Acquire a practical overview of 'good faith' in commercial contracting

The twists and turns in the ongoing development of the implied common law good faith obligation in the commercial contractual arena continue to prove fertile academic ground. Despite a lack of guidance from the High Court, the lower courts have been besieged by claims based, in part, on the implied obligation. Although lower court authority is lacking consistency and the ‘decisions in which lower courts have recognised the legitimacy of implication of a term of good faith vary in their suggested rationales’, the implied obligation may provide some comfort to a party to ‘at least some commercial contracts’ faced with a contractual counterpart exhibiting symptoms of bad faith

Property Agents and Motor Dealers Act (Qld) : disclosure, cooling-off and marketeers

The Property Agents and Motor Dealers Act 2000 commenced on 1 July 2001. Significant changes have now been made to the Act by the Property Agents and Motor Dealers Amendment Act 2001 (“the amending Act”). The amending Act contains two distinct parts. First, ss 11-19 of the amending Act provide for increased disclosure obligations on real estate agents, property developers and lawyers together with an extension of the 5 business day cooling-off period imposed by the original Act to all residential property (other than contracts formed on a sale by auction). These provisions are expected to commence on 29 October 2001. The remaining provisions of the amending Act provide for increased jurisdiction and powers to the Property Agents and Motor Dealers Tribunal (“the Tribunal”) enabling the Tribunal to deal with claims against marketeers. These provisions commenced on the date of assent (21 September 2001)

Towards a simplified taxonomy of Capsella bursa-pastoris (L.) Medik. (Brassicaceae)

Capsella bursa-pastoris (L.) Medik. is a species with a cosmopolitan distribution which shows considerable morphological variation. Numerous authors have recognised widely differing numbers of varieties, microspecies or other infraspecific subdivisions (segregates) of this species. In an attempt to clarify this situation, we grew British material of the species under controlled conditions through to the F) generation to remove environmental variation, and assessed the plants on the basis of a range of morphological criteria, namely leaf shape, capsule size and also length of time taken to flower. Analysis of these characteristics consistently produced four basic groups, which had been previously described. Herbarium specimens could also nearly always be assigned to one of these groups. Limited chromosome counts suggest that two of these groups are diploid and two are tetraploid. We suggest this fourfold division into broad groups reflects the major genetic separations within the species, but that there is also considerable phenotypic plasticity shown by C. bursapastoris in response to factors such as shade or trampling. These four groups appear to differ in their geographic.al distribution in Britain. KEYWORDS: Shepherd's Purse, morphological variation, leaf characters, capsule characters, chromosom

Ten Years in Rehabilitation of Spoil: Appearance, Plant Colonists, and the Dominant Herbivore

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Venting in the comparative study of flexural ultrasonic transducers to improve resilience at elevated environmental pressure levels

The classical form of a flexural ultrasonic transducer is a piezoelectric ceramic disc bonded to a circular metallic membrane. This ceramic induces vibration modes of the membrane for the generation and detection of ultrasound. The transducer has been popular for proximity sensing and metrology, particularly for industrial applications at ambient pressures around 1 bar. The classical flexural ultrasonic transducer is not designed for operation at elevated pressures, such as those associated with natural gas transportation or petrochemical processes. It is reliant on a rear seal which forms an internal air cavity, making the transducer susceptible to deformation through pressure imbalance. The application potential of the classical transducer is therefore severely limited. In this study, a venting strategy which balances the pressure between the internal transducer structure and the external environment is studied through experimental methods including electrical impedance analysis and pitch-catch ultrasound measurement. The vented transducer is compared with a commercial equivalent in air towards 90 bar. Venting is shown to be viable for a new generation of low cost and robust industrial ultrasonic transducers, suitable for operation at high environmental pressure levels

Laid Off: American Workers and Employers Assess a Volatile Labor Market

This Work Trends survey shows that despite economic growth, worker concern for the economy, their job security, and the threat of terrorism is increasing; workers and employers express fear about outsourcing jobs abroad

Identifying Health Facilities outside the Enterprise: Challenges and Strategies for Supporting Health Reform and Meaningful Use

