Mandated Mediation of Civil Cases in State Courts: A Litigant's Perspective on Program Model Choices

Published in cooperation with the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolutio

Administrative Procedures in Montana: A View after Four Years with the Montana Administrative Procedure Act

Administrative Procedures In Montana: A View After Four Years With The Montana Administrative Procedure Ac

Detecting and Monitoring Cracks in Aerospace Materials Using Post-Processing of TSA and AE Data

Thermoelastic stress analysis (TSA) is a non-contact technique for measuring the distribution of stress in the surface of a component subject to cyclic loading by using a sensitive infrared camera. The stress concentrations indicative of a crack can be located and tracked using an optical flow method, allowing the position of the crack-tip to be identified at a given time. Acoustic emission (AE) has been used to validate the TSA algorithm. AE events from cracking, located using the Delta-T Mapping method, were detected several seconds before the TSA algorithm first detected cracking; however, TSA provided significantly more accurate location information

The Concussion Recognition Tool 5th Edition (CRT5): Background and rationale

The Concussion Recognition Tool 5 (CRT5) is the most recent revision of the Pocket Sport Concussion Assessment Tool 2 that was initially introduced by the Concussion in Sport Group in 2005. The CRT5 is designed to assist non-medically trained individuals to recognise the signs and symptoms of possible sport-related concussion and provides guidance for removing an athlete from play/sport and to seek medical attention. This paper presents the development of the CRT5 and highlights the differences between the CRT5 and prior versions of the instrument

Consensus statement on concussion in sport—the 5 th international conference on concussion in sport held in Berlin, October 2016

The 2017 Concussion in Sport Group (CISG) consensus statement is designed to build on the principles outlined in the previous statements1–4 and to develop further conceptual understanding of sport-related concussion (SRC) using an expert consensus-based approach. This document is developed for physicians and healthcare providers who are involved in athlete care, whether at a recreational, elite or professional level. While agreement exists on the principal messages conveyed by this document, the authors acknowledge that the science of SRC is evolving and therefore individual management and return-to-play decisions remain in the realm of clinical judgement. This consensus document reflects the current state of knowledge and will need to be modified as new knowledge develops. It provides an overview of issues that may be of importance to healthcare providers involved in the management of SRC. This paper should be read in conjunction with the systematic reviews and methodology paper that accompany it. First and foremost, this document is intended to guide clinical practice; however, the authors feel that it can also help form the agenda for future research relevant to SRC by identifying knowledge gaps

Management and prevention of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease exacerbations: a state of the art review

Exacerbations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are important events in the natural history of this prevalent and devastating condition. This review provides a concise, state of the art summary on prevention and management of exacerbations. Considerable new data underpins evidence in support of many preventative interventions, pharmacological and non-pharmacological, that are now available. Challenges remain in developing new approaches, and delivering those that already exist to the right patient at the right time. Management of an exacerbation remains stepwise according to clinical severity, but there is now additional focus on addressing comorbidities and taking the opportunity at acute events to optimise preventative strategies for the future. Ultimately, exacerbations are heterogeneous events in a heterogeneous disease, and an individualised approach is paramount

Tuning the Catalytic Activity of Graphene Nanosheets for Oxygen Reduction Reaction via Size and Thickness Reduction

Currently, the fundamental factors that control the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) activity of graphene itself, in particular the dependence of the ORR activity on the number of exposed edge sites remain elusive, mainly due to limited synthesis routes of achieving small size graphene. In this work, the synthesis of low oxygen content (< 2.5 +/-0.2 at %), few layer graphene nanosheets with lateral dimensions smaller than a few hundred nm was achieved using a combination of ionic liquid assisted grinding of high purity graphite coupled with sequential centrifugation. We show for the first time, that the graphene nanosheets possessing a plethora of edges exhibited considerably higher electron transfer numbers compared to the thicker graphene nanoplatelets. This enhanced ORR activity was accomplished by successfully exploiting the plethora of edges of the nanosized graphene as well as the efficient electron communication between the active edge sites and the electrode substrate. The graphene nanosheets were characterized by an onset potential of -0.13 V vs. Ag/AgCl and a current density of -3.85 mA/cm2 at -1 V, which represent the best ORR performance ever achieved from an undoped carbon based catalyst. This work demonstrates how low oxygen content nanosized graphene synthesized by a simple route can considerably impact the ORR catalytic activity and hence it is of significance in designing and optimizing advanced metal-free ORR electrocatalysts.Comment: corresponding author: [email protected], ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces 201

