The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act and the Uniform Commercial Code: A Survey of Warranty Protection in Consumer Sales Transactions

“For many years warranties have confused and misled the American consumers. A warranty is a complicated legal document whose full essence lies buried in myriads of reported legal discussions and in complicated State codes of commercial law. The consumers\u27 understanding of what a warranty on a particular product means to him frequently does not coincide with the legal meaning. … Today, most consumers have little understanding of the frequently complex legal implications of warranties on consumer products.” These comments, included in the report submitted by the Committee on Commerce accompanying the bill that was to become the Magnuson-Moss Warranty-Federal Trade Commission Improvement Act, accurately describe the disorderly mélange encountered by the modern American consumer in the field of warranties. In particular, provisions for disclaimer of warranties and limitation of remedies or damages in transactions involving the sale of goods have been the source of confusion and extensive litigation during recent years. Unless state legislation provided special treatment for consumer transactions, the respective states\u27 adoption of Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code has provided the primary source for resolving disputes involving warranty provisions. Partly for this reason, and because decisions varied substantially from one jurisdiction to another, the state of the law in the warranty field has, in the past, been difficult to assess

Polarization-Based Image Segmentation and Height Estimation for Interferometric SAR

To find scatterers in a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image, a modification is proposed to improve peak region segmentation (PRS) with region merging. The modification considers the polarization of each pixel before it is added to a segment to ensure the segment only contains pixels of the same polarization. Prior to region merging, the polarization of the segments is compared, so that only segments with the same polarization are merged into a single region. The segmented regions are used to find the height of each scatterer through interferometric SAR (IFSAR) processing. Multiple methods of IFSAR are examined to find the best height estimator. The best height results come from using all the pixels in the segment from all four polarization channels

Double-layer shocks in a magnetized quantum plasma

The formation of small but finite amplitude electrostatic shocks in the propagation of quantum ion-acoustic waves (QIAWs) obliquely to an external magnetic field is reported in a quantum electron-positron-ion (e-p-i) plasma. Such shocks are seen to have double-layer (DL) structures composed of the compressive and accompanying rarefactive slow-wave fronts. Existence of such DL shocks depends critically on the quantum coupling parameter $H$ associated with the Bohm potential and the positron to electron density ratio $\delta$. The profiles may, however, steepen initially and reach a steady state with a number of solitary waves in front of the shocks. Such novel DL shocks could be a good candidate for particle acceleration in intense laser-solid density plasma interaction experiments as well as in compact astrophysical objects, e.g., magnetized white dwarfs.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure (to appear in Physical Review E

Identifying and accounting for the Coriolis Effect in satellite NO2 observations and emission estimates

Recent developments in atmospheric remote sensing from satellites have made it possible to resolve daily emission plumes from industrial point sources, around the globe. Wind rotation aggregation coupled with statistical fitting is commonly used to extract emission estimates from these observations. These methods are used here to investigate how the Coriolis Effect influences the trajectory of observed emission plumes, and to assess the impact of this influence on satellite derived emission estimates. Of the 17 industrial sites investigated, nine showed the expected curvature for the hemisphere they reside in. Five showed no or negligible curvature, and two showed opposing or unusual curvature. The sites which showed conflicting curvature all reside in topographically diverse regions, where strong meso-gamma scale (2&ndash;20 km) turbulence dominates over larger synoptic circulation patterns. For high curvature cases the assumption that the wind-rotated plume aggregate is symmetrically distributed across the downwind axis breaks down, which impairs the quality of statistical fitting procedures. Using NOx emissions from Matimba power station as a test case, not compensating for Coriolis curvature resulted in an10 underestimation of &sim; 9 % on average for years 2018 to 2021. This study is the first formal observation of the Coriolis Effect and its influence on satellite observed emission plumes, and highlight both the variability of emission calculation methods and the need for a standardised scheme for this data to act as evidence for regulators.</p

Gauge Theories in Particle Physics: A Practical Introduction, Volume 2: Non-Abelian Gauge Theories

Volume 2 of this revised and updated edition provides an accessible and practical introduction to the two non-Abelian quantum gauge field theories of the Standard Model of particle physics: quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and the Glashow-Salam-Weinberg (GSW) electroweak theory.This volume covers much of the experimental progress made in the last ten

Gauge Theories in Particle Physics: A Practical Introduction, Volume 1

Volume 1 of this revised and updated edition provides an accessible and practical introduction to the first gauge theory included in the Standard Model of particle physics: quantum electrodynamics (QED).The book includes self-contained presentations of electromagnetism as a gauge theory as well as relativistic quantum mechanics. It provides a uniq