Here\u27s Your Burrito and Watch Your Back: Does Missouri Really Want to Hold Businesses Liable for Attacks on Patrons

In the late 1980s, Missouri altered a longstanding common law rule and found that businesses sometimes owe a duty to their patrons to protect against or warn about criminal attacks by third parties.\u27 This new rule generally applies when a business has experienced prior incidents that are reasonably recent and similar to the attack in question.3 In Stroot v. Taco Bell Corp., the Missouri Court of Appeals for the Eastern District of Missouri upheld a summary judgment entered in favor of a business for an attack that occurred in the business\u27s parking lot even though the victim alleged that prior violent incidents had occurred in the parking lot and filed supporting affidavits.4 Perhaps Stroot represents a shift away from the modem trend of premises liability law and a return to a take care of yourself\u27 approach. Even more surprising is the court\u27s apparent willingness to ignore the rescue doctrine in favor of protecting businesses from potential liability

Caveat Vendor: Sellers of Real Estate Now Need to Beware of Misrepresentations about the Condition of Property

The common law approach to disclosure of latent defects in real property was caveat emptor, which meant sellers had no duty to disclose latent defects to purchasers.2 Most modem courts have mitigated the harshness of the doctrine by adopting a system that mandates disclosure by a seller of any latent defect3 material to the purchaser\u27s decision to buy the property and whose existence is known by the seller. Droz v. Trump highlights a growing trend among a number of Missouri courts willing to further narrow the seller protections of caveat emptor in favor of protecting innocent purchasers of real property. Most significant in this case is the use of the affirmative representation doctrine to completely cancel the purchaser\u27s duty to investigate latent defects

Microscopic and mesoscopic traffic models

Besides macroscopic traffic flow models, traffic modelling in freeway systems has also been treated with other general approaches, resulting in microscopic and mesoscopic models. Macroscopic models can surely represent large networks efficiently, since they adopt an aggregate representation of the traffic dynamics, but they generally lack the level of detail needed in modelling the individual drivers\u2019 behaviours and choices. Microscopic models are, instead, conceived to explicitly reproduce the drivers\u2019 responses to traffic patterns, reactions to traffic variations, interactions with other vehicles and route choices, i.e. most of the individual behaviours. Consequently, microscopic models are able to provide a lot of information about the features of traffic flow but they require a high computational effort, especially for large road networks. Mesoscopic models fill the gap between microscopic and macroscopic models, by representing the choices of individual drivers at a probabilistic level, but limiting the level of detail on driving behaviours

A model for the oceanic mass balance of rhenium and implications for the extent of Proterozoic ocean anoxia

Emerging geochemical evidence suggests that the atmosphere-ocean system underwent a significant decrease in O₂ content following the Great Oxidation Event (GOE), leading to a mid-Proterozoic ocean (ca. 2.0–0.8 Ga) with oxygenated surface waters and predominantly anoxic deep waters. The extent of mid-Proterozoic seafloor anoxia has been recently estimated using mass-balance models based on molybdenum (Mo), uranium (U), and chromium (Cr) enrichments in organic-rich mudrocks (ORM). Here, we use a temporal compilation of concentrations for the redox-sensitive trace metal rhenium (Re) in ORM to provide an independent constraint on the global extent of mid-Proterozoic ocean anoxia and as a tool for more generally exploring how the marine geochemical cycle of Re has changed through time. The compilation reveals that mid-Proterozoic ORM are dominated by low Re concentrations that overall are only mildly higher than those of Archean ORM and significantly lower than many ORM deposited during the ca. 2.22–2.06 Ga Lomagundi Event and during the Phanerozoic Eon. These temporal trends are consistent with a decrease in the oceanic Re inventory in response to an expansion of anoxia after an interval of increased oxygenation during the Lomagundi Event. Mass-balance modeling of the marine Re geochemical cycle indicates that the mid-Proterozoic ORM with low Re enrichments are consistent with extensive seafloor anoxia. Beyond this agreement, these new data bring added value because Re, like the other metals, responds generally to low-oxygen conditions but has its own distinct sensitivity to the varying environmental controls. Thus, we can broaden our capacity to infer nuanced spatiotemporal patterns in ancient redox landscapes. For example, despite the still small number of data, some mid-Proterozoic ORM units have higher Re enrichments that may reflect a larger oceanic Re inventory during transient episodes of ocean oxygenation. An improved understanding of the modern oceanic Re cycle and a higher temporal resolution for the Re compilation will enable further tests of these hypotheses regarding changes in the surficial Re geochemical cycle in response to variations in atmosphere-ocean oxygenation. Nevertheless, the existing Re compilation and model results are in agreement with previous Cr, Mo, and U evidence for pervasively anoxic and ferruginous conditions in mid-Proterozoic oceans