Psychiatric Boarding in New Hampshire: Violation of a Statutory Right to Treatment

[Excerpt] New Hampshire law provides for the involuntary commitment of a patient such as Jane when she is a danger to herself or others as a result of mental illness. The patient has a right to treatment under N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 135-C:1, et seq. Specifically, the patient should receive adequate and humane treatment pursuant to an individual service plan and in the least restrictive environment necessary. However, appropriate facilities often are not available for patients waiting in emergency rooms, and patients can become trapped for hours or even days. This phenomenon is called psychiatric boarding. New Hampshire is not alone in providing a statutory right to treatment, and the problem of psychiatric boarding is common in other states. While enforcement of statutory rights to treatment often is elusive, the Washington Supreme Court delivered a landmark ruling on psychiatric boarding in August 2014, finding that it violated the state laws protecting involuntarily committed patients. Could the Washington court\u27s rationale lead to similar conclusions in other states? Looking to New Hampshire as an example, the state statutes for commitment and treatment rights are analogous to Washington\u27s, and this suggests that the Washington ruling could prove a valuable precedent for barring psychiatric boarding in other states. This Note will compare Washington\u27s involuntary commitment law to New Hampshire\u27s, argue that psychiatric boarding is illegal under New Hampshire law, and propose solutions for complying with the statute, including the continued implementation of community-based services. If New Hampshire implemented its statutory scheme as written, it would satisfy patients\u27 rights to treatment. tion of community-based services. If New Hampshire implemented its statutory scheme as written, it would satisfy patients\u27 rights to treatment

Evaluation of Materials and Concepts for Aircraft Fire Protection

Woven fiberglass fluted-core simulated aircraft interior panels were flame tested and structurally evaluated against the Boeing 747 present baseline interior panels. The NASA-defined panels, though inferior on a strength-to-weight basis, showed better structural integrity after flame testing, due to the woven fiberglass structure

Resolving depth measurement ambiguity with commercially available range imaging cameras

Time-of-flight range imaging is typically performed with the amplitude modulated continuous wave method. This involves illuminating a scene with amplitude modulated light. Reflected light from the scene is received by the sensor with the range to the scene encoded as a phase delay of the modulation envelope. Due to the cyclic nature of phase, an ambiguity in the measured range occurs every half wavelength in distance, thereby limiting the maximum useable range of the camera. This paper proposes a procedure to resolve depth ambiguity using software post processing. First, the range data is processed to segment the scene into separate objects. The average intensity of each object can then be used to determine which pixels are beyond the non-ambiguous range. The results demonstrate that depth ambiguity can be resolved for various scenes using only the available depth and intensity information. This proposed method reduces the sensitivity to objects with very high and very low reflectance, normally a key problem with basic threshold approaches. This approach is very flexible as it can be used with any range imaging camera. Furthermore, capture time is not extended, keeping the artifacts caused by moving objects at a minimum. This makes it suitable for applications such as robot vision where the camera may be moving during captures. The key limitation of the method is its inability to distinguish between two overlapping objects that are separated by a distance of exactly one non-ambiguous range. Overall the reliability of this method is higher than the basic threshold approach, but not as high as the multiple frequency method of resolving ambiguity

The localization sequence for the algebraic K-theory of topological K-theory

We prove a conjecture of Rognes by establishing a localization cofiber sequence of spectra, K(Z) to K(ku) to K(KU) to Sigma K(Z), for the algebraic K-theory of topological K-theory. We deduce the existence of this sequence as a consequence of a devissage theorem identifying the K-theory of the Waldhausen category of Postnikov towers of modules over a connective A-infinity ring spectrum R with the Quillen K-theory of the abelian category of finitely generated pi_0(R)-modules.Comment: Updated final version. Small change in definition of S' construction and correction to the proof of 2.

A generalization of Hausdorff dimension applied to Hilbert cubes and Wasserstein spaces

A Wasserstein spaces is a metric space of sufficiently concentrated probability measures over a general metric space. The main goal of this paper is to estimate the largeness of Wasserstein spaces, in a sense to be precised. In a first part, we generalize the Hausdorff dimension by defining a family of bi-Lipschitz invariants, called critical parameters, that measure largeness for infinite-dimensional metric spaces. Basic properties of these invariants are given, and they are estimated for a naturel set of spaces generalizing the usual Hilbert cube. In a second part, we estimate the value of these new invariants in the case of some Wasserstein spaces, as well as the dynamical complexity of push-forward maps. The lower bounds rely on several embedding results; for example we provide bi-Lipschitz embeddings of all powers of any space inside its Wasserstein space, with uniform bound and we prove that the Wasserstein space of a d-manifold has "power-exponential" critical parameter equal to d.Comment: v2 Largely expanded version, as reflected by the change of title; all part I on generalized Hausdorff dimension is new, as well as the embedding of Hilbert cubes into Wasserstein spaces. v3 modified according to the referee final remarks ; to appear in Journal of Topology and Analysi