578 research outputs found
Torts on Boats and Yachts
Summer is here, and boaters eagerly sail or drive their gems-of-the ocean in summer fun. To the lawyer, the boating season means personal injury cases of a special, and possibly, unfamiliar nature. Torts on yachts usually fall within United States admiralty law jurisdiction. We shall sketch the applicable law-for those who read as they run (over the waves)
Torts on Boats and Yachts
Summer is here, and boaters eagerly sail or drive their gems-of-the ocean in summer fun. To the lawyer, the boating season means personal injury cases of a special, and possibly, unfamiliar nature. Torts on yachts usually fall within United States admiralty law jurisdiction. We shall sketch the applicable law-for those who read as they run (over the waves)
Real Property Inventory and Management System for Municipal Law Departments
Inventory management of city-owned real property may be defined as the recording and maintenance of information on the acquisition, identification, location, value, condition, and disposition of each parcel of such property, including the use of this property information for management decisions.Most cities own thousands or millions of dollars worth of real property. Few, however, have an accurate inventory and management system enabling them to identify and account for their holdings. Just as individuals and corporations want to know what they own in order to obtain a clear picture of their assets, a city must also maintain records to document its financial position
Shocked Gas in IRAS F17207-0014: ISM Collisions and Outflows
We combine optical and near-infrared AO-assisted integral field observations
of the merging ULIRG IRAS F17207-0014 from the Wide-Field Spectrograph (WiFeS)
and Keck/OSIRIS. The optical emission line ratios [N II]/H, [S
II]/H, and [O I]/H reveal a mixing sequence of shocks present
throughout the galaxy, with the strongest contributions coming from large radii
(up to 100% at 5 kpc in some directions), suggesting galactic-scale
winds. The near-infrared observations, which have approximately 30 times higher
spatial resolution, show that two sorts of shocks are present in the vicinity
of the merging nuclei: low-level shocks distributed throughout our
field-of-view evidenced by an H/Br line ratio of 0.6-4, and
strong collimated shocks with a high H/Br line ratio of
4-8, extending south from the two nuclear disks approximately 400 pc
(0.5 arcsec). Our data suggest that the diffuse shocks are caused by the
collision of the interstellar media associated with the two progenitor galaxies
and the strong shocks trace the base of a collimated outflow coming from the
nucleus of one of the two disks.Comment: accepted to MNRA
History dependence in insect flight decisions during odor tracking
Natural decision-making often involves extended decision sequences in response to variable stimuli with complex structure. As an example, many animals follow odor plumes to locate food sources or mates, but turbulence breaks up the advected odor signal into intermittent filaments and puffs. This scenario provides an opportunity to ask how animals use sparse, instantaneous, and stochastic signal encounters to generate goal-oriented behavioral sequences. Here we examined the trajectories of flying fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) and mosquitoes (Aedes aegypti) navigating in controlled plumes of attractive odorants. While it is known that mean odor-triggered flight responses are dominated by upwind turns, individual responses are highly variable. We asked whether deviations from mean responses depended on specific features of odor encounters, and found that odor-triggered turns were slightly but significantly modulated by two features of odor encounters. First, encounters with higher concentrations triggered stronger upwind turns. Second, encounters occurring later in a sequence triggered weaker upwind turns. To contextualize the latter history dependence theoretically, we examined trajectories simulated from three normative tracking strategies. We found that neither a purely reactive strategy nor a strategy in which the tracker learned the plume centerline over time captured the observed history dependence. In contrast, “infotaxis”, in which flight decisions maximized expected information gain about source location, exhibited a history dependence aligned in sign with the data, though much larger in magnitude. These findings suggest that while true plume tracking is dominated by a reactive odor response it might also involve a history-dependent modulation of responses consistent with the accumulation of information about a source over multi-encounter timescales. This suggests that short-term memory processes modulating decision sequences may play a role in natural plume tracking
Shocked POststarbust Galaxy Survey I: Candidate Poststarbust Galaxies with Emission Line Ratios Consistent with Shocks
[Abridged] The Shocked POststarburst Galaxy Survey (SPOGS) aims to identify
transforming galaxies, in which the nebular lines are excited via shocks
instead of through star formation processes. Utilizing the OSSY measurements on
the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 catalog, we applied Balmer
absorption and shock boundary criteria to identify 1,067 SPOG candidates
(SPOGs*) within z=0.2. SPOGs* represent 0.2% of the OSSY sample galaxies that
exceed the continuum signal-to-noise cut (and 0.7% of the emission line galaxy
sample). SPOGs* colors suggest that they are in an earlier phase of transition
than OSSY galaxies that meet an E+A selection. SPOGs* have a 13% 1.4GHz
detection rate from the Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty centimeters
survey, higher than most other subsamples, and comparable only to
low-ionization nuclear emission line region hosts, suggestive of the presence
of active galactic nuclei. SPOGs* also have stronger NaD absorption than
predicted from the stellar population, suggestive of cool gas being driven out
in galactic winds. It appears that SPOGs* represent an earlier phase in galaxy
transformation than traditionally selected poststarburst galaxies, and that a
large proportion of SPOGs* also have properties consistent with disruption of
their interstellar media, a key component to galaxy transformation. It is
likely that many of the known pathways to transformation undergo a SPOG phase.
Studying this sample of SPOGs* further, including their morphologies, active
galactic nuclei properties, and environments, has the potential for us to build
a more complete picture of the initial conditions that can lead to a galaxy
evolving.Comment: 19 pages, 19 figures, 3 tables, accepted to ApJ Supplements (Apr 13),
full sample is available on www.spogs.or
Kinematic classifications of local interacting galaxies: implications for the merger/disk classifications at high-z
The classification of galaxy mergers and isolated disks is key for
understanding the relative importance of galaxy interactions and secular
evolution during the assembly of galaxies. The kinematic properties of galaxies
as traced by emission lines have been used to suggest the existence of a
significant population of high-z star-forming galaxies consistent with isolated
rotating disks. However, recent studies have cautioned that post-coalescence
mergers may also display disk-like kinematics. To further investigate the
robustness of merger/disk classifications based on kinematic properties, we
carry out a systematic classification of 24 local (U)LIRGs spanning a range of
galaxy morphologies: from isolated spiral galaxies, ongoing interacting
systems, to fully merged remnants. We artificially redshift the WiFeS
observations of these local (U)LIRGs to z=1.5 to make a realistic comparison
with observations at high-z, and also to ensure that all galaxies have the same
spatial sampling of ~900 pc. Using both kinemetry-based and visual
classifications, we find that the reliability of kinematic classification shows
a strong trend with the interaction stage of galaxies. Mergers with two nuclei
and tidal tails have the most distinct kinematic properties compared to
isolated disks, whereas a significant population of the interacting disks and
merger remnants are indistinguishable from isolated disks. The high fraction of
late-stage mergers showing disk-like kinematics reflects the complexity of the
dynamics during galaxy interactions. However, the exact fractions of
misidentified disks and mergers depend on the definition of kinematic
asymmetries and the classification threshold when using kinemetry-based
classifications. Our results suggest that additional indicators such as
morphologies traced by stars or molecular gas are required to further constrain
the merger/disk classifications at high-z.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, ApJ accepte
- …