WILLS - RIGHT OF CREDITORS OF TESTAMENTARY DONEE TO SET ASIDE HIS RENUNCIATION - RIGHT OF SURVIVING SPOUSE TO SHARE IN INTESTATE PROPERTY AFTER ELECTING TO TAKE UNDER WILL IN LIEU OF HER DISTRIBUTIVE SHARE

Testator left all his real and personal property to his wife for life, and the remainder to his son and daughter in equal shares. The widow elected to take under the will in lieu of dower and other legal rights in the estate. The daughter renounced any right under the will, and seven months later filed a petition for voluntary bankruptcy. Her trustee in bankruptcy instituted this suit in equity to annul the renunciation. Held, the daughter had the right to file an unconditional disclaimer of all benefits granted her under the will and her creditors cannot complain thereof; and secondly, the widow having accepted the provisions in the will in lieu of all other legal rights in the estate is not entitled to share in the part of the property passing by intestacy because of the rejection of benefits by another beneficiary. McGarry v. Mathis, (Iowa 1938) 282 N. W. 786

WORKMEN\u27S COMPENSATION - LEAD POISONING CONTRACTED BY AN AUTOMOBILE MECHANIC NOT AN OCCUPATIONAL DISEASE - CANCER CONTRACTED BY BATTERY PLANT EMPLOYEE AN OCCUPATIONAL DISEASE

Plaintiff contracted lead poisoning through the gradual daily inhalation of poisonous fumes from a gasoline torch used in his occupation as an automobile mechanic. If the employer had provided another type of gasoline, it appeared that plaintiff\u27s disability would have been avoided. Held, that under these circumstances lead poisoning was not an occupational disease, and plaintiff should be compensated under the Iowa Workmen\u27s Compensation Law. Black v. Creston Auto Co., (Iowa, 1938) 281 N. W. 189

MORTGAGES - LIMITATION OF ACTIONS - DEFICIENCY DECREE ON BASIS OF COVENANT IN MORTGAGE WHEN ACTION ON NOTE BARRED

Defendant executed and delivered to plaintiff a promissory note and a mortgage securing it. The mortgage contained a covenant to pay $10,000 (the principal amount of the note) according to the terms of a certain promissory note bearing even date herewith. Upon foreclosure it was held, three judges dissenting, that the mortgagee was entitled to a deficiency decree notwithstanding action on the note was barred by the statute of limitations. Guardian Depositors Corporation of Detroit v. Savage, 287 Mich. 193,283 N. W. 26 (1938)

CRIMINAL LAW AND PROCEDURE - CONSTITUTIONALITY OF A COMMENT UPON DEFENDANT\u27S FAILURE TO TESTIFY

For several years there has been agitation in legal and legislative circles to permit comment in a criminal action upon the failure of the defendant to testify. Both the American Bar Association and the American Law Institute have passed resolutions favoring such legislation. The chief objection to the proposal has been its alleged unconstitutionality. The purpose of this comment is to attempt to rebut such a contention and to show that the advocated change is both constitutional and eminently desirable

ADVERSE POSSESSION - REQUIREMENTS FOR OBTAINING TITLE TO A CAVE BY ADVERSE POSSESSION

Plaintiff and defendant were owners of adjoining properties. On defendant\u27s land was located the only opening to a cavern, which a remote grantor of defendant discovered in 1893. Since that time, defendant and its immediate and remote grantors have improved the cave for visitors, and conducted persons through it upon the payment of an admission price. With wide publicity, this has continued for almost fifty years. Plaintiff first visited the cave in 1895, paying an admission fee for the privilege, and has visited it several times since. A part of said cave extended under real estate owned by plaintiff, but this fact was not ascertained until a survey was made in 1932. Defendant, and its grantors, thought that all the cave was under land belonging to them. Plaintiff brought action to quiet title to the part of the cavern under his land. Held, defendant did not acquire title to the part of the cave beneath plaintiff\u27s land by adverse possession. Marengo Cave Co. v. Ross, 212 Ind. 624, ION. E. (2d) 917 (1937)

CONSTITUTIONAL LAW - POWER OF LEGISLATIVE INVESTIGATING COMMITTEE TO SUPERSEDE GRAND JURY

The court of quarter sessions of Dauphin County ordered a grand jury investigation of alleged criminal misconduct by civil officers of the commonwealth. The governor then issued a call for a special session of the legislature. When this body had convened, seven members of the House of Representatives were appointed a committee to investigate the charges against those civil officers liable to impeachment. This committee sought a writ of prohibition to restrain the quarter sessions court from proceeding with the grand jury investigation, in pursuance of a statute enacted at the special session of the legislature giving the legislative investigating committee priority over all other investigations of the same charges. Held, that the act was a deprivation of the exercise of a judicial power vested in the court by the constitution of the commonwealth. In re Investigation by Dauphin County Grand Jury (No. 2) 332 Pa. 342, 2 A. (2d) 804 (1938)

State-run schools reconsidered. A reply to Merry

In this reply, the author considers some major points of Michael Merry’s article, “Citizenship, Structural Inequality, and the Political Elite.” Specifically, she discusses how his distinction between civic education and political education raises an important question about the relationship of state-run schooling to modern statecraft, namely, whether it is possible for state-run schools to do anything but reproduce the extant order. (DIPF/Orig.

Education and politics. A reply to Su and Su

In their article, \u27Why solving intergenerational injustice through education does not work\u27, Hanno Su and Shia Su present at least two claims. The first claim is that the fact of climate change refutes the progressive bias in modern educational thought and shifts the task of education away from preparing children for a better future to preparing them for what will likely be a worse future. The second claim is that the present adult generation must respond to climate change, not by resolving to educate the younger generation into \u27better\u27 habits and values, but by assuming responsibility for our part in the crisis, doing as much as possible, as soon as possible, to mitigate its long-term effects. My commentary responds to these two claims. I judge that, while Su and Su are correct to stress the present generation\u27s imperative to assume responsibility for the climate crisis, their deflationary account of education\u27s political function gives short shrift to how education can supplement and secure revolutionary change. (DIPF/Orig.

Simon II kernel reference manual

Journal ArticleThe principal objective of Simon II is to provide a flexible and adaptable framework for constructing simulators for a wide variety of parallel systems. A simulator consists of a set of software building blocks. Each building block, i.e. object, simulates a specific component of the parallel system. Objects may be defined in terms of other objects, supporting a hierarchical view of the system

Optimal performance of distributed simulation programs

Journal ArticleThis paper describes a technique to analyze the potential speedup of distributed simulation programs. A distributed simulation strategy is proposed which minimizes execution time through the use of an oracle to control the simulation. Because the strategy relies on an oracle, it cannot be used for practical simulations. However the strategy facilitates performance evaluations of distributed simulation strategies by providing a useful point of comparison and can be used to determine the suitability of specific applications for implementation on a parallel computer. Based on the proposed strategy, a tool has been developed to determine the maximum performance which can be achieved from a distributed simulation program. In this paper we describe the technique and its use in evaluating the parallelism available in distributed simulators of parallel computer systems