Consensus statement on concussion in sport-the 5th international conference on concussion in sport held in Berlin, October 2016

The 2017 Concussion in Sport Group (CISG) consensus statement is designed to build on the principles outlined in the previous statements1–4 and to develop further conceptual understanding of sport-related concussion (SRC) using an expert consensus-based approach. This document is developed for physicians and healthcare providers who are involved in athlete care, whether at a recreational, elite or professional level. While agreement exists on the principal messages conveyed by this document, the authors acknowledge that the science of SRC is evolving and therefore individual management and return-to-play decisions remain in the realm of clinical judgement. This consensus document reflects the current state of knowledge and will need to be modified as new knowledge develops. It provides an overview of issues that may be of importance to healthcare providers involved in the management of SRC. This paper should be read in conjunction with the systematic reviews and methodology paper that accompany it. First and foremost, this document is intended to guide clinical practice; however, the authors feel that it can also help form the agenda for future research relevant to SRC by identifying knowledge gaps.http://bjsm.bmj.comhj2017Sports Medicin

Optimisation of acoustic emission wavestreaming for structural health monitoring

Structural health monitoring has gained wide appeal for applications with high inspection costs, such as aircraft and wind turbines. As the structures and materials used in these industries evolve, so too must the technologies used to monitor them. Acoustic emission is a passive method of detecting damage which lends itself well to structural health monitoring. One form of acoustic emission monitoring, known as wavestreaming, involves intermittently recording data for set periods of time and using the sequential recordings to detect changes in the state of the structure. However, at present, there is no standard method for selecting appropriate wavestream recording parameters, such as their length or their interval of collection. This article investigates a method of optimising acoustic emission wavestreaming for structural health monitoring purposes by introducing the novel concept of adjoining consecutive discrete acoustic emission hit signals to create synthetic wavestreams. To this end, a pre-notched 492 mm × 67.5 mm × 20 mm, 300M grade steel cantilever specimen was subject to cyclic loading and both acoustic emission hit data and conventional wavestreams were collected as a crack grew in the notched region; crack growth activity was also monitored using digital image correlation for comparison. To demonstrate the proposed optimisation process, four sets of synthetic wavestreams were created from the hit data, 0.25, 0.5, 1.0 and 1.5 s in length, and compared with the 1.5-s-long conventional wavestreams. The activity of the peak frequency and frequency centroid bands of interest within the conventional and synthetic wavestreams were examined to determine whether or not cracking activity could be inferred through them. Across comparisons of all data, it was found that the 0.5-s-long synthetic wavestreams contained enough information to identify the same trends as the conventional wavestreams for this application; thus, the use of synthetic wavestreams as a tool for selecting an appropriate wavestream recording length was demonstrated

Acoustic emission monitoring of metals

This chapter introduces readers to the particularities associated with AE monitoring of metals and metallic structures through several example studies. The chapter begins with an overview of the failure mechanisms of metals, and a demonstration of AE’s potential as a diagnostic tool for understanding the evolution of dislocation structures during plastic deformation, up to the critical stage of crack initiation. The propagation of AE in metallic plate-like structures is then described alongside a study exemplifying the empirical determination of the dispersive properties of the primary Lamb wave modes in a 2 mm thick steel plate. As fatigue cracking is one of the most prominent causes of failure of metallic structures, three example studies are then described which highlight the ability of AE to detect, locate, and characterise cracking and crack growth. The first of these is a location study in which AE sources in a complex-geometry aluminium specimen subject to cyclic loading were located to within 3.42–20.2 mm of the cracking location, depending on the location method used. Two examples of AE characterisation approaches for identifying signals from fatigue cracking are then described; the first of which implements a principal component analysis of hit data collected from an aircraft landing gear component; and the second of which analyses the spectral information of wavestream recordings from a steel beam specimen. This chapter should educate the reader on a wide range of approaches to AE in metals, and further reading and examples can be found in the references contained throughout