Cruise Ship Medical Malpractice Cases: Must Admiralty Courts Steer by the Star of Stare Decisis?

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Awareness and beliefs regarding intimate partner violence among first-year dental students

Intimate partner violence (IPV) may affect one to four million individuals per year in the United States, with women accounting for the majority of both reported and unreported cases. Dental professionals are in a unique position to identify many types of IPV because injuries to the head and neck may be indicators or predictors of IPV abuse. Fewer than half of dental programs surveyed have reported having IPV-specific curricula, and most dental students surveyed have reported having little experience or training to recognize IPV. Based on this information, this pilot study sought to assess the awareness and beliefs regarding IPV among first-year dental students at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Using a voluntary survey, followed by a one-hour educational seminar facilitated by an experienced IPV/domestic violence advocate, a post-seminar survey was administered to assess changes in student perceptions and beliefs and to determine the magnitude and direction of any changes. The survey had an 81.25 percent response rate (65/80). The results demonstrated that more than two-thirds of the students had no previous IPV-specific education. In addition, approximately half of these students began the educational session reporting they did not believe IPV was a health care issue, although the overwhelming majority had decided it was when surveyed after the seminar. Moreover, their perceptions and beliefs about the responsibilities of the dental professional, as well as knowledge about resources and available support services, were significantly changed. These results suggest that targeted, information-specific seminars may be sufficient to provide dental students with an understanding of the key issues regarding IPV. With this knowledge, they can better provide specific information about resources and referrals for services to their patients who have experienced IPV. Recommendations based on these findings are being used to develop and refine IPV-specific curricula at this institution, which may be of significant value to other dental schools with plans to develop and integrate this material into their programs

E-MO : a system for automatically generating emotive-motions

technical reportA system is developed to automatically generate control functions for linked mechanisms that express specific emotions. This system could be employed to produce motions for characters in a computer animation. It takes advantage of the fact that evaluation functions, which take physical characteristics of a motion sequence as input, can be used as a filter on a set of motion sequences to choose one which expresses a desired emotion. In other words, the evaluation function is able to quantify how much of a certain emotion is being displayed by a motion sequence.; Thus, the system hinges on finding an evaluation function that determines how much of a certain emotion is being displayed based on a given set of physical characteristics. This is accomplished through the following steps: ; 1. Motion sequences are generated for each geometry. ; 2. Physical characteristics are measured for each motion sequence. ; 3. Humans rank each motion sequence in four emotion categories through survey.; 4. A mapping from the physical measures to the emotional categories is deter; mined. ; 5. This mapping is used as a filter in the selection of control functions.; The control functions, for the purposes of this research, are represented as sensor-actuator networks (SANs). A control function that produces motion with a desired emotional content can be created automatically by generating many random SANs for a given mechanism geometry, and then using an evaluation function that recognizes the desired emotion as a filter in order to select the SAN whose motion; scores the highest

Maintaining Radiation Exposures As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA) for Dental Personnel Operating Portable Hand-Held X-Ray Equipment

Clinical experience indicates that newly available portable hand-held x-ray units provide advantages compared to traditional fixed properly installed and operated x-ray units in dental radiography. However, concern that hand-held x-ray units produce higher operator doses than fixed x-ray units has caused regulatory agencies to mandate requirements for use of hand-held units that go beyond those recommended by the manufacturer and can discourage the use of this technology. To assess the need for additional requirements, a hand-held x-ray unit and a pair of manikins were used to measure the dose to a simulated operator under two conditions: exposures made according to the manufacturer\u27s recommendations and exposures made according to manufacturer\u27s recommendation except for the removal of the x-ray unit\u27s protective backscatter shield. Dose to the simulated operator was determined using an array of personal dosimeters and a pair of pressurized ion chambers. The results indicate that the dose to an operator of this equipment will be less than 0.6 mSy y(-1) if the device is used according to the manufacturer\u27s recommendations. This suggests that doses to properly trained operators of well-designed, hand-held dental x-ray units will be below 1.0 mSv y(-1) (2% of the annual occupational dose limit) even if additional no additional operational requirements are established by regulatory agencies. This level of annual dose is similar to those reported as typical dental personnel using fixed x-ray units and appears to satisfy the ALARA principal for this class of occupational exposures. Health PhyS. 103(Supplement 2):S179-S185; 201