Wealth, families and death: socio-legal perspectives on wills and inheritance: introduction

Inheritance as both a concept and a practice is of deep significance within all societies and jurisdictions. Located at the intersection between economics, family relations and the end of life, it offers a unique perspective on a variety of contemporary socio-legal debates. Yet the socio-legal phenomenon of inheritance has attracted relatively little scholastic attention. This special issue, which brings together eight papers coming from six different countries (and eight different jurisdictions): Belgium, England and Wales, Israel, Spain (Catalonia and the Basque Country), Switzerland and the USA, demonstrates the breadth of inheritance as a field of study in a number of ways and at the same time opens up important new lines of enquiry. This international breadth serves to foreground the significance of both national and regional political culture on inheritance law. Most significant in this respect is the fact that the authors are evenly split between those commentating on civil legal systems and those on common-law systems; for traditionally the two systems have adopted highly distinct responses to the principles of testamentary freedom and forced heirship. All the articles in this collection provide insight into this fundamental distinction but at the same time demonstrate its limits in practice

Elastic suspension of a wind tunnel test section

Experimental verification of the theory describing arbitrary motions of an airfoil is reported. The experimental apparatus is described. A mechanism was designed to provide two separate degrees of freedom without friction or backlash to mask the small but important aerodynamic effects of interest

Caging Mechanism for a drag-free satellite position sensor

A disturbance compensation system for satellites based on the drag-free concept was mechanized and flown, using a spherical proof mass and a cam-guided caging mechanism. The caging mechanism controls the location of the proof mass for testing and constrains it during launch. Design requirements, design details, and hardware are described

“The Brooding Spirit of the Law”: Supreme Court Justices Reading Dissents from the Bench

In rare instances, a Supreme Court justice may elect to call attention to his or her displeasure with a majority decision by reading a dissenting opinion from the bench. We document this phenomenon by constructing a data set from audio files of Court proceedings and news accounts. We then test a model explaining why justices use this practice selectively by analyzing ideological, strategic, and institutional variables. Judicial review, formal alteration of precedent, size of majority coalition, and issue area influence this behavior. Ideological distance between the dissenter and majority opinion writer produces a counterintuitive relationship. We suspect that reading a dissent is an action selectively undertaken when bargaining and accommodation among ideologically proximate justices has broken down irreparably

An evaluation resource for geographic information retrieval

In this paper we present an evaluation resource for geographic information retrieval developed within the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The GeoCLEF track is dedicated to the evaluation of geographic information retrieval systems. The resource encompasses more than 600,000 documents, 75 topics so far, and more than 100,000 relevance judgments for these topics. Geographic information retrieval requires an evaluation resource which represents realistic information needs and which is geographically challenging. Some experimental results and analysis are reported

On the role of the corpus callosum in interhemispheric functional connectivity in humans

Resting state functional connectivity is defined in terms of temporal correlations between physiologic signals, most commonly studied using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Major features of functional connectivity correspond to structural (axonal) connectivity. However, this relation is not one-to-one. Interhemispheric functional connectivity in relation to the corpus callosum presents a case in point. Specifically, several reports have documented nearly intact interhemispheric functional connectivity in individuals in whom the corpus callosum (the major commissure between the hemispheres) never develops. To investigate this question, we assessed functional connectivity before and after surgical section of the corpus callosum in 22 patients with medically refractory epilepsy. Section of the corpus callosum markedly reduced interhemispheric functional connectivity. This effect was more profound in multimodal associative areas in the frontal and parietal lobe than primary regions of sensorimotor and visual function. Moreover, no evidence of recovery was observed in a limited sample in which multiyear, longitudinal follow-up was obtained. Comparison of partial vs. complete callosotomy revealed several effects implying the existence of polysynaptic functional connectivity between remote brain regions. Thus, our results demonstrate that callosal as well as extracallosal anatomical connections play a role in the maintenance of interhemispheric functional connectivity

GeoCLEF 2007: the CLEF 2007 cross-language geographic information retrieval track overview

GeoCLEF ran as a regular track for the second time within the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2007. The purpose of GeoCLEF is to test and evaluate cross-language geographic information retrieval (GIR): retrieval for topics with a geographic specification. GeoCLEF 2007 consisted of two sub tasks. A search task ran for the third time and a query classification task was organized for the first. For the GeoCLEF 2007 search task, twenty-five search topics were defined by the organizing groups for searching English, German, Portuguese and Spanish document collections. All topics were translated into English, Indonesian, Portuguese, Spanish and German. Several topics in 2007 were geographically challenging. Thirteen groups submitted 108 runs. The groups used a variety of approaches. For the classification task, a query log from a search engine was provided and the groups needed to identify the queries with a geographic scope and the geographic components within the local queries

Site Factors Affecting Growth of Loblolly Pine in the Post Oak Belt

A study was conducted in the Post Oak Belt of East Texas to determine which site factors affected height growth of loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.). Height/age pairs were developed from stem analysis. Nonlinear regression was implemented to develop generalized height-age model. After curves were developed, stepwise regression was used to determine if an environmental variable impacted height growth. Environmental factors correlated with height growth included A horizon depth and those related to moisture relations including seasonal precipitation, average daily temperature, and texture of the A horizon. South.J. Appl. For. 16(4):197-20