New Name, Same Team: The Intellectual Property Realities of Changing a Professional Sports Team Name

In light of recent social justice movements, sports team nicknames have been placed under a larger microscope than possibly any time before now. Discussions surrounding team names have recently prompted at least two professional organizations—the Washington Football Team and Cleveland Guardians—to move away from racially-insensitive names. These franchises were not the first sports entities to change their name and they will certainly not be the last. This Essay seeks to provide a short guide of the legal considerations for changing a team’s name. Part I of this Essay discusses past and ongoing franchise name changes in professional sports. Part II addresses the intellectual property considerations franchises must consider when changing their name, and Part III explains how a franchise can make the appropriate corporate changes to finalize name changes with its Secretary of State (or other applicable body)

Environmental Rights for the 21st Century: A Comprehensive Analysis of the Public Trust Doctrine and Rights of Nature Movement

This Article contrasts two theoretically distinct approaches to pursuing related objectives of environmental protection: the public trust doctrine and the rights of nature movement. It reviews the development of public trust and rights of nature principles in both domestic and international legal contexts, and explores points of theoretical commonality and contrast between the two, giving special attention to the opposing systems of environmental ethics from which the anthropocentric public trust and ecocentric rights of nature principles arise. The marked jurisdictional variation associated with both approaches suggests their evolving and inchoate nature as a guarantor of environmental rights. Moreover, both are especially oriented toward the protection of waterways, suggesting the limitations of conventional environmental law to provide adequate protection, and the resulting resort to alternative means. After reviewing the historical origins of the public trust doctrine in Roman and English common law, the article recounts its reception and development in U.S. law, leading to extraordinary jurisdictional diversity along the axes of the resources to which the trust applies, what values the trust protects, what mechanisms of law vindicate trust principles, and diverging legal theories in different states about the nature of the doctrine itself. It offers a snapshot of the diversity of the doctrine in sample states of California, Idaho, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Hawaii, and Florida, and then reviews the state of public trust principles in nations beyond the United States. It then provides an overview of the rights of nature movement, both internationally and domestically. It provides the first scholarly survey of major rights of nature laws enacted throughout the world, and then reviews a series of local rights of nature bills introduced and enacted in American municipalities and Native American tribes, as well as judicial and legislative efforts to block them. It especially focuses on unfolding disputes in Florida, where multiple local governments are experimenting with rights of nature ordinances, and Orange County voters adopted a Bill of Rights charter amendment to protect the local river system from extraction in the same year that the state legislature statutorily preempted local rights of nature ordinances from effect. Finally, it compares and contrasts the two approaches, considering how these diverging anthropocentric and biocentric frames of reference provide different answers to basic questions of environmental management. It asks whether the doctrines can provide mutual support or are destined to undermine one another. It also considers the ways each model is used as a tool of political advocacy in legislative and administrative contexts beyond litigation. Both partner failures in litigation with more promising impacts in the political arena, where the motivating ideas can become a galvanizing force for policy change. Indeed, the enormous jurisdictional variation among both approaches—each a mosaic, rather than a monolith—signals the extent to which they are still evolving, and may long remain inchoate vessels of advocacy into which the champions of vulnerable environmental values pour both their frustrations and their hopes

Validation of numerical codes for impact and explosion cratering: Impacts on strengthless and metal targets

Over the last few decades, rapid improvement of computer capabilities has allowed impact cratering to be modeled with increasing complexity and realism, and has paved the way for a new era of numerical modeling of the impact process, including full, three-dimensional (3D) simulations. When properly benchmarked and validated against observation, computer models offer a powerful tool for understanding the mechanics of impact crater formation. This work presents results from the first phase of a project to benchmark and validate shock codes. A variety of 2D and 3D codes were used in this study, from commercial products like AUTODYN, to codes developed within the scientific community like SOVA, SPH, ZEUS-MP, iSALE, and codes developed at U.S. National Laboratories like CTH, SAGE/RAGE, and ALE3D. Benchmark calculations of shock wave propagation in aluminum-on-aluminum impacts were performed to examine the agreement between codes for simple idealized problems. The benchmark simulations show that variability in code results is to be expected due to differences in the underlying solution algorithm of each code, artificial stability parameters, spatial and temporal resolution, and material models. Overall, the inter-code variability in peak shock pressure as a function of distance is around 10 to 20%. In general, if the impactor is resolved by at least 20 cells across its radius, the underestimation of peak shock pressure due to spatial resolution is less than 10%. In addition to the benchmark tests, three validation tests were performed to examine the ability of the codes to reproduce the time evolution of crater radius and depth observed in vertical laboratory impacts in water and two well-characterized aluminum alloys. Results from these calculations are in good agreement with experiments. There appears to be a general tendency of shock physics codes to underestimate the radius of the forming crater. Overall, the discrepancy between the model and experiment results is between 10 and 20%, similar to the inter-code variability.The Meteoritics & Planetary Science archives are made available by the Meteoritical Society and the University of Arizona Libraries. Contact [email protected] for further information.Migrated from OJS platform February 202

