Law Student, Heal Thyself: The Role and Responsibility of Clinical Education Programs in Promoting Self-Care

The purpose of this paper is to examine the importance of self-care and stress management in the legal profession, specifically within the context of clinical legal education. Studies have shown that the legal profession exhibits one of the highest rates of mental health and addiction issues. In proactively addressing the importance of self-care and stress management amongst students, clinical legal educational programs can become a part of the solution. Using the student experience at Parkdale Community Legal Services, and drawing from other student legal clinics across Canada and the United States, several recommendations around self-care and stress management training in clinical legal education will be offered

See You on Skype! : Relocation, Access, and Virtual Parenting in the Digital Age

Since its emergence in the 1990s, the Internet has been celebrated as a tool for connecting people from all corners of the globe. Electronic communication tools, such as the Internet, now have a significant role in daily life, particularly with young people. While the legal field traditionally lags behind in integrating technological advancements into practice, these developments are increasingly, albeit somewhat slowly, being incorporated in family law disputes. Courts are now considering the use of virtual visitation to facilitate access between noncustodial parents and their children, particularly in contested relocation cases. This paper will examine the use of virtual visitation in the context of contested relocation cases, from both a domestic and international perspective. It will be argued that courts and legislatures alike must recognize that, while virtual visitation offers many benefits, including expanding access between children and non-custodial parents, virtual access should not be used to replace physical visitation, or as a determinative factor in permitting relocation. Using examples of legislation from the United States and Australia, this paper also seeks to encourage provincial legislatures across the country to enact laws to clarify public policy with respect to the appropriate scope and use of electronic communication as a form of access between parents and children

Particle filtering for joint symbol and code delay estimation in DS spread spectrum systems in multipath environment

We develop a new receiver for joint symbol, channel characteristics, and code delay estimation for DS spread spectrum systems under conditions of multipath fading. The approach is based on particle filtering techniques and combines sequential importance sampling, a selection scheme, and a variance reduction technique. Several algorithms involving both deterministic and randomized schemes are considered and an extensive simulation study is carried out in order to demonstrate the performance of the proposed methods.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

Presurgical thalamic hubness predicts surgical outcome in temporal lobe epilepsy.

OBJECTIVE: To characterize the presurgical brain functional architecture presented in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) using graph theoretical measures of resting-state fMRI data and to test its association with surgical outcome. METHODS: Fifty-six unilateral patients with TLE, who subsequently underwent anterior temporal lobectomy and were classified as obtaining a seizure-free (Engel class I, n = 35) vs not seizure-free (Engel classes II-IV, n = 21) outcome at 1 year after surgery, and 28 matched healthy controls were enrolled. On the basis of their presurgical resting-state functional connectivity, network properties, including nodal hubness (importance of a node to the network; degree, betweenness, and eigenvector centralities) and integration (global efficiency), were estimated and compared across our experimental groups. Cross-validations with support vector machine (SVM) were used to examine whether selective nodal hubness exceeded standard clinical characteristics in outcome prediction. RESULTS: Compared to the seizure-free patients and healthy controls, the not seizure-free patients displayed a specific increase in nodal hubness (degree and eigenvector centralities) involving both the ipsilateral and contralateral thalami, contributed by an increase in the number of connections to regions distributed mostly in the contralateral hemisphere. Simulating removal of thalamus reduced network integration more dramatically in not seizure-free patients. Lastly, SVM models built on these thalamic hubness measures produced 76% prediction accuracy, while models built with standard clinical variables yielded only 58% accuracy (both were cross-validated). CONCLUSIONS: A thalamic network associated with seizure recurrence may already be established presurgically. Thalamic hubness can serve as a potential biomarker of surgical outcome, outperforming the clinical characteristics commonly used in epilepsy surgery centers