The University of Hong Kong's New PCLL

A recent review of legal education criticised Hong Kong's professional legal education programme (the PCLL). The review said that the PCLL was not doing a good enough job in preparing students for legal practice. This article responds to the review by outlining proposals for a new PCLL. The proposals are based on the premise that professional legal education needs to develop students' ability to learn new skills after graduation. This is a complicated, but crucial, educational goal that is more easily understood with the help of concepts such as problem solving and transfer of learning. The paper argues that if the PCLL is designed to enable students to transfer problem solving skills from one legal context to another then students will more easily be able to transfer what they have learned in the programme to new problems in legal practice. To achieve this goal, however, requires painstaking effort in using several interdependent, curriculum-design features that other programmes around the world have used successfully.published_or_final_versio

Laser Generation and Detection of Surface Acoustic Waves Using Gas-Coupled Laser Acoustic Detection

Laser generation and detection of ultrasound has the advantage of requiring no mechanical contact with the materials under investigation. We previously reported [1] laser-based measurements on Lamb waves in graphite/polymer composite laminates using a confocal Fabry-Perot interferometer for detection. Related work by other groups includes air-coupled detection of Lamb waves in similar composites using capacitive transducers [2,3] and interferometric detection of Lamb waves in paper [4]. Our earlier work has been extended using Gas-Coupled Laser Acoustic Detection (GCLAD), an economical alternative laser-based method which has the additional advantage that the detection laser beam is not reflected from the sample surface. GCLAD is thus particularly useful for materials with surfaces of poor optical quality. We demonstrate below that the combination of laser generation and GCLAD can be used to obtain well-resolved surface-acoustic waves (SAWs) in a variety of materials, including metals, paper, thin films, and composite pre-preg tape. We also show some preliminary SAW scans obtained with laser generation and GCLAD using metallic samples. Each pixel in the scans represents the strength of a SAW passing through a portion of the sample with an area of about 1 cm2. Scans of this type offer the possibility of economical testing of large sample areas, potentially on-line in a manufacturing environment

Study Site Standard Operating Procedure SOP: P8 - Recruitment of subjects

Recently, improvements in instrumentation have provided the option of gas- or air-coupled ultrasonic testing as a realistic alternative to immersion or contact testing. In this paper we present theoretical and experimental results on resonant sound transmission methods mediated by ultrasonic coupling directly through ambient air. Although these methods are not new [1], they have only recently been considered for MHz applications. Advances in transducer technology [2–5] have further improved signal to noise ratios

A knowledge-based online workflow scheudling system

Lamb waves have been widely used in ultrasonic NDE to characterize material properties or assess material quality [1], Of the previous work on materials using phase-matched fluid-loaded coupling, most has been performed in water-coupled testing [2]. With the development of efficient non-contacting ultrasonic air-coupled transducers [3], it has become feasible to apply air-coupled ultrasonic methods to NDE. Because of the low signal noise ratio resulting from the large impedance mismatch between the air and the solid object, most work of air-coupled (AC) ultrasound is qualitative, with defects in plates and C-scan imaging being the principal objectives. As demonstrated by Safaeinili, et al. [4], however, it is possible to characterize elastic plates, both isotropic and anisotropic, by using AC ultrasound, despite the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) penalty

Birthweight and psychological distress in adult twins: A longitudinal study

Aim: To assess the relation between birthweight and psychological distress as measured by the Malaise Inventory in adult twins. Methods: Data were drawn from the 1958 British birth cohort study, which included twins followed from birth to age 42 y. We examined the relation between birthweight and psychological distress at ages 23, 33 and 42 y measured by the psychological scale of the Malaise Inventory. Analyses were performed both between subjects (n = 282) and within twin pairs (n = 112). The generalized estimating equations approach was used to handle the repeated measurements. Results: Between the 282 twins, the difference in psychological distress score was -0.45 (95% confidence interval -0.74 to -0.15) per Z-score increase in birthweight- for-gestational age. Within twin pairs, the heavier co-twins tended to have a psychological distress score lower than that of their lighter co-twins, the mean difference being -0.35 (-0.78 to 0.09). Conclusion: Results from the between-subject analysis agreed with previous findings from adult singletons that psychological health is related to birthweight. The within-pair analysis suggested a similar relation but did not attain statistical significance.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

The effect of Eastern psychosocial intervention support group in breast cancer patients in Hong Kong: a pilot study on Salivary Cortisol, GHQ12 and HADS

Tomographic reconstruction [1] is a method of imaging by illuminating the object in many different directions in the plane of interest, using X-rays or ultrasound. An image is formed from changes in a physical variable occurring in the planar cross section. Typically, changes in propagation delay or arrival time are used to reconstruct an image of the slowness variations (where slowness is the inverse of velocity), or changes in signal amplitude are used to produce an attenuation image