Objective: To support collation of data for disability determination, we sought to accurately identify facilities where care was delivered across multiple, independent hospitals and clinics. Methods: Data from various institutions' electronic health records were merged and delivered as continuity of care documents to the United States Social Security Administration (SSA). Results: Electronic records for nearly 8000 disability claimants were exchanged with SSA. Due to the lack of standard nomenclature for identifying the facilities in which patients received the care documented in the electronic records, SSA could not match the information received with information provided by disability claimants. Facility identifiers were generated arbitrarily by health care systems and therefore could not be mapped to the existing international standards. Discussion: We propose strategies for improving facility identification in electronic health records to support improved tracking of a patient's care between providers to better serve clinical care delivery, disability determination, health reform and meaningful use. Conclusion: Accurately identifying the facilities where health care is delivered to patients is important to a number of major health reform and improvement efforts underway in many nations. A standardized nomenclature for identifying health care facilities is needed to improve tracking of care and linking of electronic health records

Picture Composition for a Robot Photographer

We explain how to use simple composition rules to drive an automated, mobile photography system. The composition rules are used to determine both the location for a good photograph, and how to frame that photograph. We describe the composition component in the context of a larger application, a robotic photographer. The robot moves around an area with people in it, opportunistically looking for faces and taking photographs. We describe both how to find faces in the world and how to create “good” photographs of those faces

The influence of air pressure on the dynamics of flexural ultrasonic transducers

The flexural ultrasonic transducer comprises a piezoelectric ceramic disc bonded to a membrane. The vibrations of the piezoelectric ceramic disc induce flexural modes in the membrane, producing ultrasound waves. The transducer is principally utilized for proximity or flow measurement, designed for operation at atmospheric pressure conditions. However, there is rapidly growing industrial demand for the flexural ultrasonic transducer in applications including water metering or in petrochemical plants where the pressure levels of the gas or liquid environment can approach 100 bar. In this study, characterization methods including electrical impedance analysis and pitch-catch ultrasound measurement are employed to demonstrate the dynamic performance of flexural ultrasonic transducers in air at elevated pressures approaching 100 bar. Measurement principles are discussed, in addition to modifications to the transducer design for ensuring resilience at increasing air pressure levels. The results highlight the importance of controlling the parameters of the measurement environment and show that although the conventional design of flexural ultrasonic transducer can exhibit functionality towards 100 bar, its dynamic performance is unsuitable for accurate ultrasound measurement. It is anticipated that this research will initiate new developments in ultrasound measurement systems for fluid environments at elevated pressures

Wideband electromagnetic dynamic acoustic transducer as a standard acoustic source for air-coupled ultrasonic sensors

To experimentally study the characteristics of ultrasonic sensors, a wideband air-coupled ultrasonic transducer, wideband electromagnetic dynamic acoustic transducer (WEMDAT), is designed and fabricated. Characterisation methods, including electrical impedance analysis, laser Doppler vibrometry and pressure-field microphone measurement, are used to examine the performance of the WEMDAT, which have shown that the transducer has a wide bandwidth ranging approximately from 47 kHz to 145 kHz and a good directivity with a beam angle of around 20˚ with no evident side lobes. A 40 kHz commercial flexural ultrasonic transducer (FUT) is then taken as an example to receive ultrasonic waves in a pitch-catch configuration to evaluate the performance of the WEMDAT as an acoustic source. Experiment results have demonstrated that the WEMDAT can maintain the most of the frequency content of a 5 cycle 40 kHz tone burst electric signal and convert it into an ultrasonic wave for studying the dynamic characteristic and the directivity pattern of the ultrasonic receiver. A comparison of the dynamic characteristics between the transmitting and the receiving processes of the same FUT reveals that the FUT has a wider bandwidth when operating as an ultrasonic receiver than operating as a transmitter, which indicates that it is necessary to quantitatively investigate the receiving process of an ultrasonic transducer, demonstrating a huge potential of the WEMDAT serving as a standard acoustic source for ultrasonic sensors for various air-coupled ultrasonic applications