Online Fantasy Sports Litigation and the Need for a Federal Right of Publicity Statute

The right of publicity is currently a jumble of state common law and state statutes, but the online fantasy sports industry crosses state lines with ease. Having witnessed the great revenue potential of online fantasy sports, professional sports leagues are trying to strong-arm independent fantasy sports providers out of the business by using the right of publicity to assert property interests in the statistics generated by professional players, and used by fantasy sports providers to run their online games. The first such attempt--by Major League Baseball--failed. However, the state law nature of the right of publicity prevents any single court opinion from binding the industry or other jurisdictions. The National Football League is attempting to achieve a more favorable result in a different jurisdiction. If successful, other professional sports leagues will be encouraged to litigate the issue, and Major League Baseball might even attempt to re-litigate its position in other states. This free-for-all could result in different rules for different sports in different states, which would not only be untenable for the online fantasy sports providers, but a violation of the Constitution as well. A cohesive federal right of publicity statute would (1) bring uniformity to the doctrine, (2) give federal courts (where these actions are being brought) a federal law to apply instead of allowing them to continue muddying the application of state laws, (3) directly address First Amendment concerns, and (4) solve the dormant commerce clause violation alluded to above

RXTE and BeppoSAX Observations of MCG -5-23-16: Reflection From Distant Cold Material

We examine the spectral variability of the Seyfert 1.9 galaxy MCG -5-23-16 using RXTE and BeppoSAX observations spanning 2 years from April 1996 to April 1998. During the first year the X-ray source brightens by a factor of ~25% on timescales of days to months. During this time, the reprocessed continuum emission seen with RXTE does not respond measurably to the continuum increase. However, by the end of the second year during the BeppoSAX epoch the X-ray source has faded again. This time, the reprocessed emission has also faded, indicating that the reprocessed flux has responded to the continuum. If these effects are caused by time delays due to the distance between the X-ray source and the reprocessing region, we derive a light crossing time of between ~1 light day and ~1.5 light years. This corresponds to a distance of 0.001 pc to 0.55 pc, which implies that the reprocessed emission originates between 3x10^15 cm and 1.6x10^18 cm from the X-ray source. In other words, the reprocessing in MCG -5-23-16 is not dominated by the inner regions of a standard accretion disk.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ. 17 pages, 8 figure

Assessment of water pollution by airborne measurement of chlorophyll

Remote measurement of chlorophyll concentrations to determine extent of water pollution is discussed. Construction and operation of radiometer to provide measurement capability are explained. Diagram of equipment is provided

Oscillatory approach to the singularity in vacuum T2T^2 symmetric spacetimes

A combination of qualitative analysis and numerical study indicates that vacuum $T^2$ symmetric spacetimes are, generically, oscillatory.Comment: 2 pages submitted to the Ninth Marcel Grossmann Proceedings; v2, "all known cases" changed to "various known cases" in the first paragrap

Static inconsistencies in certain axiomatic higher-order shear deformation theories for beams, plates and shells

AbstractStatic inconsistencies that arise when modelling the flexural behaviour of beams, plates and shells with clamped boundary conditions using a certain class of axiomatic, higher-order shear deformation theory are discussed. The inconsistencies pertain to displacement-based theories that enforce conditions of vanishing shear strain at the top and bottom surfaces a priori. First it is shown that the essential boundary condition of vanishing Kirchhoff rotation perpendicular to an edge (w,x=0 or w,y=0) is physically inaccurate, as the rotation at a clamped edge may in fact be non-zero due to the presence of transverse shear rotation. As a result, the shear force derived from constitutive equations erroneously vanishes at a clamped edge. In effect, this boundary condition overconstrains the structure leading to underpredictions in transverse bending deflection and overpredictions of axial stresses compared to high-fidelity 3D finite element solutions for thick and highly orthotropic plates. Generalised higher-order theories written in the form of a power series, as in Carrera’s Unified Formulation, do not produce this inconsistency. It is shown that the condition of vanishing shear tractions at the top and bottom surfaces need not be applied a priori, as the transverse shear strains inherently vanish if the order of the theory is sufficient to capture all higher-order effects. Finally, the transverse deflection of the generalised higher-order theories is expanded in a power series of a non-dimensional parameter and used to derive a material and geometry dependent shear correction factor that provides more accurate solutions of bending deflection than the classical value of 5/6

Ventilation of the North Atlantic Ocean during the Last Glacial Maximum: A comparison between simulated and observed radiocarbon ages

The distribution of radiocarbon during simulations of the Last Glacial Maximum with a coupled ocean-atmosphere-sea ice model is compared with sediment core measurements from the equatorial Atlantic Ceara Rise, Blake Ridge, Caribbean Sea, and South China Sea. During these simulations we introduce a perturbation of North Atlantic freshwater fluxes leading to varying strengths of the Atlantic meridional overturning. The best fit with the observations is obtained for an overturning weakened by 40% compared with today. Further, we simulate the phenomenon of an “age reversal” found in deep sea corals, but we suggest that this indicates rather a sudden interruption of deep water formation instead of an increase in ventilation, which was suggested earlier

A proposed group management scheme for XTP multicast

The purpose of a group management scheme is to enable its associated transfer layer protocol to be responsive to user determined reliability requirements for multicasting. Group management (GM) must assist the client process in coordinating multicast group membership, allow the user to express the subset of the multicast group that a particular multicast distribution must reach in order to be successful (reliable), and provide the transfer layer protocol with the group membership information necessary to guarantee delivery to this subset. GM provides services and mechanisms that respond to the need of the client process or process level management protocols to coordinate, modify, and determine attributes of the multicast group, especially membership. XTP GM provides a link between process groups and their multicast groups by maintaining a group membership database that identifies members in a name space understood by the underlying transfer layer protocol. Other attributes of the multicast group useful to both the client process and the data transfer protocol may be stored in the database. Examples include the relative dispersion, most recent update, and default delivery parameters of a group

Solar pumped laser

A solar pumped laser is described in which the lasant is a gas that will photodissociate and lase when subjected to sunrays. Sunrays are collected and directed onto the gas lasant to cause it to lase. Applications to laser propulsion and laser power transmission are discussed

Issues in designing transport layer multicast facilities

Multicasting denotes a facility in a communications system for providing efficient delivery from a message's source to some well-defined set of locations using a single logical address. While modem network hardware supports multidestination delivery, first generation Transport Layer protocols (e.g., the DoD Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) (15) and ISO TP-4 (41)) did not anticipate the changes over the past decade in underlying network hardware, transmission speeds, and communication patterns that have enabled and driven the interest in reliable multicast. Much recent research has focused on integrating the underlying hardware multicast capability with the reliable services of Transport Layer protocols. Here, we explore the communication issues surrounding the design of such a reliable multicast mechanism. Approaches and solutions from the literature are discussed, and four experimental Transport Layer protocols that incorporate reliable multicast are examined

Infrared molecular emissions from comets

The possibility of detecting IR molecular line emission from cometary parent molecules is explored. Due to the non-LTE conditions in the inner coma and the large amount of near IR solar flux, IR fluorescence will be a significant source of cometary emission and, in fact, will dominate the grain radiation in a sufficiently high resolution instrument. The detection of this line emission will be difficult due to absorption in the terrestrial atmosphere, but it appears possible to measure cometary H2O emission from airplane altitudes. As IR molecular line emission represents one of the few promising methods of detecting cometary parent molecules directly, further research on this problem should be vigorously pursued