Absolute Pollution: Exclusion Update

This article reviews court decisions from 2001 and 2002 discussing the absolute pollution exclusion in the context of property damage, bodily injury claims, and other types of harm. In recent cases, courts have consistently found the absolute pollution exclusion to be clear and unambiguous, excluding coverage for “environmental” and other types of property damage claims. However, there is a split of authority and inconsistency in how courts analyze and interpret the absolute pollution exclusion when bodily injury claims are at issue. The analysis and court rulings are often determined by the specific policy language as applied to the facts in the cases.     

Business Development Capabilities in Information Technology SMEs in a Regional Economy: An Exploratory Study

“Business development” is a corporate entrepreneurial capability (or competence) that has emerged in the Information Technology industry to support that industry’s practice of co-creation of value with customers and complementors. As a set of practices that link the firm’s value creating processes with its external environment, business development capabilities are a key factor in the success of IT SMEs. This article examines business development functions and business developer attributes in SMEs in the Information Technology Industry in Eastern Canada. The principal business development functions are finding profitable opportunities in business networks, developing and maintaining partnerships, providing support for new product development, and recognizing and responding to customer needs. The regional market and export markets require different business development capabilities.     

Relationship Between Two Types of Help Seeking Behavior in Domestic Violence Victims

A coordinated community response system to the help-seeking behaviors of domestic violence victims is critical to minimize the impact of violent events and to educate the public, so that safe and effective conflict management skills may replace violent responses. The focus for the present study is to identify and analyze victims’ choices of law enforcement assistance in stopping the violence and/or aid through the services of the regional family violence center. Some victims select legal channels of support; others rely exclusively on social service support, and others seek assistance from both sources. Characteristics of victims whose cases followed two types of help-seeking behavior patterns—legal support or social support–were determined through archived data from both the records of a regional family violence center (FVC) (n=258) and domestic violence incident reports of a police department serving a city of approximately 200,000 citizens (n=127). Findings indicate that African American victims more frequently sought protection through law enforcement sources than they did through family violence center services, and the reverse was true for Euro-Americans.     

Social psychology,demographic variables,and linear regression: Breaking the iron triangle in voting research

A previous paper showed that a simple prospective model of voting and party identification subsumed much of the social-psychological and retrospective voting literatures, in the sense that it rigorously implied their key findings and added many new ones as well. This paper extends the argument by showing that the same prospective voting model has drastic implications for conventional statistical specifications in voting research. First, linear models should be discarded in favor of a particular nonlinear specification. Second, demographics should be dropped from the list of independent variables.