Augmenting Advocacy: Giving Voice to the Medical-Legal Partnership Model in Medicaid Proceedings and Beyond

The denial of Medicaid coverage for augmentative communication devices, despite an existing legal framework that mandates the opposite result, raises fundamental questions about what independence means for people with disabilities. This situation, compounded by the barriers in the Medicaid administrative appeal process encountered by such beneficiaries, invites new approaches to the delivery of civil legal services, such as medical-legal partnerships (MLPs). MLPs are formalized arrangements that bring lawyers into a healthcare setting to provide specialist consultations when patients experience legal problems that affect health. While there is an emerging scholarship on MLPs, this Article offers the first in-depth analysis of a particular area of the law-Medicaid advocacy for people with disabilities-in the context of the MLP model. Part I explores legal and public policy justifications for Medicaid coverage of services that promote independence for people with disabilities, such as augmentative communication devices. Part II describes the Medicaid administrative hearing process and the barriers it presents to people with disabilities who appeal the denial of a service, including augmentative communication devices. Part III summarizes existing scholarship about MLPs. Part IV applies the MLP model to the problems typically encountered by Medicaid beneficiaries in the appeals process. The Article concludes by recommending some refinements to increase the acceptance of this new legal services delivery model

Children and Pets: The Hidden Victims of Domestic Violence & Abuse (DVA): Where Action & Activism merge!

Children and Pets: The Hidden Victims of Domestic Violence & Abuse (DVA): Where Action & Activism merge! Researchers such as Harne (2011) and Radford et al (2011) have long championed the area of Children’s rights in the DVA field and the Government’s VAWG strategy has begun to recognise young people as victims of DVA as a distinct issue. Another gain thus far has been that the Home Office (2013) definition now recognises victims from age 17 years. Moreover, the Government’s draft Domestic Abuse Bill (2019) commits itself to better addressing young people’s needs alongside making improvements for children, though it does fall short of recognising children as victims of DVA independently. Nonetheless, there continues to be calls to progress the agenda to recognise that child victims be given independent agency, with research and practice strategically developed to address their needs specifically, as well as within the broader context of DVA prevention (e.g. NSPCC 2019). In a similar vein, we argue that the concept of denial of agency, is equally applicable to other types of hidden victims of DVA including that of companion animals/pets. While some research has explored the link between victims and their companion animals in DVA relationships (e.g. Flynn, 2000, 2011), the area of agency and its denial has been relatively underexplored as it relates to animals. Arguably, one reason for this, is the notion of a broader ontological debate on anthropocentrism and speciesism. More specifically, an anthropocentric perspective of companion animals has provided some developments towards their protection such as pet fostering services offered to victims experiencing DVA when seeking to escape/flee. This is aligned with a hierarchal concept of the species placing humans at the top of a policy agenda comparative to non-human species (e.g. Beirne, 2013). On the other hand, a speciesist perspective explores and emphasises the rights of animals, where animals are given independent agency in the same way as humans (e.g. Sollund, 2011). This perspective then translates into policy and criminal law regarding the treatment of animals as victims of animal cruelty. These services already exist in for instance animal organisations taking responsibility for prosecutions of animal cruelty. However, we contend that the treatment of companion animals/pets should – not unlike the developments regarding children as victims of DVA – be incorporated into the same approach to developing and tackling strategies to address DVA. This poster explores the steps taken to date to draw attention to and develop a research and policy agenda of DVA for Pets, how this interlinks with the rights of children and what may be the blocks, challenges and enabling forces to start a collaborative discussion as to how to best address/recognise animal agency. We propose a broader theoretical development to help understand these victims of DVA using ‘The Power and Control Wheel’ model. Raising awareness of the need for the intersection of agency and highlighting that children and pets are very different to adults in numerous ways has important implications for service delivery and community resources which may help professionals and advocates to develop the support mechanisms these victims really need to survive and best recover from the trauma of DVA

Protecting web services with service oriented traceback architecture

Service oriented architecture (SOA) is a way of reorganizing software infrastructure into a set of service abstracts. In the area of applying SOA to Web service security, there have been some well defined security dimensions. However, current Web security systems, like WS-Security are not efficient enough to handle distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Our new approach, service oriented traceback architecture (SOTA), provides a framework to be able to identify the source of an attack. This is accomplished by deploying our defence system at distributed routers, in order to examine the incoming SOAP messages and place our own SOAP header. By this method, we can then use the new SOAP header information, to traceback through the network the source of the attack. According to our experimental performance evaluations, we find that SOTA is quite scaleable, simple and quite effective at identifying the source.<br /

Active router approach to defeating denial-of-service attacks in networks

Denial-of-service attacks represent a major threat to modern organisations who are increasingly dependent on the integrity of their computer networks. A new approach to combating such threats introduces active routers into the network architecture. These active routers offer the combined benefits of intrusion detection, firewall functionality and data encryption and work collaboratively to provide a distributed defence mechanism. The paper provides a detailed description of the design and operation of the algorithms used by the active routers and demonstrates how this approach is able to defeat a SYN and SMURF attack. Other approaches to network design, such as the introduction of a firewall and intrusion detection systems, can be used to protect networks, however, weaknesses remain. It is proposed that the adoption of an active router approach to protecting networks overcomes many of these weaknesses and therefore offers enhanced protection

A focused force: Australia's Defence priorities in the Asian century

The biggest questions for Australia’s defence white paper concern China. How does China's rise affect Australia's strategic situation and what does it mean for our defence needs? Just as Australia's strategic outlook has been dominated in past decades by American primacy in Asia, so in future it will be shaped more than anything else by what follows as America's primacy fades and China's grows. The biggest risk is not that China becomes a direct threat to Australia but that the erosion of American power unleashes strategic competition among Asia's strongest states, which in turn increases the risk that Australia could face a number of military threats to its interests, even its territorial security. The blunt truth is that our existing and planned forces will not be able to achieve the strategic objectives set for them over the past decade, let alone any wider objectives that may be set in future. To provide future Australian governments with genuine military options to protect Australia's strategic interests if Asia becomes more contested, our defence planning needs to focus on the capabilities that provide those options most cost-effectively. At sea, we should invest in a much bigger fleet of submarines, which are most cost-effective for maritime denial, and stop building highly vulnerable and extremely expensive surface ships for which there is no clear strategic purpose. In the air we need to ensure a robust air combat and strike capacity against the kinds of forces that major-power adversaries will have in the 2020s and '30s. That means aircraft at least as capable as the joint strike fighter, and many more of them than planned at present. To build a focused force to achieve Australia's long-term strategic objectives as they are now defined would need spending 2.5 per cent of GDP or more