Tobacco Suits Today: Are Cigarette Plaintiffs Just Blowing Smoke?

The Surgeon General has stated that cigarette smoking is the chief, single, avoidable cause of death in our society and the most important public health issue of our time. Over 200,000 people die each year in the United States as a result of cigarette smoking. Consequently, numerous products liability suits have been filed against tobacco companies. However, until the 1988 decision in CipoIlone v. Liggett Group, Inc., no plaintiff had won a products liability suit against a tobacco company

The Making of an Image: The Narrative Form of Ibn Ishaq\u27s Sirat Rasul Allah

This thesis explores the meaning and significance of the form of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah. It asks the questions: What are the possible reasons for Ibn Ishaq choosing a narrative form for this biography of Muhammad? What does a narrative format grant the text? Are there historical factors which could have influenced the decision? What other influences affected the text? Finally, what are the implications of Ibn Ishaq’s decision to use a narrative form? Taking into consideration narrative theory, the historical setting, and textual evidence, the thesis argues that Ibn Ishaq chose the format most likely to control the image of Muhammad, thus controlling the conversation of what Islam should be. The implications of this view affect how one understands the usages of the Sira as well as the historicity of the text

Too Much, Too Soon? Obergefell as Applied Equality Practice

Abrupt cultural change inevitably arouses anxieties, and often those fears provoke a retrograde reaction seeking to preserve the familiar status quo. When the world by which we define ourselves undergoes unexpected transitions, especially in directions that contradict the comfortable taken-for-granted assumptions that had been earlier enjoyed, we feel threatened. One needs only recall how the new standards of racial equality announced in Brown I and Brown II elicited virulent protests as some districts chose to shutter all public schools rather than have them become racially integrated. In the shadow of such traumas, it may seem an obvious lesson that progress should be slow and incremental, going only so far and as fast as the changes can be absorbed into the social habits. William Eskridge has offered a full-throated defense of modulating the rate of change in order to avoid these unintended consequences of modernization. Legal rights can be formally recognized, he says, but their enforcement should not outpace the acceptance of the new order. The prudence that Eskridge counsels appeals at an intuitive level, but is too abstract to provide useful guidance on how the real world should behave. This paper attempts to demonstrate an empirical means to distinguish situations when caution is prudent from moments when it is not by examining the context in which Eskridge himself frames his defense of incrementalism: same-sex marriage

Realitites of Providing Site-Specific Services to Customers

Site-specific agriculture has the potential to improve management of crop production inputs and efficiency of use. Improved technologies should be applied when a need is identified and implementation is feasible. Currently, technology costs and our capacity to reliably delineate or map properties affecting crop production does not always allow maximum benefit to be derived from site-specific services. This will likely improve as the costs for certain technologies decrease and there is a better understanding about variability management. Today a whole range of new technologies are often thrown together as the site-specific approach. These include GPS, GIS, yield monitoring, grid soil sampling, variable rate application, remote sensing, and more. One must understand each of these, and determine if, when, and where there is a fit for each. In other words, there should be a clear understanding of the benefit for each possible segment of the site-specific approach, and the relationship each has to potential improvement in the crop production system. All may not be useful. Not all areas of crop production may benefit from a site-specific approach. This must be considered as site-specific services are delivered to the farmer. Soil sampling and yield monitoring, combined with variable lime and fertilizer application, are today the most prominent components of site specific services. Our discussion of site-specific agriculture will focus on these topics (much of the following information was taken from Sawyer, 1994a)

Does the wearing of padded headgear in non-helmeted contact sports reduce the likelihood of sustaining a concussion? A critically appraised topic

Context: Concussions are a hot topic in the world of athletics. When most people think of concussions in the world of sports, they generally think of sports such as American football or ice hockey. Current literature men's rugby has the highest amount of concussions of all the team contact sports for both adult and adolescent athletes. High on the list for adolescent athletes is soccer, having the 5th most concussions behind hockey, American football, and lacrosse. It is important to note that of the top 5 sports for concussion, soccer and rugby are the only ones that do not require the use of a helmet. This raises the question: could wearing padded headgear decrease the amount of concussions in the high concussion risk sports that do not require a helmet?Objective: To determine whether or not the wearing of padded headgear in contact sports (i.e. rugby and soccer) reduce the likelihood of sustaining a concussion.Data Sources: A search was conducted in November 2019. Electronic databases utilized included PubMed, SPORTDiscus, and Google Scholar. Hand searches were also performed through the article's reference lists. The terms used in the search included soccer, rugby, headgear, padded headgear, concussions, and prevention.Study Selection: Studies were included if performed on humans, looked at the relationship between padded headgear and concussions, were conducted within the last 15 years, and included only rugby or soccer. Studies were excluded if they were performed on animals, looked strictly at how headgear dissipates force, looked at non-padded headgear (hard shelled helmets, mouth-guards, or face shields), researched how headgear effected accuracy, or sought out the athlete's opinions on headgear and concussions.Data Extraction: Three studies, one cross-sectional study and two randomized controlled trials were selected based on the inclusion/exclusion criteria. Data Synthesis: The cross-sectional study asked adolescents (12-17yo) on a traveling soccer team a survey that asked them about their use of headgear and any concussion symptoms experienced and found that a little more than 50% of non-headgear users reported concussion symptoms compared to 27% of headgear users. One RCT studied 14-18-year-old soccer players while the other studied 13-20-year-old male rugby athletes. Both studies showed that the wearing of headgear did not decrease the likelihood of sustaining a concussion.Conclusions: There is good, but conflicting evidence about the use of padded headgear in non-helmeted contact sports. It is due to this confliction that we cannot say whether or not these headgears may be useful in preventing concussions. More focused research is necessary in order to better understand the impact padded headgear has on concussions. Based on the SORT system, a grade B recommendation is given due to inconsistent findings in level 2 evidence

Vertical Variability in the Structure of the Martian Nitric Oxide Nightglow Layer

Understanding the connection between the lower and upper atmospheres is key to determining the atmospheric history of Mars. One such tracer of the connection between Mars’s thermosphere and mesosphere is the nitric oxide (NO) nightglow, an atmospheric airglow phenomenon which is indicative of atmospheric flux between the nightside thermosphere and mesosphere. For my thesis, I analyze a set of altitude profiles of the NO nightglow observed by the Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph (IUVS) instrument on the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission. Using a toy model of the NO recombination, I fit the altitude profiles to determine some char- acteristic atmospheric quantities and how they change over the course of a day during particular seasons and on average between seasons. During winter, I find that the peak altitude does not vary appreciably with local time, while during equinox and summer the peak altitude decreases during evening, reaching a minimum before midnight, then increasing during the early morning hours toward dawn. Between seasons, I find the average peak altitude varies by about 20km between summer/equinox at around 70km and polar winter at around 50km. These results suggest the diurnal variation depends on daily temperature variation, while the seasonal variation exhibits a more complex connection to variables like average nighttime temperature and other factors like the dayside photodissociation rate producing atomic oxygen and nitrogen