Peculiar Risk in American Tort Law

American tort law includes a significant strand of liability tied to an intriguing concept variously termed “peculiar risk,” “special danger,” and “special risk inherent in the work,” among others. Peculiar risk presents a basis for liability different from other standards or actions that trigger liability in tort law - it is different from intent, recklessness, negligence, nuisance, and abnormally dangerous activity. Both England and the United States endorsed versions of the doctrine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet, by 1965, American and English tort law had sharply diverged on the doctrine. American courts continued to apply it; meanwhile, the doctrine had been severely limited in England and rejected in several other common law countries. The divide between the American approach and treatment of the doctrine outside the U.S. is a puzzle. In countries that have rejected or severely limited the doctrine, the critiques have included decisional indeterminacy and shaky historical and normative justifications. Yet a doctrine subject to these criticisms elsewhere has remained well accepted in the United States in the last thirty years - a thirty-year period characterized by extensive tort reform across the bandwidth of tort law. This Article explores three points about this divide between American tort law and the tort law of other common law countries: when and how the divide occurred; why this doctrine - whose breadth and indeterminacy spelled its disfavor elsewhere - remained well-accepted in America despite the intensity and duration of American tort reform; and whether the American version of the doctrine offers lessons for tort law outside the United States

Alien Registration- Pryor, Whitney S. (Monticello, Aroostook County)

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Comparison of two methods for describing the strain profiles in quantum dots

The electronic structure of interfaces between lattice-mismatched semiconductor is sensitive to the strain. We compare two approaches for calculating such inhomogeneous strain -- continuum elasticity (CE, treated as a finite difference problem) and atomistic elasticity (AE). While for small strain the two methods must agree, for the large strains that exist between lattice-mismatched III-V semiconductors (e.g. 7% for InAs/GaAs outside the linearity regime of CE) there are discrepancies. We compare the strain profile obtained by both approaches (including the approximation of the correct C_2 symmetry by the C_4 symmetry in the CE method), when applied to C_2-symmetric InAs pyramidal dots capped by GaAs.Comment: To appear in J. Appl. Physic

Evaluation of the NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis in Terms of Synoptic Scale Phenomea: A Case Study from the Midwestern USA

We evaluate the ability of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP)–National Center for Atmosphere Research (NCAR) reanalysis to represent the synoptic-scale climate of the Midwestern USA relative to radiosonde data. Independent, automated synoptic classifications, based on rotated principal component analysis (PCA) of 500 hPa geopotential heights, 850 hPa air temperatures, and 200 hPa wind speeds and a two-step clustering algorithm, result in a 15-type NCEP–NCAR synoptic classification and a 14-type radiosonde classification. The classifications are examined in terms of similarities and differences in the modes of variance manifest in the PCA solutions, the spatial patterns and variability of input variables within each weather type, and the temporal variability of the occurrence of each weather type. The classifications are then compared in terms of these characteristics and the degree of mutual class occupancy. Although the classifications identify a number of the same weather types (in terms of the input data, PCA solution, and mutual occupancy), the correspondence is imperfect. To assess whether the differences in the classifications are due to errant assignment of data to clusters or to differences in the fundamental modes present in the data sets as represented by the PC loadings and scores, a third targeted classification is undertaken that categorizes the NCEP–NCAR reanalysis data according to the radiosonde PCA solution. This classification exhibits a higher degree of similarity to that derived using the radiosonde data (in terms of both interpretability and mutual class occupancy), but the solutions still exhibit considerable differences. It is probable that the discrepancies are partly a function of the differing data structures and densities, but they may also reflect differences in the intensity of synoptic-scale phenomena as manifest in the data sets

An Evaluation of Two GCMs: Simulation of North American Teleconnection Indices and Synoptic Phenomena

We evaluate the ability of two coupled atmospheric–oceanic GCMs – the Hadley Center’s third generation coupled climate model (HadCM3) and the Canadian Center for Climate Modeling and Analysis second-generation coupled model (CGCM2) – to simulate the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), the Pacific North American teleconnection pattern (PNA), and map patterns in the Midwest region of the United States, relative to NCEP/NCAR reanalysis (NNR) data. The observed (NNR-derived) and GCM-derived probability distributions and temporal behavior of the daily teleconnection indices exhibit agreement over the 1990–2001 reference period, and both GCMs successfully reproduce the range of 500-hPa map patterns over the study region. During the reference period, observed and modeled map patterns are similar in terms of frequency, coherence, persistence, and progression, although the most common map pattern occurs too often in HadCM3 relative to NNR and CGCM2-derived map patterns generally exhibit closer agreement with those derived from NNR data. Despite the relatively high degree of correspondence between the observed and simulated teleconnection indices and map patterns in the study area, differences between the GCM and NNR-derived map-pattern frequencies in the reference period are greater than either (1) recent historical changes in map-pattern frequencies or (2) changes in the mappattern frequencies as derived from twenty-first century GCM simulations, indicating that changes in these phenomena over recent and approaching decades are of insufficient magnitude relative to model uncertainty to be definitively identified