almost everything without ensuring reliability. Accordingly, Utah evidence law will benefit from amending Rule 702 whether it reverts to the federal rule or elects the Minnesota approach. Either is preferred to the almost nonexistent standard currently in place, which has drifted far from the “inherent[ly] reliab[le]” tradition and is no longer “the touchstone of admissibility” in Utah. The State should amend Rule of Evidence 702 to allow judges to make meaningful decisions on the admissibility of expert testimony once again

Where Are the Gatekeepers? Challenging Utah’s Threshold Standard for Admissibility of Expert Witness Testimony

Utah’s Rule 702 on the admissibility of expert witness testimony is far too low. Utah trial courts cannot to fulfill their role as gatekeepers because the threshold standard forces them to admit almost everything without ensuring reliability. Accordingly, Utah evidence law will benefit from amending Rule 702 whether it reverts to the federal rule or elects the Minnesota approach. Either is preferred to the almost nonexistent standard currently in place, which has drifted far from the “inherent[ly] reliab[le]” tradition and is no longer “the touchstone of admissibility” in Utah. The State should amend Rule of Evidence 702 to allow judges to make meaningful decisions on the admissibility of expert testimony once again

Optimization of the Strontium Modification Process in Gravity Permanent Mould Tilt Cast AlSi6Cu4 Cylinder Heads

Sr addition rates between 80 and 400 ppm were tested in industrial-scale casting campaigns. An adequate level of modification is achieved across the entire section of the cylinder head at a Sr addition rate of 160-200 ppm, and further increase in Sr levels fails to offer additional benefits. Porosity increases at Sr addition levels exceeding 200 ppm. The fraction of porosity is as high as 2.5% at a Sr addition rate of 400 ppm. Mechanical properties do not change over these Sr addition rates. It can be argued that the adverse and favourable effects of Sr addition more or less balance each other. However, the underlying issue of the industrial-scale experimental work is that the mechanical properties targeted for this particular AlSi6Cu4 cylinder head casting have been confidently and consistently achieved with the gravity permanent mould tilt casting process, without a separate heat treatment

Moore's Law and the Semiconductor Industry: A Vintage Model

In this paper we develop a vintage model to gain a better understanding of the semiconductor industry and its role in recent U.S. productivity gains. Unlike previous work, in our model the observed price declines of individual chips are driven by the introduction of better vintages rather than by learning economies. Dominated chips, nonetheless, continue to be produced, for a time, due to sunk investments in chip-specific production equipment. The model lends partial support to Jorgenson's hypothesis that an exogenous increase in Moore's Law could have generated the more rapid price declines, and faster productivity growth, seen after 1995. Copyright The editors of the "Scandinavian Journal of Economics", 2005 .