194,436 research outputs found
\u3ci\u3ePalsgraf\u3c/i\u3e Revisited (Again)
Dean Prosser wrote Palsgraf Revisited because he believed that courts had inadequate standards to make predictable and consistent duty decisions. He expressed his discontent by providing a thumbnail description of decisions that appeared to him to be rationally irreconcilable. Acknowledging that Cardozo\u27s powerful Palsgraf imagery had been persuasive to most courts, Prosser fastened upon it as the focus of his dissatisfaction. Hence, Prosser provided us Palsgraf Revisited.
I fault Prosser for looking for a nirvana that has no existence in law. Rarely will a court make a difficult, fact based, policy driven decision that all thoughtful legal commentators will endorse. I myself have expressed dissatisfaction with Smaxwell. Furthermore, few commentators would ever be possessed of the full knowledge about the cases that was available to the judges who made the decisions. Hence, summarizing a list of apparently irreconcilable cases is hardly proof that either the standards or the processes under which the cases were decided were faulty. In the course of time, any system that employs the judgment of human decision makers - call it discretion - as to whether an actor should be held liable for harm caused by non-intentional acts will produce an array of apparently inconsistent outcomes. Judge Cardozo knew as much. Life will have to be made over and human nature transformed before perfect consistency in the exercise of judgment would occur. It will also produce a predominance of predictable outcomes that is silently accepted without comment
\u3ci\u3ePalsgraf\u3c/i\u3e Revisited (Again)
Dean Prosser wrote Palsgraf Revisited because he believed that courts had inadequate standards to make predictable and consistent duty decisions. He expressed his discontent by providing a thumbnail description of decisions that appeared to him to be rationally irreconcilable. Acknowledging that Cardozo\u27s powerful Palsgraf imagery had been persuasive to most courts, Prosser fastened upon it as the focus of his dissatisfaction. Hence, Prosser provided us Palsgraf Revisited.
I fault Prosser for looking for a nirvana that has no existence in law. Rarely will a court make a difficult, fact based, policy driven decision that all thoughtful legal commentators will endorse. I myself have expressed dissatisfaction with Smaxwell. Furthermore, few commentators would ever be possessed of the full knowledge about the cases that was available to the judges who made the decisions. Hence, summarizing a list of apparently irreconcilable cases is hardly proof that either the standards or the processes under which the cases were decided were faulty. In the course of time, any system that employs the judgment of human decision makers - call it discretion - as to whether an actor should be held liable for harm caused by non-intentional acts will produce an array of apparently inconsistent outcomes. Judge Cardozo knew as much. Life will have to be made over and human nature transformed before perfect consistency in the exercise of judgment would occur. It will also produce a predominance of predictable outcomes that is silently accepted without comment
“One Size Can Fit All” – On the Mass Production of Legal Transplants
Law reformers like the World Bank sometimes suggest that optimal legal rules and institutions can be recognized and then be recommended for law reform in every country in the world. Comparative lawyers have long been skeptical of such views. They point out that both laws and social problems are context-specific. What works in one context may fail in another. Instead of “one size fits all,” they suggest tailormade solutions.
I challenge this view. Drawing on a comparison with IKEA’s global marketing strategy, I suggest that “one size fits all” can sometimes be not only a successful law reform strategy, but also not as objectionable as critics make it to be. First, whereas, “one size fits all” is deficient a functionalist position, it proves to be surprisingly successful as a formalist conception. Second, critics of legal transplants often insists on what can be called “best law” approach, whereas in law reform, what we sometimes need is law that is just” good enough” law. “Third, legal transplants no longer happen in isolation but rather on a global scale, so that context-specific rules are no longer necessarily local.
This is not a plea for formal law, for commodification of laws, and for “one size fits all”. But it is a plea to overcome the romanticism and elitism that may lurk behind the seemingly benign suggestion that law reform must always be tailored to the specific societal context
The Argument from Consciousness and Divine Consciousness
The paper aims for an improvement of the so-called argument from consciousness while focusing on the first-person-perspective as a unique feature of consciousness that opens the floor for a theistic explanation. As a side effect of knowledge arguments, which are necessary to keep a posterior materialism off bounds, the paper proposes an interpretation of divine knowledge as knowledge of things rather than knowledge of facts
Movement around real and virtual cluttered environments
Two experiments investigated participants’ ability to search for targets in a cluttered small-scale space. The first experiment was conducted in the real world with two field of view conditions (full vs. restricted), and participants found the task trivial to perform in both. The second experiment used the same search task but was conducted in a desktop virtual environment (VE), and investigated two movement interfaces and two visual scene conditions. Participants restricted to forward only movement performed the search task quicker and more efficiently (visiting fewer targets) than those who used an interface that allowed more flexible movement (forward, backward, left, right, and diagonal). Also, participants using a high fidelity visual scene performed the task significantly quicker and more efficiently than those who used a low fidelity scene. The performance differences between all the conditions decreased with practice, but the performance of the best VE group approached that of the real-world participants. These results indicate the importance of using high fidelity scenes in VEs, and suggest that the use of a simple control system is sufficient for maintaining ones spatial orientation during searching
The role of healthcare professionals in encouraging parents to see and hold their stillborn baby: a meta-synthesis of qualitative studies.
