Garland v. Herrin: Surviving Parents\u27 Remedies for a Child\u27s Wrongful Death - The Pecuniary-Loss Rule and Reckless Infliction of Emotional Distress

The parents of Bonnie Garland are only two of the innumerable third-party victims who have suffered from the wrongful death of a child. Because the emotional distress suffered by the Garlands was comprised of so many elements, the wrongful death of their child provides a framework for analyzing all the harms engendered within the term emotional distress and the availability of civil remedies for each of those separable harms. The tragedy of the Garlands will be used as a vehicle to assess the success of legislatures and courts in enacting and interpreting wrongful death statutes. The important question becomes whether the courts and legislatures have adequately addressed the problem of parental psychic injuries resulting from the death of a child. The analysis will focus on the attempts in the common law, through the recognition of the torts of intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress, to remedy other elements of psychic harm arising from the wrongful death of a child. The three difficulties that the courts have had in both stages of the process will be examined: 1) the barrier of recognizing psychic harm as a compensable injury; 2) the elusiveness of the definitional standards employed by the courts; and 3) the strictures the courts have placed on victims in order to constrain the cause of action. Finally, the Note will analyze tort liability for the intentional infliction of emotional distress to third-party victims based on recklessness: the rationale for liability and the scope of the action

Keeping the patient asleep and alive : Towards a computational cognitive model of disturbance management in anaesthesia

We have analysed rich, dynamic data about the behaviour of anaesthetists during the management of a simulated critical incident in the operating theatre. We use a paper based analysis and a partial implementation to further the development of a computational cognitive model for disturbance management in anaesthesia. We suggest that our data analysis pattern may be used for the analysis of behavioural data describing cognitive and observable events in other complex dynamic domains. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.C

ICT student projects : Assessing students engaged in the community

To perform successfully in the workplace, employers demand that a new ICT graduate should be equipped with a strong set of technical skills, coupled with a flexible and creative approach to problem solving (Dawson, 2000; Hagan, 2004). To prepare students for their transition to industry, many tertiary institutions incorporate a team project into the final year of their IT and Computing courses (Clear, Young, Goldweber, Leidig, & Scott, 2001). Such projects include diverse technical areas including software development on specialised platforms, hardware design, networking problems and multimedia development. The importance of a software team project in final year computing degrees is without argument (Newman, Daniels, & Faulkner, 2003; Lynch, Goold, & Blain, 2004); however, there is academic debate about how to best achieve ‘industrial strength’ authenticity for students. Should the project problem be one constructed by academic staff? Or should the problem be that of a real client? In this paper we argue the latter case by describing our experiences drawn from supervising student ICT projects done for real clients in the local community across three different institutions. An assessment model for student projects that successfully promotes the development of good graduate attributes and the development of professional processes is detailed. The model includes explicit scaffolding and support structures to aid students engaged in real‐life (and loosely defined) software projects. We argue that assessment of project work is about valuing process as much as product; we also report upon lessons learned from implementing this model at different institutions

Agent teamwork and reorganisation: exploring self-awareness in dynamic situations

We propose attributes that are needed in sophisticated agent teams capable of working to manage an evolving disaster. Such agent teams need to be dynamically formed and ca- pable of adaptive reorganization as the demands and com- plexity of the situation evolve. The agents need to have self- awareness of their own roles, responsibilities and capabilities and be aware of their relationships with others in the team. Each agent is not only empowered to act autonomously to- ward realizing their goals, agents are also able to negotiate to change roles as a situation changes, if reorganization is required or perceived to be in the team interest. The hierar- chical 'position' of an agent and the 'relationships' between agents govern the authority and obligations that an agent adopts. Such sophisticated agents might work in a collabora- tive team with people to self-organize and manage a critical incident such as a bush-¯re. We are planning to implement a team of agents to interface with a bush-¯re simulation, working with people in real time, to test our architecture.E

Depth-based Sampling and Steering Constraints for Memoryless Local Planners

By utilizing only depth information, the paper introduces a novel but efficient local planning approach that enhances not only computational efficiency but also planning performances for memoryless local planners. The sampling is first proposed to be based on the depth data which can identify and eliminate a specific type of in-collision trajectories in the sampled motion primitive library. More specifically, all the obscured primitives' endpoints are found through querying the depth values and excluded from the sampled set, which can significantly reduce the computational workload required in collision checking. On the other hand, we furthermore propose a steering mechanism also based on the depth information to effectively prevent an autonomous vehicle from getting stuck when facing a large convex obstacle, providing a higher level of autonomy for a planning system. Our steering technique is theoretically proved to be complete in scenarios of convex obstacles. To evaluate effectiveness of the proposed DEpth based both Sampling and Steering (DESS) methods, we implemented them in the synthetic environments where a quadrotor was simulated flying through a cluttered region with multiple size-different obstacles. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed approach can considerably decrease computing time in local planners, where more trajectories can be evaluated while the best path with much lower cost can be found. More importantly, the success rates calculated by the fact that the robot successfully navigated to the destinations in different testing scenarios are always higher than 99.6% on average.Comment: Submitted to the Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems (JINT

