Death is Certain but Probate is Optional: How to Transfer Wealth and Dodge Creditors Using a Revocable Trust

This article explores the impact on creditors of two common methods of wealth transfer at death in the state of Missouri: the revocable inter vivos trust and the traditional probate estate administration process. In the former, the trustee will administer the property in the trust in accordance with its terms, thus circumventing the probate process for the assets placed in the trust. In the latter, a personal representative is appointed to manage the decedent’s final affairs through the probate courts in accordance with probate rules. The trustee and the personal representative play very similar roles but are held to different standards when it comes to their responsibility under the law. Each will step into the shoes of the decedent when it comes to managing affairs, but only of them can be held personally liable for mismanagement with respect to the decedent’s creditors. A personal representative is charged with payment of the decedent’s debts before distributing any remaining assets to beneficiaries, but the trustee has no such duty. Nor will the trustee of a revocable trust be held liable for not doing so. The statutory remedy is instead to chase after the trust beneficiaries individually for their pro rata share of the debt rather than have debts paid prior to distribution; an outcome that can prove to be fruitless in many cases due to the cost of litigation if the beneficiaries choose not to pay. The law is clear that during the lifetime of the settlor, the property of a revocable trust is subject to claims of the settlor\u27s creditors, which includes claims existing at death. Heirs are simply not entitled to any assets until the indebtedness of the decedent is discharged by proper management of the estate. The law as to creditors\u27 rights needs to be revisited and carefully harmonized to clearly define rights and procedures in all assets at death to avoid such inconsistent results

Modelling agronomic properties of Technosols constructed with urban wastes

International audienceThe greening of urban and suburban areas requires large amounts of arable earth that is a non-renewable resource. However, concentration of population in cities leads to the production of high amounts of wastes and by-products that are nowadays partly recycled as a resource and quite systematically exported out of urban areas. To preserve natural soil resources, a strategy of waste recycling as fertile substitutes is proposed. Eleven wastes are selected for their environmental harmlessness and their contrasted physico-chemical properties for their potential use in pedological engineering. The aim is (i) to demonstrate the feasibility of the formulation of fertile substrates exclusively with wastes and (ii) to model their physico-chemical properties following various types, number and proportions of constitutive wastes. Twenty-five binary and ternary combinations are tested at different ratios for total carbon, Olsen available phosphorus, cation exchange capacity, water pH, water retention capacity and bulk density. Dose-response curves describe the variation of physico-chemical properties of mixtures depending on the type and ratio of selected wastes. If these mixtures mainly mimic natural soils, some of them present more extreme urban soil features, especially for pH and P Olsen. The fertility of the new substrates is modelled by multilinear regressions for the main soil properties

The diet of red-throated divers (Gavia stellata) overwintering in the German Bight (North Sea) analysed using molecular diagnostics

In Europe, the German Bight is one of the most important non-breeding areas for protected red-throated divers (Gavia stellata). It is unclear what attracts the birds to this area, especially as the food composition of seabirds outside the breeding season is notoriously difficult to study. To obtain information on prey species composition of red-throated divers in this area, faecal samples from 34 birds caught alive were analysed using DNA metabarcoding. Prey DNA was detected in 85% of the samples with a mean number of 4.2 ± 0.7 taxa per sample (n = 29). Altogether, we found a broad prey spectrum with 19 fish taxa from 13 families dominated by five groups: clupeids, mackerel, gadoids, flatfish and sand lances with clupeids being the most frequently detected prey. Our results indicate that red-throated divers are generalist opportunistic feeders in the German Bight, but pelagic schooling fish that aggregate at frontal zones and have a high energetic value might be favoured. Atlantic mackerel appears to be a more important prey for red-throated divers in this area than previously thought. The precision achievable using metabarcoding has revealed a number of prey species that are consumed by red-throated divers in the German Bight, which helps to explain the selection of this area by divers in winter and spring

On noise treatment in radio measurements of cosmic ray air showers

Precise measurements of the radio emission by cosmic ray air showers require an adequate treatment of noise. Unlike to usual experiments in particle physics, where noise always adds to the signal, radio noise can in principle decrease or increase the signal if it interferes by chance destructively or constructively. Consequently, noise cannot simply be subtracted from the signal, and its influence on amplitude and time measurement of radio pulses must be studied with care. First, noise has to be determined consistently with the definition of the radio signal which typically is the maximum field strength of the radio pulse. Second, the average impact of noise on radio pulse measurements at individual antennas is studied for LOPES. It is shown that a correct treatment of noise is especially important at low signal-to-noise ratios: noise can be the dominant source of uncertainty for pulse height and time measurements, and it can systematically flatten the slope of lateral distributions. The presented method can also be transfered to other experiments in radio and acoustic detection of cosmic rays and neutrinos.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures, submitted to NIM A, Proceedings of ARENA 2010, Nantes, Franc

The LOPES experiment - recent results, status and perspectives

The LOPES experiment at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology has been taking radio data in the frequency range from 40 to 80 MHz in coincidence with the KASCADE-Grande air shower detector since 2003. Various experimental configurations have been employed to study aspects such as the energy scaling, geomagnetic dependence, lateral distribution, and polarization of the radio emission from cosmic rays. The high quality per-event air shower information provided by KASCADE-Grande has been the key to many of these studies and has even allowed us to perform detailed per-event comparisons with simulations of the radio emission. In this article, we give an overview of results obtained by LOPES, and present the status and perspectives of the ever-evolving experiment.Comment: Proceedings of the ARENA2010 conference, Nantes, Franc

Radio Emission in Atmospheric Air Showers: First Measurements with LOPES-30

When Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays interact with particles in the Earth's atmosphere, they produce a shower of secondary particles propagating toward the ground. LOPES-30 is an absolutely calibrated array of 30 dipole antennas investigating the radio emission from these showers in detail and clarifying if the technique is useful for largescale applications. LOPES-30 is co-located and measures in coincidence with the air shower experiment KASCADE-Grande. Status of LOPES-30 and first measurements are presented.Comment: Proceedings of ARENA 06, June 2006, University of Northumbria, U

IoTwins: Design and implementation of a platform for the management of digital twins in industrial scenarios

With the increase of the volume of data produced by IoT devices, there is a growing demand of applications capable of elaborating data anywhere along the IoT-to-Cloud path (Edge/Fog). In industrial environments, strict real-time constraints require computation to run as close to the data origin as possible (e.g., IoT Gateway or Edge nodes), whilst batch-wise tasks such as Big Data analytics and Machine Learning model training are advised to run on the Cloud, where computing resources are abundant. The H2020 IoTwins project leverages the digital twin concept to implement virtual representation of physical assets (e.g., machine parts, machines, production/control processes) and deliver a software platform that will help enterprises, and in particular SMEs, to build highly innovative, AI-based services that exploit the potential of IoT/Edge/Cloud computing paradigms. In this paper, we discuss the design principles of the IoTwins reference architecture, delving into technical details of its components and offered functionalities, and propose an exemplary software implementation

Results from the KASCADE, KASCADE-Grande, and LOPES experiments

The origin of high-energy cosmic rays in the energy range from 10^14 to 10^18 eV is explored with the KASCADE and KASCADE-Grande experiments. Radio signals from air showers are measured with the LOPES experiment. An overview on results is given.Comment: Talk at The ninth International Conference on Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics, TAUP 2005, Zaragoza, September 10-14, 200