Background: Globally, during 2013 there were three million recorded stillbirths. Where clinical guidelines exist some recommend that professionals do not encourage parental contact. The guidance is based on quantitative evidence that seeing and holding the baby is not beneficial for everyone, but has been challenged by bereaved parents' organisations. We aim to inform future guideline development through a synthesis of qualitative studies reporting data relevant to the research question; how does the approach of healthcare professionals to seeing and holding the baby following stillbirth impact parents views and experiences?
Methods/Findings: Using a predetermined search strategy of PubMed and PsychINFO we identified robust qualitative studies reporting bereaved parental views and/or experiences relating to seeing and holding their stillborn baby (final search 24 February, 2014). Eligible studies were English language, reporting parental views, with gestational loss >20weeks. Quality was independently assessed by three authors using a validated tool. We used meta-ethnographic techniques to identify key themes and a line of argument synthesis. We included 12 papers, representing the views of 333 parents (156 mothers, 150 fathers, and 27 couples) from six countries. The final themes were: "[Still]birth: Nature of care is paramount", "Real babies: Perfect beauties, monsters and spectres", and "Opportunity of a lifetime lost." Our line-of-argument synthesis highlights the contrast between all parents need to know their baby, with the time around birth being the only time memories can be made, and the variable ability that parents have to articulate their preferences at that time. Thus, we hypothesised that how health professionals approach contact between parents and their stillborn baby demands a degree of active management. An important limitation of this paper is all included studies originated from high income, westernised countries raising questions about the findings transferability to other cultural contexts. We do not offer new evidence to answer the question "Should parents see and hold their stillborn baby?", instead our findings advance understanding of how professionals can support parents to make appropriate decisions in a novel, highly charged and dynamic situation.
Conclusions: Guidelines could be more specific in their recommendations regarding parental contact. The role of healthcare professionals in encouraging parents to see and hold their stillborn baby is paramount. Parental choice not to see their baby, apprehension, or uncertainty should be continuously revisited in the hours after birth as the opportunity for contact is fleeting and final
Movement around real and virtual cluttered environments
Two experiments investigated participants’ ability to search for targets in a cluttered small-scale space. The first experiment was conducted in the real world with two field of view conditions (full vs. restricted), and participants found the task trivial to perform in both. The second experiment used the same search task but was conducted in a desktop virtual environment (VE), and investigated two movement interfaces and two visual scene conditions. Participants restricted to forward only movement performed the search task quicker and more efficiently (visiting fewer targets) than those who used an interface that allowed more flexible movement (forward, backward, left, right, and diagonal). Also, participants using a high fidelity visual scene performed the task significantly quicker and more efficiently than those who used a low fidelity scene. The performance differences between all the conditions decreased with practice, but the performance of the best VE group approached that of the real-world participants. These results indicate the importance of using high fidelity scenes in VEs, and suggest that the use of a simple control system is sufficient for maintaining ones spatial orientation during searching
The Greenberg functor revisited
We extend Greenberg\u2019s original construction to arbitrary schemes over (certain types of) local artinian rings. We then establish a number of properties of the extended functor and determine, for example, its behavior under Weil restriction. We also discuss a formal analog of the functor
Three levels of metric for evaluating wayfinding
Three levels of virtual environment (VE) metric are proposed, based on: (1) users’ task performance (time taken, distance traveled and number of errors made), (2) physical behavior (locomotion, looking around, and time and error classification), and (3) decision making (i.e., cognitive) rationale (think aloud, interview and questionnaire). Examples of the use of these metrics are drawn from a detailed review of research into VE wayfinding. A case study from research into the fidelity that is required for efficient VE wayfinding is presented, showing the unsuitability in some circumstances of common metrics of task performance such as time and distance, and the benefits to be gained by making fine-grained analyses of users’ behavior. Taken as a whole, the article highlights the range of techniques that have been successfully used to evaluate wayfinding and explains in detail how some of these techniques may be applied
Short Codes with Mismatched Channel State Information: A Case Study
The rising interest in applications requiring the transmission of small
amounts of data has recently lead to the development of accurate performance
bounds and of powerful channel codes for the transmission of short-data packets
over the AWGN channel. Much less is known about the interaction between error
control coding and channel estimation at short blocks when transmitting over
channels with states (e.g., fading channels, phase-noise channels, etc...) for
the setup where no a priori channel state information (CSI) is available at the
transmitter and the receiver. In this paper, we use the mismatched-decoding
framework to characterize the fundamental tradeoff occurring in the
transmission of short data packet over an AWGN channel with unknown gain that
stays constant over the packet. Our analysis for this simplified setup aims at
showing the potential of mismatched decoding as a tool to design and analyze
transmission strategies for short blocks. We focus on a pragmatic approach
where the transmission frame contains a codeword as well as a preamble that is
used to estimate the channel (the codeword symbols are not used for channel
estimation). Achievability and converse bounds on the block error probability
achievable by this approach are provided and compared with simulation results
for schemes employing short low-density parity-check codes. Our bounds turn out
to predict accurately the optimal trade-off between the preamble length and the
redundancy introduced by the channel code.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, to appear in Proceedings of the IEEE
International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless
Communications (SPAWC 2017
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