Interpreting The Pollution Exclusion Clause In The Comprehensive General Liability Policy - Ohio\u27s Next Step

Our purpose here is to analyze the courts\u27 treatment of the pollution exclusion clause. From the context of insurance policy interpretation, decisions regarding the exclusion will be reviewed and placed in a national perspective. The Ohio decisions will be examined against the backdrop of current trends and the national consensus. We conclude, for the reasons which follow, that the Ohio Supreme Court, when presented with the issue, should not adopt the findings of the Ohio appellate courts in interpreting the pollution exclusion clause, but should recognize that those decisions were wrong and follow the law which finds sudden and accidental not ambiguous. That is, the standard pollution exclusion clause is not ambiguous as drafted and the wording sudden and accidental should be accorded its literal and common meaning. These insurance coverage disputes should not be determined on the basis of the judicial canons of construction for insurance policies but on factual determinations in relation to these policies

V!ola Day!!! 2.0

Viola Day is presented by the Utah Viola Society. It includes masterclasses, instrument trials, performances, and more!https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/music_programs/1215/thumbnail.jp

Inefficiency as the major driver of excess costs in lung resection

BackgroundRisk-adjusted outcomes of surgical care are important for quality and cost assessments. Although cardiac surgery is commonly studied, risk-adjusted analysis of excess costs of lung resection has not been pursued.MethodsWe used 2002 to 2005 National Inpatient Sample of the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project data to evaluate adverse outcomes and costs in elective lung resections in hospitals with more than 20 cases during that period. Adverse outcomes were inpatient death or excessive risk-adjusted postoperative stay. Logistic models were defined to predict adverse outcomes. Linear models were designed to predict costs. Hospital-specific adverse outcome rates and costs were measured to define performance outliers. Cost-effective reference hospitals were used to define total excess costs.ResultsAmong 12,182 patients at 215 hospitals undergoing lung resection, there were 336 inpatient deaths (2.8%) and 880 live discharges with prolonged risk-adjusted postoperative stay (7.2%). Predictive models for mortality and risk-adjusted postoperative stay had C statistics of 0.773 and 0.643, respectively. There were 11 ineffective hospitals (5.1%) with excessive adverse outcomes (P < .005) and 34 inefficient hospitals (15.8%) meeting quality measures but with higher than predicted costs (P < .0005). Ineffective hospitals had costs $1020 per case lower than predicted. Inefficient hospitals had costs$9978 higher than predicted.ConclusionsInefficiency is the major factor in excess inpatient costs associated with lung resection in this model. Although refinements in databases, including total physician costs and postdischarge adverse event costs, will alter models, excess costs of lung resection appear to be driven by inefficiency, not adverse outcomes

Visual analysis of social networks in space and time using smartphone logs

We designed and applied novel interactive visualisation to investigate how social networks - derived from smartphone logs - are embedded in time and space. Social networks were identified through direct calls between participants and calls to mutual contacts of participants. Direct contact between participants was sparse and deriving networks through mutual contacts helped enrich the social networks. Our resulting interactive visualisation tool offers four linked and co-ordinated views of spatial, temporal, individual and social network aspects of the data. Brushing and altering techniques help us investigate how these aspects relate. We also simultaneously display some demographic and attitudinal variables to help add context to the behaviours we observe. Using these techniques, we were able to characterise spatial and temporal aspects of participants' social networks and suggest explanations for some of them. We reflect on the extent to which such analysis helps us understand social communication behaviour

Defensive responses of cuttlefish to different teleost predators

Author Posting. © Marine Biological Laboratory, 2013. This article is posted here by permission of Marine Biological Laboratory for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Biological Bulletin 225 (2013): 161-174.We evaluated cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) responses to three teleost predators: bluefish (Pomatomus saltatrix), summer flounder (Paralichthys dentatus), and black seabass (Centropristis striata). We hypothesized that the distinct body shapes, swimming behaviors, and predation tactics exhibited by the three fishes would elicit markedly different antipredator responses by cuttlefish. Over the course of 25 predator-prey behavioral trials, 3 primary and 15 secondary defense behaviors of cuttlefish were shown to predators. In contrast, secondary defenses were not shown during control trials in which predators were absent. With seabass—a benthic, sit-and-pursue predator—cuttlefish used flight and spent more time swimming in the water column than with other predators. With bluefish—an active, pelagic searching predator—cuttlefish remained closely associated with the substrate and relied more on cryptic behaviors. Startle (deimatic) displays were the most frequent secondary defense shown to seabass and bluefish, particularly the Dark eye ring and Deimatic spot displays. We were unable to evaluate secondary defenses by cuttlefish to flounder—a lie-and-wait predator—because flounder did not pursue cuttlefish or make attacks. Nonetheless, cuttlefish used primary defense during flounder trials, alternating between cryptic still and moving behaviors. Overall, our results suggest that cuttlefish may vary their behavior in the presence of different teleost predators: cryptic behaviors may be more important in the presence of active searching predators (e.g., bluefish), while conspicuous movements such as swimming in the water column and startle displays may be more prevalent with relatively sedentary, bottom-associated predators (e.g., seabass).This project was funded by a United States Department of Defense, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Defense Sciences Office (DARPA DSO) Grant (HR0011-09- 1-0017)

Theoretical and experimental study of cylindrical shock and heterogeneous detonation waves

A simplified theory of blast initiation of detonations in clouds of fuel in gaseous or droplet form is developed and agrees with the experiments described below. The flow is at first dominated by the strong blast wave but transition from blast to detonation behavior occurs near a critical radius r* where the blast energy and the heat of combustion contained in r r* are equal. The complex flow in this transition region cannot be determined analytically. In the simplified theory the details of the transition region are ignored but the flow is represented by the self-similar solution for a strong blast wave for r r* and by the self-similar detonation solution for r &gt; r*.The development of a sectored shock tube to study cylindrical shock waves and two-phase detonations is described. Data are presented for shock waves as well as for blast initiated detonations of a monodisperse spray of 400 [mu] kerosene droplets in air at standard conditions. Two regimes of propagation were established experimentally: (1) the subcritical energy regime, where decoupling of shock and reaction zone results in a strong blast wave type decay and, (2) the supercritical energy regime, where the initially overdriven cylindrical detonation decays, at some critical radius, to its Chapman-Jouguet state. Experimentally determined critical radii and steady-state detonation velocity agree very well with theoretical predictions. Detonation velocity was found to be constant at the plane C-J value for radius greater than the critical radius.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/22402/1/0000852.pd