Professional Ethics and Trial Publicity: Another Constitutional Attack on DR7-107- Hirschkop v. Snead

Philip J. Hirschkop brought an action seeking a declaratory judgment that Disciplinary Rule 7-107 of the Virginia Code of Professional Responsibility, was unconstitutionally vague and over broad. DR 7-107, generally referred to as the no-comment rule, prohibits extrajudicial statements by attorneys regarding pending litigation in which they are involved, if there is a reasonable likelihood that such dissemination will interfere with a fair trial or otherwise prejudice the due administration of justice

Interpleader in Virginia

Interpleader is a joinder device employed by a stakeholder (as the obligor is called) who does not know to which of several claimants he is or may be liable. It allows him to bring all of the claimants into a single proceeding, and to require them to litigate among themselves to determine who, if any, has a valid claim to the stake

Study of Compaction and Ejection of Hydrided-Dehydrided Titanium Powder

Three similar varieties of pure Ti hydride-dehydried (HDH) powders were tested for the understanding of the variables that have an influence on the compaction process of Ti powders. The study shows that small differences in the characteristics of the powders lead to very different behaviours in the compaction stage. Compressibility curves, friction with the die walls and ejection forces are discussed in this study. The results are compared with a commercial iron powder as a reference to complete the discussion, as well as to show the enhancements and modifications that should be performed in Ti powders to design an optimized powder suitable for being pressed in an industrial process.The authors want to acknowledge the contribution and effort of Mr. Paul-Émile Mongeon from Industrial Materials Institute (IMI, Canada), as well as for his teaching and advises during the use of Powder Testing Center located at IMI. Shirley Mercier from IMI and Dr. Begoña Ferrari from Instituto de Cerámica y Vidrio (ICV, Spain), are also acknowledged for their contribution to the experimental work. Authors want to acknowledge Fundación Carlos III and Instituto Álvaro Alonso Barba for the funds supplied during the stay at IMI of P.G. Esteban, and the Spanish Ministry of Education for the funds provided for the research thought the I+D project MAT2006-02458.Publicad

Tailoring the pressure-drop in multi-layered open-cell porous inconel structures

This study investigates the pressure-drop behaviour associated with airflow through bulk and structurally tailored multi-layered, open-cell porous Inconel structures over a wide airflow velocity range (0–50 m s-1). The effect of airflow velocity on the pressure-drop behaviour as a function of the sample thickness is presented and related to the flow behaviour corresponding to the relevant flow regimes (Darcy, Forchheimer, Turbulent and Postturbulent). Entrance effects are highlighted as a source of the pressure-drop increase for porous structures with air gaps, regardless of their sizes, as long as they are larger than those generated by loosely-stacked structures. The pressure-drops for gapped porous structures and the mathematical-summation of the pressure drop for the corresponding individual components, were in very good agreement, at lower airflow velocities. The potential for mass-efficient porous structures, providing a high pressure drop, was demonstrated using multiple thin porous laminates separated by air gaps

Experimental investigation of pressure-drop characteristics across multi-layer porous metal structures

This study investigates the effect of airflow (in the range of 0–70 m s-1) on the pressure-drop characteristics for a novel multi-layered, nickel-based porous metal, as a function of thickness (affected by sectioning) and density (affected by compression). In addition to generating unique data for these materials, the study highlights the need for precise pinpointing of the different flow regimes (Darcy, Forchheimer and Turbulent) in order to enable accurate determination of the permeability (K) and form drag coefficient (C) defined by the Forchheimer equation and to understand the complex dependence of length-normalised pressure drop on sample thickness

Swedish social insurance officers' experiences of difficulties in assessing applications for disability pensions – an interview study

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>In this study the focus is on social insurance officers judging applications for disability pensions. The number of applications for disability pension increased during the late 1990s, which has resulted in an increasing number of disability pensions in Sweden. A more restrictive attitude towards the clients has however evolved, as societal costs have increased and governmental guidelines now focus on reducing costs. As a consequence, the quantitative and qualitative demands on social insurance officers when handling applications for disability pensions may have increased. The aim of this study was therefore to describe the social insurance officers' experiences of assessing applications for disability pensions after the government's introduction of stricter regulations.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Qualitative methodology was employed and a total of ten social insurance officers representing different experiences and ages were chosen. Open-ended interviews were performed with the ten social insurance officers. Data was analysed with inductive content analysis.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Three themes could be identified as problematic in the social insurance officers' descriptions of dealing with the applications in order to reach a decision on whether the issue qualified applicants for a disability pension or not: 1. Clients are heterogeneous. 2. Ineffective and time consuming waiting for medical certificates impede the decision process. 3. Perspectives on the issue of work capacity differed among different stakeholders. The backgrounds of the clients differ considerably, leading to variation in the quality and content of applications. Social insurance officers had to make rapid decisions within a limited time frame, based on limited information, mainly on the basis of medical certificates that were often insufficient to judge work capacity. The role as coordinating actor with other stakeholders in the welfare system was perceived as frustrating, since different stakeholders have different goals and demands. The social insurance officers experience lack of control over the decision process, as regulations and other stakeholders restrict their work.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>A picture emerges of difficulties due to disharmonized systems, stakeholder-bound goals causing some clients to fall between two stools, or leading to unnecessary waiting times, which may limit the clients' ability to take an active part in a constructive process. Increased communication with physicians about how to elaborate the medical certificates might improve the quality of certificates and thereby reduce the clients waiting time.</p

