Insurance

This article focuses on recent legislative changes and judicial interpretations in the area of automobile insurance. Amendments to the Financial Responsibility Laws of Florida have, inter alia, lowered the requisite amount of insurance coverage, shifted the primary insurance burden from the automobile lessor to the lessee\u27s insurer, and disallowed joinder of the liability carrier as a party to the litigation. Florida\u27s no-fault statute has undergone its most severe changes to date. The authors note that the amendments are intended to limit victims\u27 rights to recover damages from tortfeasors, the size of awards that victims may recover, and the number of fraudulent claims. Uninsured motorist coverage has been limited by the elimination of stacking, but broadened by including underinsured motorists within its provisions. Attention is also given to developments in medical malpractice insurance and the new statutory mandate for readable insurance policies

Fit Into College: A Program to Improve Physical Activity and Dietary Intake Lifestyles Among College Students

The purpose of this study was to determine whether a 10-week program could improve physical activity, physical fitness, body weight, dietary intake, and perceptions of exercise and diet among college 30 healthy college freshmen. Outcomes were measured at baseline, and following the 10-week program. The weekly sessions incorporated constructs of the Transtheoretical Model of Health Behavior Change and were administered by fitness interns who were junior or senior college students enrolled in health-related majors. The participants presented with low physical activity, physical fitness, and poor dietary intake, and 50% were overweight/obese (BMI \u3e 25). Participants demonstrated gains in their physical fitness and their perceived benefits to engaging in exercise and decreased their perceived barriers to engaging in exercise and a healthy diet. College freshmen presented with low levels of physical activity, poor dietary intake, and excess body weight. A peer-administered program can improve these measures and favorably change perceptions of exercise and diet

Dynamics and Pattern Formation in Large Systems of Spatially-Coupled Oscillators with Finite Response Times

We consider systems of many spatially distributed phase oscillators that interact with their neighbors. Each oscillator is allowed to have a different natural frequency, as well as a different response time to the signals it receives from other oscillators in its neighborhood. Using the ansatz of Ott and Antonsen (Ref. \cite{OA1}) and adopting a strategy similar to that employed in the recent work of Laing (Ref. \cite{Laing2}), we reduce the microscopic dynamics of these systems to a macroscopic partial-differential-equation description. Using this macroscopic formulation, we numerically find that finite oscillator response time leads to interesting spatio-temporal dynamical behaviors including propagating fronts, spots, target patterns, chimerae, spiral waves, etc., and we study interactions and evolutionary behaviors of these spatio-temporal patterns

Quantifying the development, size, and repertoire diversity of T cell populations

The adaptive immune system must be able to respond to virtually any pathogen that the body encounters. T cell immunity is able to do so by developing a diverse repertoire of T cell receptors and maintaining large numbers of T cells. These two quantitative properties are fundamental for the ability of T cell-mediated immunity to clear infections and generate memory cells for future protection. The aims of this thesis are to quantify the sizes of T cell populations, to develop tools to measure the diversity of T cell repertoires, and to describe how T cell populations develop in neonatal mice. We studied the development of T cell populations in neonatal mice by measuring cell counts and Ki67 expression in thymocyte and peripheral T cell subsets from mice soon after birth to late adulthood. The presumed lymphopenic environment of the neonatal mouse is thought to cause T cells to undergo lymphopenia-induced proliferation, and we wanted to quantify the balance between thymic output and peripheral expansion in the naive T cell compartment during development with mathematical modeling. We also used modeling to find the most parsimonious description of differentiation within the thymus that explains the dynamically growing thymus. We then sought to quantify the sizes of the peripheral T cell compartments in the adult mouse. Understanding the characteristics of healthy T cell immunity requires knowing the precise numbers of the different T cell subsets found in the body. We performed thoracic duct cannulations in adult mice to collect recirculating T cells and reduce cell numbers in the lymph nodes and spleens; by counting the number of collected T cells and its effect on cell numbers on the secondary lymphoid organs, we sought to back-calculate the total number of T cells in the mouse. Finally, we developed tools that provide high-throughput and cost-effective methods for identifying paired TCR sequences. By using computational techniques, we were able to adapt standard sequencing protocols to identify many paired TCR sequences without resorting to large and expensive single-cell sequencing techniques. By leveraging experimental design with mathematical methods, we were able to quantify and characterize many properties of effective T cell immunity

