Congress passed the Periodic Payment Settlement Act of 1982 to incentivize structured settlements. The Act sought to encourage tort victims with serious injuries to agree to settlements that offered ...the best prospect of long-term financial security. But Congress failed to predict the development of a robust secondary market for settlement payment streams: Since the early 1990s, factoring companies have aggressively and unscrupulously purchased billions of dollars’ worth of settlement payments from tort victims, often at great profit. This massive transfer of wealth from injured victims has fundamentally undermined congressional policy and left tens of thousands of victims and their dependents without the financial security structured settlements purported to offer.
To regulate the industry, Congress and forty-nine state legislatures developed a legislative scheme that requires state court approval of settlement transfers and limits approval to those found to be in the “best interest” of the tort victim. This Note argues that this legislative scheme has fundamental substantive and procedural flaws that prevent it from achieving its purpose. As a solution, this Note suggests, based on generally accepted contract law principles, that courts recognize that insurance companies charged with dispensing settlement streams have a contractual obligation to object to transfer petitions in certain circumstances. Additionally, this Note recommends that courts and legislatures take steps to increase the transparency and quality of the secondary market. Together, these reforms will help protect tort victims from sordid factoring industry business tactics while also allowing tort victims the opportunity to sell their payment streams at substantively fair prices.
Abstract We study the 12 $$ \frac{1}{2} $$ -BPS circular Wilson loop in the totally antisymmetric representation of the gauge group in N $$ \mathcal{N} $$ = 4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills. This ...observable is captured by a Gaussian matrix model with appropriate insertion. We compute the first 1/N correction at leading order in ’t Hooft coupling by means of the matrix model loop equations. Disagreement with the 1-loop effective action of the holographically dual D5-brane suggests the need to account for gravitational backreaction on the string theory side.
Wide-ranging changes have been made to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) since 2006, when the binational agreement was signed in perpetuity. NORAD traces the joint command's recent ...history - one marked by technological and structural innovations, but also by unprecedented threats and challenges.
Focusing on holistic wellbeing rather than solely economic prosperity is becoming ever more popular among policy makers, both in Australia and New Zealand, and elsewhere. And yet, turning a complex ...set of system-level indicators of wellbeing into actionable policy requires us to rethink how we develop, implement, and evaluate policy. In this article I review the current trends in wellbeing, including developments in the measurement and tracking of wellbeing, and offer practical steps for integrating actionable wellbeing outcomes into future policymaking processes.
This paper considers the influence of Platonism and Neoplatonism on the British Romantic poet and theologian Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and how they informed his reverence for nature. ...Coleridge did not see this reverence as merely personal but sought to call an increasingly materialist and industrializing England back to a Platonic social imagination that would better revere the created world. First, I will establish the influence of Platonic and Neoplatonic thought on his philosophical system. Second, I will show how the relationship between Platonic philosophy and scientific pursuit is worked out in Coleridge’s “Essays on Method”, wherein he attempts to synthesize Plato with Frances Bacon and poetry with science and proposes a scientific method that reverences all of creation in its individuality and participation within a spiritual whole. Third, I will briefly explore two of Coleridge’s most famous poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel, as both show the destructive potential of a lack of reverence for the mysterious natural order. These poems may be read as case studies, experimental worlds where refusal to recognize nature’s order and participation with the divine results in the coming apart of those worlds and the self’s relation to them.
Transcription-export complex 2 (TREX-2, or THSC) facilitates localization of actively transcribing genes such as GAL1 to the nuclear periphery, contributes to the generation of export-competent mRNPs ...and influences gene expression through interactions with Mediator. TREX-2 is based on a Sac3 scaffold to which Thp1, Sem1, Cdc31 and Sus1 bind and consists of three modules: the N-region (Sac3∼1-100), which binds mRNA export factor Mex67:Mtr2; the M-region, in which Thp1 and Sem1 bind to Sac3∼100-550; and the CID region in which Cdc31 and two Sus1 chains bind to Sac3∼720-805. Although the M-region of Sac3 was originally thought to encompass residues ∼250-550, we report here the 2.3Å resolution crystal structure of a complex containing Sac3 residues 60-550 that indicates that the TPR-like repeats of the M-region extend to residue 137 and that residues 90-125 form a novel loop that links Sac3 to Thp1. These new structural elements are important for growth and mRNA export in vivo. Although deleting Sac3 residues 1-90 produced a wild-type phenotype, deletion of the loop as well generated growth defects at 37°C, whereas the deletion of residues 1-250 impaired mRNA export and also generated longer lag times when glucose or raffinose was replaced by galactose as the carbon source.
In Saccharomyces cerevisiae generation of export-competent mRNPs terminates the nuclear phase of the gene expression pathway and facilitates transport to the cytoplasm for translation. Nab2 functions ...in this process to control both mRNP compaction that facilitates movement through nuclear pore complexes and the length of transcript poly(A) tails. Nab2 has a modular structure that includes seven CCCH Zn fingers that bind to A-rich RNAs and fingers 5–7 are critical for these functions. Here, we demonstrate, using both biophysical and structural methods, that binding A11G RNA induces dimerization of Zn fingers 5–7 mediated by the novel spatial arrangement of the fingers promoting each RNA chain binding two protein chains. The dimerization of Nab2 induced by RNA binding provides a basis for understanding its function in both poly(A) tail length regulation and in the compaction of mature transcripts to facilitate nuclear export.
John Baillie was a leading Scottish theologian during the middle third of the 20th Century. A son of the manse and a staunch Presbyterian, his intellectual journey engaged the disciplines of ...philosophical and systematic theology. Following 15 years in North America he returned to Edinburgh as Professor of Divinity in 1934. In the decade 1929–1939 Baillie published several substantial books of theology and a volume of prayers. While his theology during this period was speculative and liberal, the prayers reveal a piety which is biblically rooted, Christ centered, and theologically robust. By comparing the prayers with his theological publications of the same period, this essay explores the spirituality of John Baillie by examining the conversation between his philosophical theology and personal piety, with a particular focus on The Place of Jesus Christ in Modern Christianity (1929), A Diary of Private Prayer (1936), and Our Knowledge of God (1939). Each book is placed in context, and Baillie’s spirituality in the prayers is shown to be significantly indebted to his particular intellectual and conceptual understanding of knowledge of God, human experience of God as mediated immediacy, and the central place of Jesus Christ in his Christian piety.
In this review article I do three things. I examine the question of whether the jewish émigrés of the Frankfurt School are best thought of as “permanent exiles” or migrants. I discuss Gordon's ...account of the relation between religious and profane ideas in Benjamin, Horkheimer and Adorno. Third, I try to flush out Gordon's implicit Habermasian commitments and ask to what extent these can be reconciled with his explicit Adornian conclusions.
If the received views on self‐transformation in philosophical literature are correct, then either self‐transformation (1) is caused by forces beyond oneself and beyond one's control, (2) is not ...rational to pursue, or (3) does not ever really happen. In this essay, James Gordon highlights the philosophical puzzle known as the “self‐transformation puzzle,” as raised by Ryan Kemp, who suggests that transformation of the sort educators are interested in cannot be self‐caused: it is either something that happens to a person, or something that, if agent guided, is not full‐fledged transformation. Next, Gordon turns to an alternative take on the puzzle that tries to recast the conceptual terrain and offer a new way of thinking about self‐transformation, namely, the “aspirational” account of self‐change offered by Agnes Callard. He argues that Callard's aspirational account of transformation shows that at least one of the premises of Kemp's argument is false. Finally, he suggests several ways that those interested in transformative education might appeal to the concept of aspiration to revise their educational practices.
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