Finite difference calculations of permeability in large domains in a wide porosity range.

Determining effective hydraulic, thermal, mechanical and electrical properties of porous materials by means of classical physical experiments is often time-consuming and expensive. Thus, accurate numerical calculations of material properties are of increasing interest in geophysical, manufacturing, bio-mechanical and environmental applications, among other fields. Characteristic material properties (e.g. intrinsic permeability, thermal conductivity and elastic moduli) depend on morphological details on the porescale such as shape and size of pores and pore throats or cracks. To obtain reliable predictions of these properties it is necessary to perform numerical analyses of sufficiently large unit cells. Such representative volume elements require optimized numerical simulation techniques. Current state-of-the-art simulation tools to calculate effective permeabilities of porous materials are based on various methods, e.g. lattice Boltzmann, finite volumes or explicit jump Stokes methods. All approaches still have limitations in the maximum size of the simulation domain. In response to these deficits of the well-established methods we propose an efficient and reliable numerical method which allows to calculate intrinsic permeabilities directly from voxel-based data obtained from 3D imaging techniques like X-ray microtomography. We present a modelling framework based on a parallel finite differences solver, allowing the calculation of large domains with relative low computing requirements (i.e. desktop computers). The presented method is validated in a diverse selection of materials, obtaining accurate results for a large range of porosities, wider than the ranges previously reported. Ongoing work includes the estimation of other effective properties of porous media

Calling structural variants with confidence from short-read data in wild bird populations

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available on open access from Oxford University Press via the DOI in this recordData Availability: The Illumina reads and assembled reference genome from this article are available at NCBI, Bioproject number PRJNA255814 (P. domesticus reference accession number SAMN02929199). Additional data and script are available at the Dryad database: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.6q573n647Comprehensive characterisation of structural variation in natural populations has only become feasible in the last decade. To investigate the population genomic nature of structural variation (SV), reproducible and high-confidence SV callsets are first required. We created a population-scale reference of the genome-wide landscape of structural variation across 33 Nordic house sparrows (Passer domesticus) individuals. To produce a consensus callset across all samples using short-read data, we compare heuristic-based quality-filtering and visual curation (Samplot/PlotCritic and Samplot-ML) approaches. We demonstrate that curation of SVs is important for reducing putative false positives and that the time invested in this step outweighs the potential costs of analysing short-read discovered SV datasets that include many potential false positives. We find that even a lenient manual curation strategy (e.g. applied by a single curator) can reduce the proportion of putative false positives by up to 80%, thus enriching the proportion of high-confidence variants. Crucially, in applying a lenient manual curation strategy with a single curator, nearly all (>99%) variants rejected as putative false positives were also classified as such by a more stringent curation strategy using three additional curators. Furthermore, variants rejected by manual curation failed to reflect expected population structure from SNPs, whereas variants passing curation did. Combining heuristic-based quality-filtering with rapid manual curation of structural variants in short-read data can therefore become a time- and cost-effective first step for functional and population genomic studies requiring high-confidence SV callsets.Swedish Research CouncilResearch Council of NorwayDepartment of Ecology and Genetics, Uppsala UniversityBiotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC

Decisional Conflict and User Acceptance of Multicriteria Decision-Making Aids *

Despite the development of increasingly sophisticated and refined multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) methods, an examination of the experimental evidence indicates that users most often prefer relatively unsophisticated methods. In this paper, we synthesize theories and empirical findings from the psychology of judgment and choice to provide a new theoretical explanation for such user preferences. Our argument centers on the assertion that the MCDM method preferred by decision makers is a function of the degree to which the method tends to introduce decisional conflict. The model we develop relates response mode, decision strategy, and the salience of decisional conflict to user preferences among decision aids. We then show that the model is consistent with empirical results in MCDM studies. Next, the role of decisional conflict in problem formulation aids is briefly discussed. Finally, we outline future research needed to thoroughly test the theoretical mechanisms we have proposed.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73461/1/j.1540-5915.1991.tb00371.x.pd