The United States is on the verge of a public health crisis. For decades, all 50 states have required that parents vaccinate their children against various diseases, including polio and measles, as a prerequisite to enrolling them in public schools [1]. While virtually all states have tailored their immunization statutes to exempt those with religious (and sometimes philosophical) objections to...

The primary functions of the tort system in resolving medical malpractice claims are to deter injuries and to compensate victims.' One reason for the high overhead of the tort system is the separation of liability and loss determinations. Calculations of damages are expected to follow general rules. 2 All injury classification schemes yield categories with some intracategory variation in actual...

In Wyeth v. Levine, decided in March, 2009, the United States Supreme Court concluded that the plaintiff's failure to warn claim against the makers of the drug Phenergan was not impliedly preempted by the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. In doing so, the Court rejected the argument of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that tort claims of this nature stand as an obstacle to federal regulat...

Lattice vector quantization schemes offer high coding e f i c i ency without t he burden associated with generating and searching a codebook. T h e dis tort ion associated with a given lattice is of ten expressed i n t e r m s of the G number, which is a measure of the m e a n square error per dimension generated by quantization of a u n i f o r m source. Subband image coef ic ients , however, ...