Practicing the Perfections: \u3ci\u3eCommunitas\u3c/i\u3e During the \u3ci\u3eSaga Dawa Kortsay\u3c/i\u3e at Swayambhunath, Nepal

Based on observations from personal participation in the 2014 Saga Dawa Kortsay at Swayambhunath Stupa complex located near Kathmandu, Nepal, my essay draws attention to the distinctive lay Buddhist community that is formed in such ritual performances. Using Victor Turner’s concept of communitas, I argue that the liminal experience of the pilgrimage enables the constitution of a distinctive lay Buddhist community in terms of the self-transformation usually reserved for monastic practitioners. In contrast to recent accounts of Nepali pilgrimage that emphasize the subordinate role of the lay community in the Buddhist sangha, I argue that lay participants in ritual performances like the Saga Dawa Kortsay cultivate individual and collective identities as members of the sangha in their own right, with their own responsibilities for practicing and preserving Buddhist teachings. Through discussions of the Swayambunath complex, pilgrims’ efforts toward self-transformation, and their practice of Buddhist perfections through donations to mendicants, I use the example of the Saga Dawa Kortsay to explain how a distinctive lay Buddhist community is formed by pilgrims through the situation of communitas

Asbestos and the Future of Mass Torts

Asbestos was once referred to as a miracle mineral' for its ability to withstand heat and it was used in thousands of products. But exposure to asbestos causes cancer and other diseases. As of the beginning of 2001, 600,000 individuals had filed lawsuits for asbestos-related diseases against more than 6,000 defendants. 85 firms have filed for bankruptcy due to asbestos liabilities and several insurers have failed or are in financial distress. More than $54 billion has been spent on the litigation higher than any other mass tort. Estimates of the eventual cost of asbestos litigation range from$200 to $265 billion. The paper examines the history of asbestos regulation and asbestos liability and argues that it was liability rather than regulation that eventually caused producers to eliminate asbestos from most products by the late 1970s. But despite the disappearance of asbestos products from the marketplace, asbestos litigation continued to grow. Plaintiffs' lawyers used forum-shopping to select the most favorable state courts techniques for mass processing of claims, and substituted new defendants when old ones went bankrupt. Because representing asbestos victims was extremely profitable, lawyers had an incentive to seek out large numbers of additional plaintiffs, including many claimants who were not harmed by asbestos exposure. The paper contrasts asbestos litigation to other mass torts involving personal injury and concludes that asbestos was unique in a number of ways, so that future mass torts are unlikely to be as big. However new legal innovations developed for asbestos are likely to make future mass torts larger and more expensive. I explore two mechanisms-- bankruptcies and class action settlements--that the legal system has developed to resolve mass torts and show that neither has worked for asbestos litigation. The first, bankruptcy by individual asbestos defendants, exacerbates the litigation by spreading it to non-bankrupt defendants. The second, a class action settlement, is impractical for asbestos litigation because of the large number of defendants. As a result, Congressional legislation is needed and the paper discusses the compensation fund approach that Congress is currently considering.

Explaining the Flood of Asbestos Litigation: Consolidation, Bifurcation, and Bouquet Trials

The number of asbestos personal injury claims filed each year is in the hundreds of thousands and has been increasing rather than decreasing over time, even though asbestos stopped being used in the early 1970's. Eighty firms have filed for bankruptcy due to asbestos liabilities including 30 filings since the beginning of 2000. This paper examines why asbestos claims are increasing over time. Because large numbers of asbestos claims are filed in particular courts, judges in these courts have adopted procedural innovations intended to clear their dockets by encouraging mass settlements. These innovations cause trial outcomes to change in plaintiffs' favor. As a result, the innovations make the asbestos crisis worse by giving plaintiffs' lawyers an incentive to file large numbers of additional claims in the same courts. The paper uses a new dataset of asbestos trials to test the hypothesis that three important procedural innovations--consolidated trials, bifurcation, and bouquet trials--favor plaintiffs and therefore encourage the filing of additional claims. I find that bifurcation and bouquet trials nearly triple plaintiffs' expected return from trial, while consolidations of up to seven lawsuits raise plaintiffs' expected return from trial by one- third to one-half.

The Harlem Children's Zone, Promise Neighborhoods, and the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education

Examines the role of community services in raising academic achievement in the Harlem Children's Zone. Questions the effectiveness of replicating the neighborhood approach, rather than the schools-only approach, in the Promise Neighborhoods Initiative

The capacity region of broadcast channels with intersymbol interference and colored Gaussian noise

We derive the capacity region for a broadcast channel with intersymbol interference (ISI) and colored Gaussian noise under an input power constraint. The region is obtained by first defining a similar channel model, the circular broadcast channel, which can be decomposed into a set of parallel degraded broadcast channels. The capacity region for parallel degraded broadcast channels is known. We then show that the capacity region of the original broadcast channel equals that of the circular broadcast channel in the limit of infinite block length, and we obtain an explicit formula for the resulting capacity region. The coding strategy used to achieve each point on the convex hull of the capacity region uses superposition coding on some or all of the parallel channels and dedicated transmission on the others. The optimal power allocation for any point in the capacity region is obtained via a multilevel water-filling. We derive this optimal power allocation and the resulting capacity region for several broadcast channel models

Rapid near-optimal VQ design with a deterministic data net

We present a new algorithm for fixed-rate vector quantizer (VQ) design with deterministic data net. The algorithm also performs efficient VQ design for simply characterized continuous distributions. The algorithm also serves as an approximation algorithm for the d-dimensional fixed-rate operational distortion-rate function, extends to a variety of network VQ problems. The algorithm generalizes to give /spl epsiv/-approximation algorithms for many network VQ design problems. A few examples are multiresolution VQ (MRVQ), multiple description VQ (MDVQ), side information VQ (SIVQ), Broadcast VQ (BCVQ), joint source-channel VQ (JSCVQ) and remote source VQ (RSVQ)

Rural and Urban Children Have Lower Rates of Health Insurance Coverage and are More Often Covered by Public Plans

This Carsey brief looks at the geographic distribution of health insurance for children. Based on data from the 2008 American Community Survey, it includes such findings as one in ten children are still uninsured, insurance rates vary considerably by geographic area, and rural children are most likely to depend on public plans for their health care