Familiarity-based Collaborative Team Recognition in Academic Social Networks

Collaborative teamwork is key to major scientific discoveries. However, the prevalence of collaboration among researchers makes team recognition increasingly challenging. Previous studies have demonstrated that people are more likely to collaborate with individuals they are familiar with. In this work, we employ the definition of familiarity and then propose MOTO (faMiliarity-based cOllaborative Team recOgnition algorithm) to recognize collaborative teams. MOTO calculates the shortest distance matrix within the global collaboration network and the local density of each node. Central team members are initially recognized based on local density. Then MOTO recognizes the remaining team members by using the familiarity metric and shortest distance matrix. Extensive experiments have been conducted upon a large-scale data set. The experimental results show that compared with baseline methods, MOTO can recognize the largest number of teams. The teams recognized by MOTO possess more cohesive team structures and lower team communication costs compared with other methods. MOTO utilizes familiarity in team recognition to identify cohesive academic teams. The recognized teams are in line with real-world collaborative teamwork patterns. Based on team recognition using MOTO, the research team structure and performance are further analyzed for given time periods. The number of teams that consist of members from different institutions increases gradually. Such teams are found to perform better in comparison with those whose members are from the same institution

A depth-based hybrid approach for safe flight corridor generation in memoryless planning

This paper presents a depth-based hybrid method to generate safe flight corridors for a memoryless local navigation planner. It is first proposed to use raw depth images as inputs in the learning-based object-detection engine with no requirement for map fusion. We then employ an object-detection network to directly predict the base of polyhedral safe corridors in a new raw depth image. Furthermore, we apply a verification procedure to eliminate any false predictions so that the resulting collision-free corridors are guaranteed. More importantly, the proposed mechanism helps produce separate safe corridors with minimal overlap that are suitable to be used as space boundaries for path planning. The average intersection of union (IoU) of corridors obtained by the proposed algorithm is less than 2%. To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we incorporated it into a memoryless planner with a straight-line path-planning algorithm. We then tested the entire system in both synthetic and real-world obstacle-dense environments. The obtained results with very high success rates demonstrate that the proposed approach is highly capable of producing safe corridors for memoryless local planning. © 2023 by the authors

A scalable and portable structure for conducting successful year-long undergraduate software team projects

Year-long team projects with external clients provide a well recognized opportunity for students to gain industry experience, whilst being supported and guided by staff to minimize risks. Each group should be supervised to ensure that they have enough direction and confidence to approach a new problem of significant size, without being daunted. A structure is needed that is flexible and adaptable to suit various institutional cultures but, at the same time, provides the safety net to ensure that success is likely. This paper presents a reflective analysis of teaching at three different institutions and presents the resulting distilled wisdom of experience that has produced a structured framework for capstone project units.C

Midwife led randomised controlled trials in Australia and New Zealand: A scoping review

Background: Midwives are the largest workforce involved in caring for pregnant women and their babies, and are well placed to translate research into practice and ensure midwifery priorities are appropriately targeted in researched. Currently, the number and focus of randomised controlled trials led by midwives in Australia and New Zealand is unknown. The Australasian Nursing and Midwifery Clinical Trials Network was established in 2020 to build nursing and midwifery research capacity. To aid this, scoping reviews of the quality and quantity of nurse and midwife led trials were undertaken. Aim: To identify midwife led trials conducted between 2000 and 2021 in Australia and New Zealand. Methods: This review was informed by the JBI scoping review framework. Medline, Emcare, and Scopus were searched from 2000-August 2021. ANZCTR, NHMRC, MRFF, and HRC (NZ) registries were searched from inception to July 2021. Findings: Of 26,467 randomised controlled trials registered on the Australian and New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry, 50 midwife led trials, and 35 peer-reviewed publications were identified. Publications were of moderate to high quality with scores limited due to an inability to blind participants or clinicians. Blinding of assessors was included in 19 published trials. Discussion: Additional support for midwives to design and conduct trials and publish findings is required. Further support is needed to translate registration of trial protocols into peer reviewed publications. Conclusion: These findings will inform the Australasian Nursing and Midwifery Clinical Trials Network plans to promote quality midwife led trials

Harnessing the nursing and midwifery workforce to boost Australia\u27s clinical research impact

For the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) to achieve its full impact, it is necessary for health practitioners to be trained and reliably funded to deliver research and translation alongside their clinical work. We offer insight into current systems, concerns and suggestions as this applies to clinical research in nursing and midwifery. Nurses and midwives globally have a long record of delivering high quality clinical research that improves care and outcomes. An analysis of four landmark nursing-led studies in the United States illustrates the value-adding potential of such research: for every grant dollar, the return on investment ranged from $202 to$1206. In Australia, investment in nursing- and midwifery-led research also pays dividends for health care costs and population and health system outcomes, as evidenced from the many research contributions of Australian nurses and midwives over the past decade (Box)