Don\u27t Take It Personally - Limited Liability for Attorney Shareholders under Florida\u27s Professional Service Corporation Act

Multimillion dollar lawsuits and rising malpractice insurance premiums have heightened professional interest in limited liability. In this Article, James M. Grippando examines limited liability as it applies to Florida professional service corporations with attorney shareholders. Grippando provides a detailed analysis of the Florida Professional Services Corporation Act and the court decisions construing it. He concludes that the Act as written provides limited liability for professionals in general and discusses public policy considerations courts have weighed and should weigh in determining whether attorneys in particular should enjoy limited liability

SMART ARRAY

Devices, systems, and methods for generating arrays are disclosed herein. In one aspect, a method for generating an array includes calculating a true metric for a peer set. The peer set includes peer values and weight percentages corresponding to each of the peer values. The method further includes determining that the peer set does not comply with at least one privacy policy rule. The method further includes generating the array based on determining that the peer set does not comply with the at least one privacy policy rule. The array represents the true metric and is generated by (i) calculating an upper bound based on the true metric, a weighted standard deviation of the peer set, and a first random number and (ii) calculating a lower bound based on the true metric, the weighted standard deviation of the peer set, and a second random number

The providers of health services in Lebanon: a survey of physicians

BACKGROUND: Emerging from civil distress carries with it major challenges to reforming a health system. One such challenge is to ensure an adequate supply of competent human resources. The objective of this study was to assess the supply of physicians in Lebanon in 1998, with an assessment of their practice patterns and capacity building. METHODS: Lists of members of physician's associations were examined to determine the number of physicians in Lebanon and their geographical distribution. A self-administered survey targeted 388 physicians (5%) randomly stratified by the five regions of Lebanon. Some 377 providers reported information on their demographic profile, practice patterns and development. Further, information on continuing education activities was acquired. RESULTS: In Lebanon, the overall physician-to-population ratio was 248 per 100, 000, characterized by an evident maldistribution at the intracountry regional level. Physicians worked 38 hours per week examining on average 21 patients per day, with an average time of 30 minutes spent per visit. They also reported spending 11% of their time waiting for patients. Respondents reported a very wide range of income, with 90% earning less than USD 2,000 per month. Moreover, the continuing education profile revealed a total of 43.7 hours per year, similar to that required for board certification in many developed countries. Conference attendance was the dominant continuing education activity (95% of respondents) and consumed most of the time allotted for continuing education, reported at 32 hours per year. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: Various economic indicators point to an oversupply of physicians in Lebanon and a poor allocation of their time for capacity building. Therefore, it is crucial for decision-makers to closely monitor the increasing supply of providers and institute appropriate intervention strategies, taking into consideration appropriate provision of good-quality services and ensuring that continuing education activities are well established, organized and monitored

The Ink in Our Speech: Influence from Orthographic Complexity in Speech Production

In this dissertation, I present three studies that expand our field’s understanding of the role of orthography in speech production, particularly the interaction between the complexity of an orthographic form and speech duration. The studies address this topic in Japanese, English, and novel words. To the author’s knowledge, there has been no previous research that explores the interaction between the complexity of an orthographic form and speech duration in a language with a non-alphabetic writing system. The results of these studies are presented as evidence that orthographic units beyond letters can influence speech duration, although non-alphabetic orthographic units may interact with speech differently than letters. In the first study I build upon previous research that finds a correlation between spelling and speech duration: The more letters in the orthographic representation of a segment, the longer that segment is produced (Brewer, 2008). Until the time of this study, this effect had only been examined in languages with alphabetic writing systems. I further investigate this behavior in Japanese, a language with a logography. Native Japanese-speaking participants were audio-recorded reading pairs of homophonous words that varied in number of pen strokes or number of whole characters. Two-character words were produced significantly longer than 1-character words, however there was no significant effect from number pen strokes on speech duration.The second study directly expands upon the first study by conducting 5 multi-day novel word learning experiments to investigate the effects on speech production from different measures of orthographic complexity. Each experiment used a novel orthography that varied in the orthographic complexity among homophonous triplets by: a) number of pen strokes; b) number of whole graphemes; c) number of pen strokes and whole graphemes; d) number of repeating sub-graphemic components; e) number of non-repeating sub-graphemic components. Significant effects from orthographic complexity on speech duration were observed in reading tasks for c (number of pen strokes and whole graphemes) and e (number of non-repeating sub-graphemic components).The third study addresses the question of how the speech patterns observed in the first two studies and previous research may develop. One possibility is that auditory cues, not orthography, drive the development of this behavior. Five auditory discrimination experiments were conducted to determine participants’ sensitivity to durational contrasts at lengths similar to those observed in the previous studies. The results showed no evidence of sensitivity at the critical levels of speech duration: Participants showed an inconsistent pattern of sensitivity starting at 2-4 times the length of some speech effects found in previous studies. The results of these studies are discussed in relation to two hypotheses that have been proposed to account for how orthography may influence speech: Phonological Restructuring and On-Line Activation (Brewer, 2008; Perre et al., 2009). Phonological Restructuring argues that through off-line processes, orthographic information can alter underlying phonological forms. On-Line Activations argues that surface forms can be influenced by activation of orthographic information just before articulation occurs. I argue that the results of the current dissertation necessitate modifications to these hypotheses in terms of task dependency and compatibility limitations for categories of writing systems. I discuss how orthography may interact with speech production processes under these two accounts to influence speech. Finally, the number of orthographic units that affected duration varied across studies, differing by writing system and category of orthographic units. To account for this variability, I also propose constraints for the minimum and maximum number of orthographic units required to influence speech, specific to categories of writing systems and types of orthographic units

Gone again: a Jack Swyteck novel

A Miami criminal defense lawyer takes on his first death-row clienthttps://scholarship.law.ua.edu/harper_lee_prize_books_2017/1011/thumbnail.jp