Perceptions and Price: Evidence from CEO Presentations at IPO Roadshows

This paper examines the relation between cognitive perceptions of management and firm valuation. We develop a composite measure of investor perception using 30‐second content‐filtered video clips of initial public offering (IPO) roadshow presentations. We show that this measure, designed to capture viewers’ overall perceptions of a CEO, is positively associated with pricing at all stages of the IPO (proposed price, offer price, and end of first day of trading). The result is robust to controls for traditional determinants of firm value. We also show that firms with highly perceived management are more likely to be matched to high‐quality underwriters. In further exploratory analyses, we find the impact is greater for firms with more uncertain language in their written S‐1. Taken together, our results provide evidence that investors’ instinctive perceptions of management are incorporated into their assessments of firm value.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136541/1/joar12164_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136541/2/joar12164.pd

Progress in Self-Healing Fiber-Reinforced Polymer Composites

This paper sets out to review the current state of the art in applying self-healing/self-repair to high-performing advanced fiber-reinforced polymer composite materials (FRPs). A significant proportion of self-healing studies have focused so far on developing and assessing healing efficiency of bulk polymer systems, applied to particulate composites or low-volume fraction fiber-reinforced materials. Only limited research is undertaken on self-healing in advanced structural FRP composite materials. This review focuses on what is achieved to date, the ongoing challenges which have arisen in implementing self-healing into FRPs, how considerations for industrialization and large-scale manufacture must be considered from the outset, where self-healing may provide most benefits, and how a functionality like self-healing can be validated for application in real structures. Systems are compared in terms of process parameters, resulting mechanical properties, methods of healing assessment, as well as values of healing quantification. Guidelines are further given for a concerted effort to drive toward standardization of tests and the use of specific reinforcement architectures in order to allow reliable comparison between the available healing systems in structural composites

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Cracks, microcracks and fracture in polymer structures: Formation, detection, autonomic repair

The first author would like to acknowledge the financial support from the European Union under the FP7 COFUND Marie Curie Action. N.M.P. is supported by the European Research Council (ERC StG Ideas 2011 n. 279985 BIHSNAM, ERC PoC 2015 n. 693670 SILKENE), and by the EU under the FET Graphene Flagship (WP 14 “Polymer nano-composites” n. 696656)

New Name, Same Team: The Intellectual Property Realities of Changing a Professional Sports Team Name

In light of recent social justice movements, sports team nicknames have been placed under a larger microscope than possibly any time before now. Discussions surrounding team names have recently prompted at least two professional organizations—the Washington Football Team and Cleveland Guardians—to move away from racially-insensitive names. These franchises were not the first sports entities to change their name and they will certainly not be the last. This Essay seeks to provide a short guide of the legal considerations for changing a team’s name. Part I of this Essay discusses past and ongoing franchise name changes in professional sports. Part II addresses the intellectual property considerations franchises must consider when changing their name, and Part III explains how a franchise can make the appropriate corporate changes to finalize name changes with its Secretary of State (or other applicable body)

Environmental Rights for the 21st Century: A Comprehensive Analysis of the Public Trust Doctrine and Rights of Nature Movement

This Article contrasts two theoretically distinct approaches to pursuing related objectives of environmental protection: the public trust doctrine and the rights of nature movement. It reviews the development of public trust and rights of nature principles in both domestic and international legal contexts, and explores points of theoretical commonality and contrast between the two, giving special attention to the opposing systems of environmental ethics from which the anthropocentric public trust and ecocentric rights of nature principles arise. The marked jurisdictional variation associated with both approaches suggests their evolving and inchoate nature as a guarantor of environmental rights. Moreover, both are especially oriented toward the protection of waterways, suggesting the limitations of conventional environmental law to provide adequate protection, and the resulting resort to alternative means. After reviewing the historical origins of the public trust doctrine in Roman and English common law, the article recounts its reception and development in U.S. law, leading to extraordinary jurisdictional diversity along the axes of the resources to which the trust applies, what values the trust protects, what mechanisms of law vindicate trust principles, and diverging legal theories in different states about the nature of the doctrine itself. It offers a snapshot of the diversity of the doctrine in sample states of California, Idaho, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Hawaii, and Florida, and then reviews the state of public trust principles in nations beyond the United States. It then provides an overview of the rights of nature movement, both internationally and domestically. It provides the first scholarly survey of major rights of nature laws enacted throughout the world, and then reviews a series of local rights of nature bills introduced and enacted in American municipalities and Native American tribes, as well as judicial and legislative efforts to block them. It especially focuses on unfolding disputes in Florida, where multiple local governments are experimenting with rights of nature ordinances, and Orange County voters adopted a Bill of Rights charter amendment to protect the local river system from extraction in the same year that the state legislature statutorily preempted local rights of nature ordinances from effect. Finally, it compares and contrasts the two approaches, considering how these diverging anthropocentric and biocentric frames of reference provide different answers to basic questions of environmental management. It asks whether the doctrines can provide mutual support or are destined to undermine one another. It also considers the ways each model is used as a tool of political advocacy in legislative and administrative contexts beyond litigation. Both partner failures in litigation with more promising impacts in the political arena, where the motivating ideas can become a galvanizing force for policy change. Indeed, the enormous jurisdictional variation among both approaches—each a mosaic, rather than a monolith—signals the extent to which they are still evolving, and may long remain inchoate vessels of advocacy into which the champions of vulnerable environmental values pour both their frustrations and their hopes