Problematizing competence in clinical legal education : what do we mean by competence and how do we assess non-skill competencies?

The special issue of this journal is about problematizing assessment. However, in this article I want to start further back and problematize what is meant by competence. I think it is fair to say that when law clinicians speak about assessing competence they usually have in mind the assessment of skills. By contrast, I will argue that competence goes well beyond skills, at least if we understand skills in the narrow sense of technical legal skills, and includes in addition a values dimension. Moreover, if this dimension is added to the notion of skills, and clinical legal education (CLE) is expanded to include an understanding of how lawyers? skills are used, for whom and to what end, it might help reverse the traditional and still continuing antipathy in many law schools to CLE. For those like myself, who see law clinics as more about contributing to social justice than legal education (Nicolson 2006), the reluctance to embrace CLE is rooted (rightly or wrongly) in a political and moral stance. But for most academics, the antipathy - or, at best, apathy - towards CLE might be more to do with its association with skills training and the consequent assumption that it is unintellectual, unfit for the lofty heights of a liberal legal education and thus best left for the grubby business of preparing lawyers for practice (see eg Bradney 1995, 2003, Brownsword, 1999; Guth & Ashford, 2014)

Tailored emails prompt electric vehicle owners to engage with tariff switching information

The carbon intensity of the electricity used to charge an electric vehicle (EV) is dependent on when in the day charging occurs. However, persuading EV owners to adopt incentives to charge during off-peak hours is challenging. Here we show that governments could exploit the ‘window of opportunity’ created when people purchase their first EV to promote time-of-use tariffs. Email recipients (n = 7,038 EV owners) were more likely to click-through to an information webpage when the email emphasized specific reductions in home-charging costs versus general bill savings. However, the ‘window of opportunity’ for maximizing potential adoption is short; email open rates declined from over 70% immediately after purchase to 40% for recipients owning their EV for over three months. These results demonstrate the potential of prompts to change behaviours for which opt-out enrolment (where enrolment is automatic unless people explicitly opt out) would be unethical or less effective

A relativistic helical jet in the gamma-ray AGN 1156+295

We present the results of a number of high resolution radio observations of the AGN 1156+295. These include multi-epoch and multi-frequency VLBI, VSOP, MERLIN and VLA observations made over a period of 50 months. The 5 GHz MERLIN images trace a straight jet extending to 2 arcsec at P.A. -18 degrees. Extended low brightness emission was detected in the MERLIN observation at 1.6 GHz and the VLA observation at 8.5 GHz with a bend of about 90 degrees at the end of the 2 arcsecond jet. A region of similar diffuse emission is also seen about 2 arcseconds south of the radio core. The VLBI images of the blazar reveal a core-jet structure with an oscillating jet on a milli-arcsecond (mas) scale which aligns with the arcsecond jet at a distance of several tens of milli-arcseconds from the core. This probably indicates that the orientation of the jet structure is close to the line of sight, with the northern jet being relativistically beamed toward us. In this scenario the diffuse emission to the north and south is not beamed and appears symmetrical. For the northern jet at the mas scale, proper motions of 13.7 +/-3.5, 10.6 +/- 2.8, and 11.8 +/- 2.8 c are measured in three distinct components of the jet (q_0=0.5, H_0=65 km /s /Mpc are used through out this paper). Highly polarised emission is detected on VLBI scales in the region in which the jet bends sharply to the north-west. The spectral index distribution of the source shows that the strongest compact component has a flat spectrum, and the extended jet has a steep spectrum. A helical trajectory along the surface of a cone was proposed based on the conservation laws for kinetic energy and momentum to explain the observed phenomena, which is in a good agreement with the observed results on scales of 1 mas to 1 arcsec.Comment: 19 pages with 18 figures. Accepted for publication in the A&

Block to granular-like transition in dense bubble flows

We have experimentally investigated 2-dimensional dense bubble flows underneath inclined planes. Velocity profiles and velocity fluctuations have been measured. A broad second-order phase transition between two dynamical regimes is observed as a function of the tilt angle $\theta$. For low $\theta$ values, a block motion is observed. For high $\theta$ values, the velocity profile becomes curved and a shear velocity gradient appears in the flow.Comment: Europhys. Lett. (2003) in pres

e-VLBI observations of Circinus X-1: monitoring of the quiescent and flaring radio emission on AU scales

A recent detection of the peculiar neutron star X-ray binary Circinus X-1 with electronic very long baseline interferometry (e-VLBI) prompted the suggestion that compact, non-variable radio emission persists through the entire 16.6-day orbit of the binary system. We present the results of a high angular resolution monitoring campaign conducted with the Australian Long Baseline Array in real-time e-VLBI mode. e-VLBI observations of Circinus X-1 were made on alternate days over a period of 20 days covering the full binary orbit. A compact radio source associated with Circinus X-1 was clearly detected at orbital phases following periastron passage but no compact radio emission was detected at any other orbital phase, ruling out the presence of a persistent, compact emitting region at our sensitivity levels. The jet was not resolved at any epoch of our 1.4-GHz monitoring campaign, suggesting that the ultrarelativistic flow previously inferred to exist in this source is likely to be dark. We discuss these findings within the context of previous radio monitoring of Circinus X-1.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS. 7 pages, 5 figure

A return to strong radio flaring by Circinus X-1 observed with the Karoo Array Telescope test array KAT-7

Circinus X-1 is a bright and highly variable X-ray binary which displays strong and rapid evolution in all wavebands. Radio flaring, associated with the production of a relativistic jet, occurs periodically on a ~17-day timescale. A longer-term envelope modulates the peak radio fluxes in flares, ranging from peaks in excess of a Jansky in the 1970s to an historic low of milliJanskys during the years 1994 to 2007. Here we report first observations of this source with the MeerKAT test array, KAT-7, part of the pathfinder development for the African dish component of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), demonstrating successful scientific operation for variable and transient sources with the test array. The KAT-7 observations at 1.9 GHz during the period 13 December 2011 to 16 January 2012 reveal in temporal detail the return to the Jansky-level events observed in the 1970s. We compare these data to contemporaneous single-dish measurements at 4.8 and 8.5 GHz with the HartRAO 26-m telescope and X-ray monitoring from MAXI. We discuss whether the overall modulation and recent dramatic brightening is likely to be due to an increase in the power of the jet due to changes in accretion rate or changing Doppler boosting associated with a varying angle to the line of sight.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS 14 May 201