Should Moving In Mean Losing Out? Making a Case to Clarify the Legal Effect of Cohabitation on Alimony

As nonmarital cohabitation has skyrocketed over the last several decades, courts and legislatures have increasingly struggled to decide what legal effect an ex-spouse\u27s cohabitation with a new partner should have on the receipt of alimony payments. In seeking to answer this cohabitation question, states have taken a variety of approaches. Often, however, courts\u27 answers to the cohabitation question are not grounded in the rationale that those courts used to award alimony in the first place and may therefore lead to inconsistent or absurd results. This Note addresses the cohabitation question and argues that states should revisit their current approaches in light of the multiple contemporary theories of alimony and twenty-first century social-science research on cohabitation. Ultimately, this Note proposes several clarifications to existing law in order to provide a sensible, workable rule that would introduce consistency to courts\u27 considerations of the cohabitation question

Spatio-temporal variation of conversational utterances on Twitter

Conversations reflect the existing norms of a language. Previously, we found that utterance lengths in English fictional conversations in books and movies have shortened over a period of 200 years. In this work, we show that this shortening occurs even for a brief period of 3 years (September 2009-December 2012) using 229 million utterances from Twitter. Furthermore, the subset of geographically-tagged tweets from the United States show an inverse proportion between utterance lengths and the state-level percentage of the Black population. We argue that shortening of utterances can be explained by the increasing usage of jargon including coined words.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, published in PLoS On

Explaining variations in public acceptability of road pricing schemes

The literature on acceptability of road pricing schemes is reviewed, and a number of limitations of that research are identified. In particular, little evidence is found of the differences between users and non-users and the effects of scheme design and level of charge. A stated preference survey was conducted in two UK cities to provide evidence on these issues. Charging was found to be more acceptable to non-users, those who perceived pollution and congestion to be very serious, those who considered current conditions unacceptable, and those who judged road pricing to be effective. It proved possible to identify design combinations, for both cities, which would be voted for by a majority

Reflection beam isolator for submillimeter wavelengths

Magnetoplasma reflection beam isolators for submillimeter wave use are discussed. The basic configuration used is that of the Kerr transverse magneto-optical effect. Theoretical and experimental data at 337 microns using InSb as a plasma are given

Secondary literacy across the curriculum: Challenges and possibilities

This paper discusses the challenges and possibilities attendant upon successfully implementing literacy across the curriculum initiatives – or ‘school language policies’ as they have come to be known - particularly at the secondary or high school level. It provides a theoretical background to these issues, exploring previous academic discussions of school language policies, and highlights key areas of concern as well as opportunity with respect to school implementation of such policies. As such, it provides a necessary conceptual background to the subsequent papers in this special issue, which focus upon the Secondary Schools’ Literacy Initiative (SSLI) – a New Zealand funded programme that aims to establish cross-curricular language and literacy policies in secondary schools