Tennessee Death Taxes

The leading articles in this symposium stress the problems which federal death duties create in the planning of estates. The purpose of this note is to discuss the Tennessee Inheritance Tax,\u27 and to indicate how its treatment of particular types of property and forms of ownership differs from the federal succession tax. The federal tax poses no problem to the Tennessean of moderate means in planning his estate. By some elementary advance planning, all but very substantial estates may be made free of federal tax. In no event will an estate be subject to federal tax which is valued at less than $60,000 after authorized deductions. This specific exemption of$60,000 is now only the starting point. The Revenue Act of 1948 has included an additional deduction where property passes to a surviving spouse. By use of this marital deduction there is a splitting of ownership for estate tax purposes. A similar drastic change was made in the federal gift tax. Under prior law the donor could make annual gifts of $3,000 to any number of donees. In addition to these annual exclusions, the donor had a specific exemption of$30,000. This amount could be given in any one year or spread over several years. The 1948 Act has provided that a married donor under certain circumstances may avail himself of his spouse\u27s exemptions and exclusions. This doubles the amount of property of which such donor may divest himself free of tax

Tennessee Death Taxes

The leading articles in this symposium stress the problems which federal death duties create in the planning of estates. The purpose of this note is to discuss the Tennessee Inheritance Tax,\u27 and to indicate how its treatment of particular types of property and forms of ownership differs from the federal succession tax. The federal tax poses no problem to the Tennessean of moderate means in planning his estate. By some elementary advance planning, all but very substantial estates may be made free of federal tax. In no event will an estate be subject to federal tax which is valued at less than $60,000 after authorized deductions. This specific exemption of$60,000 is now only the starting point. The Revenue Act of 1948 has included an additional deduction where property passes to a surviving spouse. By use of this marital deduction there is a splitting of ownership for estate tax purposes. A similar drastic change was made in the federal gift tax. Under prior law the donor could make annual gifts of $3,000 to any number of donees. In addition to these annual exclusions, the donor had a specific exemption of$30,000. This amount could be given in any one year or spread over several years. The 1948 Act has provided that a married donor under certain circumstances may avail himself of his spouse\u27s exemptions and exclusions. This doubles the amount of property of which such donor may divest himself free of tax

To What Extent Does the Privilege against Self-Incrimination Protect a Witness against Forced Production of Documents

This comment is intended to be a companion piece to the Comment in Vanderbilt Law Review, Vol. I, No. 2, which discusses self-incrimination by means of physical disclosures. The preceding Comment gave a brief account of the privilege and pointed out that the Constitutions of the Federal Government and forty-six states have incorporated the common law privilege against self-incrimination. The two exceptions among the states, Iowa and New Jersey, have accepted the privilege, either by incorporation into their common law by judicial interpretation, or by statute. It is the purpose of this comment to discuss the possibility of the invocation of the privilege against self-incrimination by an individual who has been ordered by regular legal process to produce books, papers and other documents

Chloroplast DNA rearrangements in Campanulaceae: phylogenetic utility of highly rearranged genomes

BACKGROUND: The Campanulaceae (the "hare bell" or "bellflower" family) is a derived angiosperm family comprised of about 600 species treated in 35 to 55 genera. Taxonomic treatments vary widely and little phylogenetic work has been done in the family. Gene order in the chloroplast genome usually varies little among vascular plants. However, chloroplast genomes of Campanulaceae represent an exception and phylogenetic analyses solely based on chloroplast rearrangement characters support a reasonably well-resolved tree. RESULTS: Chloroplast DNA physical maps were constructed for eighteen representatives of the family. So many gene order changes have occurred among the genomes that characterizing individual mutational events was not always possible. Therefore, we examined different, novel scoring methods to prepare data matrices for cladistic analysis. These approaches yielded largely congruent results but varied in amounts of resolution and homoplasy. The strongly supported nodes were common to all gene order analyses as well as to parallel analyses based on ITS and rbcL sequence data. The results suggest some interesting and unexpected intrafamilial relationships. For example fifteen of the taxa form a derived clade; whereas the remaining three taxa – Platycodon, Codonopsis, and Cyananthus – form the basal clade. This major subdivision of the family corresponds to the distribution of pollen morphology characteristics but is not compatible with previous taxonomic treatments. CONCLUSIONS: Our use of gene order data in the Campanulaceae provides the most highly resolved phylogeny as yet developed for a plant family using only cpDNA rearrangements. The gene order data showed markedly less homoplasy than sequence data for the same taxa but did not resolve quite as many nodes. The rearrangement characters, though relatively few in number, support robust and meaningful phylogenetic hypotheses and provide new insights into evolutionary relationships within the Campanulaceae

Generative Modeling of Residuals for Real-Time Risk-Sensitive Safety with Discrete-Time Control Barrier Functions

A key source of brittleness for robotic systems is the presence of model uncertainty and external disturbances. Most existing approaches to robust control either seek to bound the worst-case disturbance (which results in conservative behavior), or to learn a deterministic dynamics model (which is unable to capture uncertain dynamics or disturbances). This work proposes a different approach: training a state-conditioned generative model to represent the distribution of error residuals between the nominal dynamics and the actual system. In particular we introduce the Online Risk-Informed Optimization controller (ORIO), which uses Discrete-Time Control Barrier Functions, combined with a learned, generative disturbance model, to ensure the safety of the system up to some level of risk. We demonstrate our approach in both simulations and hardware, and show our method can learn a disturbance model that is accurate enough to enable risk-sensitive control of a quadrotor flying aggressively with an unmodelled slung load. We use a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) to learn a state-conditioned dynamics residual distribution, and find that the resulting probabilistic safety controller, which can be run at 100Hz on an embedded computer, exhibits less conservative behavior while retaining theoretical safety properties.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, submitted to the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2024

Guaranteeing Safety of Learned Perception Modules via Measurement-Robust Control Barrier Functions

Modern nonlinear control theory seeks to develop feedback controllers that endow systems with properties such as safety and stability. The guarantees ensured by these controllers often rely on accurate estimates of the system state for determining control actions. In practice, measurement model uncertainty can lead to error in state estimates that degrades these guarantees. In this paper, we seek to unify techniques from control theory and machine learning to synthesize controllers that achieve safety in the presence of measurement model uncertainty. We define the notion of a Measurement-Robust Control Barrier Function (MR-CBF) as a tool for determining safe control inputs when facing measurement model uncertainty. Furthermore, MR-CBFs are used to inform sampling methodologies for learning-based perception systems and quantify tolerable error in the resulting learned models. We demonstrate the efficacy of MR-CBFs in achieving safety with measurement model uncertainty on a simulated Segway system

Book Reviews

Minimum Standards of Judicial Administration Edited by Arthur T. Vanderbilt Published by The Law Center of New York University for The National Conference of Judicial Councils, 1949. Pp. xxxii,752. $7.50 reviewer: William J. Bowa ================================= Availability for Work By Ralph Altman Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950. Pp. 350.$4.50 reviewer: Emmett Conner, Charles K. Cosner ================================== Forrester\u27s Edition of Dobie and Ladd\u27s Cases and Materials on Federal Jurisdiction and Procedure By Ray Forrester St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1950, Pp. vii, 990. $8.50 reviewer: Charles E. Clark ====================================== Life Insurance and Estate Tax Planning By William J. Bowe Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1950. Pp. 90.$2.10 reviewer: Joseph Trachma