A bivariate first order autoregressive time series model in exponential variables (BEAR (1))

A simple time series model for bivariate exponential variables having first-order auto-regressive structure is presented. The linear random coefficient difference equation model is an adaptation of the New Exponential Autoregressive model (NEAR (2)). The process is Markovian in the bivariate sense and has correlation structure analogous to that of the Gaussian AR(1) bivariate time series model. The model exhibits a full range of positive correlations and cross-correlations. With some modification in either the innovation or the random coefficients, the model admits some negative values for the cross- correlations. The marginal processes are shown to have correlation structure of ARMA (2,1) modelsPrepared for: Naval Postgraduate School Monterey, CAhttp://archive.org/details/bivariatefirstor00dewaNAN

Efficient computation of matched solutions of the Kapchinskij-Vladimirskij envelope equations for periodic focusing lattices

A new iterative method is developed to numerically calculate the periodic, matched beam envelope solution of the coupled Kapchinskij-Vladimirskij (KV) equations describing the transverse evolution of a beam in a periodic, linear focusing lattice of arbitrary complexity. Implementation of the method is straightforward. It is highly convergent and can be applied to all usual parameterizations of the matched envelope solutions. The method is applicable to all classes of linear focusing lattices without skew couplings, and also applies to all physically achievable system parameters -- including where the matched beam envelope is strongly unstable. Example applications are presented for periodic solenoidal and quadrupole focusing lattices. Convergence properties are summarized over a wide range of system parameters.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures, Mathematica source code provide

Trick or Heat? Manipulating Critical Temperature-Based Control Systems Using Rectification Attacks

Temperature sensing and control systems are widely used in the closed-loop control of critical processes such as maintaining the thermal stability of patients, or in alarm systems for detecting temperature-related hazards. However, the security of these systems has yet to be completely explored, leaving potential attack surfaces that can be exploited to take control over critical systems. In this paper we investigate the reliability of temperature-based control systems from a security and safety perspective. We show how unexpected consequences and safety risks can be induced by physical-level attacks on analog temperature sensing components. For instance, we demonstrate that an adversary could remotely manipulate the temperature sensor measurements of an infant incubator to cause potential safety issues, without tampering with the victim system or triggering automatic temperature alarms. This attack exploits the unintended rectification effect that can be induced in operational and instrumentation amplifiers to control the sensor output, tricking the internal control loop of the victim system to heat up or cool down. Furthermore, we show how the exploit of this hardware-level vulnerability could affect different classes of analog sensors that share similar signal conditioning processes. Our experimental results indicate that conventional defenses commonly deployed in these systems are not sufficient to mitigate the threat, so we propose a prototype design of a low-cost anomaly detector for critical applications to ensure the integrity of temperature sensor signals.Comment: Accepted at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 201

A Tensor Virial-equation for stellar dynamics

A tensor virial-equation is derived for a system consisting of equal mass-points, appropriately for stellar dynamics, by starting with the Liouville equation governing an ensemble of such systems in the six N-dimensional phase space

Quantum Monte Carlo Calculations of Pion Scattering from Li

We show that the neutron and proton transition densities predicted by recent quantum Monte Carlo calculations for A=6,7 nuclei are consistent with pion scattering from 6Li and 7Li at energies near the Delta resonance. This has provided a microscopic understanding of the enhancement factors for quadrople excitations, which were needed to describe pion inelastic scattering within the nuclear shell model of Cohen and Kurath.Comment: 10 pages, REVTeX, 3 postscript figures; added calculation of elastic and inelastic pion scattering from 6Li at multiple energie