REAL PROPERTY-ADVERSE POSSESSION-ADVERSENESS OF POSSESSION WHEN POSSESSOR HAS NOT CLAIMED A FEE

From 1924 until 1948 plaintiff and her family were in apparent, open and continuous possession of a portion of defendant\u27s lot, without permission, and with the intent to exclude the defendant and all others from possession. Although plaintiff and her family constructed a lawn, gardens, steps and parking space on the premises, the court found that such use was an incident to her occupancy of the house on the adjoining lot, and was without any separate claim of title. In 1948, defendant entered and began excavating for the foundation of a house. Plaintiff sought an injunction and damages, resting her claim on title acquired through adverse possession. The evidence disclosed that from 1937 until 1941 plaintiff and her family occupied the adjoining lot as tenant of a bank rather than as owner of the fee, but the bank made no claim to the disputed premises. From a final decree dismissing the bill, held, affirmed. Possession will not ripen into fee simple title where the possessor has not claimed a fee throughout the period of the statute of limitations. Holmes v. Johnson, (Mass. 1949) 86 N.E. (2d) 924

CORPORATIONS--BY-LAWS--RESTRICTIONS ON TRANSFER OF BANK STOCK

Plaintiff received thirty shares of bank stock by bequest. Before she presented the shares to the bank for transfer, the stockholders, by a majority vote (plaintiff dissenting), amended the by-laws so as to limit to certain classes the persons to whom the bank stock could be transferred, whether by transfer inter vivos, will, or descent. A mandamus proceeding was initiated against the bank to compel a transfer of the shares free of the restrictions. On defendants\u27 appeal from a ruling denying a motion to quash an alternative writ, held, affirmed. The restrictions sought to be imposed were not authorized by statute. Wentworth v. Russell State Bank, (Kan. 1949) 205 P. (2d) 972

An Investigation of Scottish Secondary School Pupils' Learning Difficulties With the Concepts of Current, Potential Difference and Resistance

Electricity is a topic within the Scottish Higher Grade Syllabus in physics which presents difficulty to many pupils. It may also be the topic which deters some pupils from continuing to study physics beyond secondary school

CONSTITUTIONAL LAW-EMINENT DOMAIN-ELEMENTS OF FAIR VALUE

Respondent bought the tug MacArthur from the Coast Guard in March, 1942. Exclusive of his own labor, his outlay for purchase and repair of the tug totaled $8,574.78. In October, 1942, the War Shipping Administration, acting under the Merchant Marine Act of 1936, requisitioned the tug and awarded compensation of$9,000. Respondent contested the award, and the Court of Claims found that the fair market value at the time of taking was $15,500. This determination was made without deduction for enhancement of value due to the government\u27s need of vessels, or previous taking of vessels of similar type. The Court of Claims found that immediately prior to the time of requisition, there was no reasonable prospect that the MacArthur would be requisitioned and that respondent therefore should be paid the fair market value as determined. On certiorari, held, reversed, Justice Frankfurter dissenting in an opinion concurred in by Justices Jackson and Burton, and Chief Justice Vinson dissenting without opinion. The just compensation requirement of the Fifth Amendment need not include allowance for any enhancement of value resulting from the government\u27s extraordinary or special demand for the property. United States v. Cors, 337 U.S. 325, 69 S.Ct. 1086 (1949)

TRUSTS AND ESTATES-ACCUMULATIONS-SETTING ASIDE RESERVE FOR DEPRECIATION ON TRUST BUILDINGS

Testator created a testamentary trust of several parcels of real property improved with apartment houses, authorizing the trustees to pay the net annual income therefrom to his sons in equal shares. The trust was to terminate when the youngest son attained the age of twenty-one, or, if he died before majority, when the second youngest son attained the age of thirty-seven, or sooner died. Remainder was to the testator\u27s sons living at the termination date or their issue, per stirpes. Testator, while living, had maintained accounting records for the properties in such manner as to reflect an annual charge for depreciation on the buildings, thereby creating a reserve for depreciation. The special guardian for infant contingent remaindermen objected to the failure of the trustees to create and maintain a reserve for depreciation after the death of the testator, while the special guardian for the testator\u27s youngest son, who was an income beneficiary of the trust, maintained that any direction, express or implied, authorizing the setting aside of income as a reserve for depreciation would be invalid under the New York statute restricting accumulations of income. Held, in the absence of a definite direction to the contrary, the trustees not only had a right, but also were under a duty to establish a depreciation reserve, and such a practice would not amount to accumulation of income. In re Kaplan\u27s Will, 195 Misc. 132, 88 N.Y.S. (2d) 851 (1949)

A method of spherical harmonic analysis in the geosciences via hierarchical Bayesian inference

The problem of decomposing irregular data on the sphere into a set of spherical harmonics is common in many fields of geosciences where it is necessary to build a quantitative understanding of a globally varying field. For example, in global seismology, a compressional or shear wave speed that emerges from tomographic images is used to interpret current state and composition of the mantle, and in geomagnetism, secular variation of magnetic field intensity measured at the surface is studied to better understand the changes in the Earth's core. Optimization methods are widely used for spherical harmonic analysis of irregular data, but they typically do not treat the dependence of the uncertainty estimates on the imposed regularization. This can cause significant difficulties in interpretation, especially when the best-fit model requires more variables as a result of underestimating data noise. Here, with the above limitations in mind, the problem of spherical harmonic expansion of irregular data is treated within the hierarchical Bayesian framework. The hierarchical approach significantly simplifies the problem by removing the need for regularization terms and user-supplied noise estimates. The use of the corrected Akaike Information Criterion for picking the optimal maximum degree of spherical harmonic expansion and the resulting spherical harmonic analyses are first illustrated on a noisy synthetic data set. Subsequently, the method is applied to two global data sets sensitive to the Earth's inner core and lowermost mantle, consisting of PKPab-df and PcP-P differential traveltime residuals relative to a spherically symmetric Earth model. The posterior probability distributions for each spherical harmonic coefficient are calculated via Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling; the uncertainty obtained for the coefficients thus reflects the noise present in the real data and the imperfections in the spherical harmonic expansion