Acute psychiatric ward rules: a review of the literature

This literature review forms a background element of a comparative study of two acute psychiatric wards in the East End of London. The research focused on ward rules as a means of investigating the relationship between the flexibility/inflexibility of ward nursing regimes and patient outcomes. Previous studies identified a relationship between ward rules and patient aggression. Other studies identified a link between absconding by inpatients and nurses’ attitudes towards rule enforcement. However, an in-depth exploration of psychiatric ward rules from the perspective of nurses and patients has not been undertaken previously

Two Paradigms of Jurisdiction

Globalization causes convergence of legal orders. Or so it is argued. Law and economics scholars predict that legal orders will move towards the same efficient end state. They argue that the requirements of globalization will pressure legal orders to converge on the level of economic efficiency, because regulatory competition between legal orders makes it impossible for individual legal systems to maintain suboptimal solutions. Many comparative lawyers predict a similar convergence. In particular traditional functionalist comparatists have long held that unification of law was both desirable and unavoidable. Their basic argument is based on functional equivalence and can be summarized as follows: legal systems may look different because they have different doctrines and institutions; these differences, however, are only superficial, because the institutions fulfill the same functions and are therefore actually similar. Realizing that legal orders are already similar in substance should make it easy to unify the law formally as well

Identifying psychological and socio-economic factors affecting motorcycle helmet use

Sixty percent of motorcyclist fatalities in traffic accidents of Iran are due to head injuries, but helmet use is low, despite it being a legal requirement. This study used face-to-face interviews to investigate the factors associated with helmet use among motorcycle riders in Mashhad city, the second largest city in Iran. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) were used for data reduction and identification of consistent features of the data. Ordered and multinomial logit analyses were used to quantify the influences on helmet use and non-use. The data show that 47% of the sample used a helmet use, but a substantial proportion of these did not wear their helmet properly. In addition, 5% of motorcyclists believed that helmets reduced their safety. Norms, attitudes toward helmet use, risky traffic behavior and awareness of traffic rules were found to be the key determinants of helmet use, but perceptions of enforcement lacked influence. Duration of daily motorcycle trips, riding experience and type of job also affected helmet use. Results indicate that motorcyclist training, safety courses for offending motorcyclists and social programs to improve social norms and attitudes regarding helmet use are warranted, as are more effective law enforcement techniques, in order to increase proper use of helmets in Iranian motorcyclists. In addition, special safety courses should be considered for motorcyclists who have committed traffic violations

How to Generate Security Cameras: Towards Defence Generation for Socio-Technical Systems

Recently security researchers have started to look into automated generation of attack trees from socio-technical system models. The obvious next step in this trend of automated risk analysis is automating the selection of security controls to treat the detected threats. However, the existing socio-technical models are too abstract to represent all security controls recommended by practitioners and standards. In this paper we propose an attack-defence model, consisting of a set of attack-defence bundles, to be generated and maintained with the socio-technical model. The attack-defence bundles can be used to synthesise attack-defence trees directly from the model to offer basic attack-defence analysis, but also they can be used to select and maintain the security controls that cannot be handled by the model itself.Comment: GraMSec 2015, 16 page

Intellectual Property, Globalization, and Left-Libertarianism

Intellectual property has become the apple of discord in today’s moral and political debates. Although it has been approached from many different perspectives, a final conclusion has not been reached. In this paper I will offer a new way of thinking about intellectual property rights (IPRs), from a left-libertarian perspective. My thesis is that IPRs are not (natural) original rights, aprioric rights, as it is usually argued. They are derived rights hence any claim for intellectual property is weaker than the correlative duties attached to self-ownership and world-ownership rights, which are of crucial importance in any left-libertarian view. Moreover, IPRs lack priority in front of these two original rights and should be overridden by stronger claims of justice. Thus, as derived rights, IPRs should not benefit of strong enforcement like any original rights especially if it could be in the latters’ detriment

Revisiting the OLI Paradigm: The Institutions, the State, and China's OFDI

We propose a modified theoretical framework based on John Dunning’s classical OLI paradigm in the international business literature to analyze Chinese firms’ fast-growing and aggressive outward foreign direct investment (OFDI). In particular, from an institutional perspective, we suggest a “state-stewardship” view to incorporate state institutions into the OLI paradigm. This paper supplements our earlier work (Ren, Liang, and Zheng, 2011) on identifying the formal institutional determinants of Chinese firms’ OFDI motivations and strategies, by further looking at the impact of direct and indirect policies, and the OFDI state-controlled financial intermediaries. Under our modified OLI framework we also examine the potential concerns on China’s state-backed OFDI and its implication on long-term sustainability.outward foreign direct investment, institutions, state-stewardship view, OLI paradigm

Online Personal Data Processing and EU Data Protection Reform. CEPS Task Force Report, April 2013

This report sheds light on the fundamental questions and underlying tensions between current policy objectives, compliance strategies and global trends in online personal data processing, assessing the existing and future framework in terms of effective regulation and public policy. Based on the discussions among the members of the CEPS Digital Forum and independent research carried out by the rapporteurs, policy conclusions are derived with the aim of making EU data protection policy more fit for purpose in today’s online technological context. This report constructively engages with the EU data protection framework, but does not provide a textual analysis of the EU data protection reform proposal as such

Searching for the optimal EMU fiscal rule:an ex-post analysis of the SGP reform proposals

Over last decades the study of fiscal policy rules has attracted a growing attention from researchers and policy-makers. The case of European Monetary Union is a clear example. However, even before its inception, the Stability and Growth Pact has been a source of inspiration for a large number of policy recommendations. The heated political and academic debate intervened after the Ecofin Council's decision on November 2003 and mostly concluded in March 2005 with the Spring European Council's conclusions has revealed the institutional and theoretical weaknesses of EMU rule-based system. This paper provides an ex-post analysis of the Pact by indicating a different qualitative and pragmatic approach to judge the most relevant and known SGP reforms; furthermore, it highlights the direction along which any modification of the Pact would have been successfully implemented and offers useful insights also to test the robustness of the new SGP. After revisiting the main characteristics of a fully effective rule-based framework and taking into account the specificity of EMU economic policy set up, we evaluate in a systematic way, through a multivariate statistical analysis, about 100 proposals for reforming the SGP presented by professional academic and non-academic economists prior to April 2005. Despite these large number of proposals, however, principal component analysis outcomes show that only few reforms could have been effectively considered a real improvement of the previous version of SGP, the others reflecting the traditional dilemma between credibility and effectiveness aspects of budgetary rules.Fiscal rules, Fiscal policy, Stability and Growth Pact, European Union Monetary, Principal Component Analysis