Helping Junior Lawyers Thrive

There has been increased discussion over the past few years about the mental health of lawyers. Most previous studies have researched the extent and causes of psychological distress in law students and lawyers. There has been less attention on also understanding what helps lawyers to thrive and become happy, healthy and ethical members of the legal profession. Our research project, the Transition to Professional Practice Project, has focused on this latter aspect, looking specifically at Australian lawyers in their first year of practice. This can be a difficult and exciting time, but is always a critical period of discovery and change. We were interested to see how newcomers make the transition from student to legal professional and how they develop their professional identity, in the sense of developing their beliefs and practices about what it means to be a lawyer. Lawyers-to-be are often not given opportunities to explore these issues in law school, sometimes resulting in a collision of expectations and reality when first exposed to legal practice

Fiscal Policy Coordination within a Monetary Union in the Presence of Risk Premia

This paper extends the differential game analysis of Engwerda et al (2002)on the interaction between fiscal stabilisation policies in a two-country monetary union. It considers the effect on the behaviour of authorities when there are country and/or union risk premia that depend on the fiscal position of both countries in the monetary union. These effects are discussed in the context of a monetary authority adopting a fixed rate and a Taylor rule, respectively, for its monetary policy. Noncooperative open-loop Nash equilibria and Pareto equilibria are computed numerically for these cases and their adjustment dynamics compared

A dynamic neural field model of leaky prosody: proof of concept

Recent work has shown that lexical items come to take on the phonetic characteristics of the prosodic environments in which they are typically produced, a phenomenon referred to as "leaky prosody". Focusing on pitch patterns in Mandarin, we show that leaky prosody can be derived from a flat (i.e., non-transformational, non-optimizing) model of speech production. Formalized using Dynamic Field Theory, in our model, lexical, phonological, and prosodic inputs each exert forces on a Dynamic Neural Field representing pitch. Notably, the forces exerted by these inputs reflect surface distributions in a large corpus of spontaneous speech. Our simulations showed that the flat model derives the short timescale effect of prosodic prominence on pitch production as well as the longer timescale effect of leaky prosody. By updating lexical items based on surface phonetic form, words that are consistently produced in high/low prosodic prominence positions take on the phonetic characteristics of those environments

An equivalent-effect phenomenon in eddy current non-destructive testing of thin structures

The inductance/impedance due to thin metallic structures in non-destructive testing (NDT) is difficult to evaluate. In particular, in Finite Element Method (FEM) eddy current simulation, an extremely fine mesh is required to accurately simulate skin effects especially at high frequencies, and this could cause an extremely large total mesh for the whole problem, i.e. including, for example, other surrounding structures and excitation sources like coils. Consequently, intensive computation requirements are needed. In this paper, an equivalent-effect phenomenon is found, which has revealed that alternative structures can produce the same effect on the sensor response, i.e. mutual impedance/inductance of coupled coils if a relationship (reciprocal relationship) between the electrical conductivity and the thickness of the structure is observed. By using this relationship, the mutual inductance/impedance can be calculated from the equivalent structures with much fewer mesh elements, which can significantly save the computation time. In eddy current NDT, coils inductance/impedance is normally used as a critical parameter for various industrial applications, such as flaw detection, coating and microstructure sensing. Theoretical derivation, measurements and simulations have been presented to verify the feasibility of the proposed phenomenon

Asymptotics of Random Contractions

In this paper we discuss the asymptotic behaviour of random contractions $X=RS$, where $R$, with distribution function $F$, is a positive random variable independent of $S\in (0,1)$. Random contractions appear naturally in insurance and finance. Our principal contribution is the derivation of the tail asymptotics of $X$ assuming that $F$ is in the max-domain of attraction of an extreme value distribution and the distribution function of $S$ satisfies a regular variation property. We apply our result to derive the asymptotics of the probability of ruin for a particular discrete-time risk model. Further we quantify in our asymptotic setting the effect of the random scaling on the Conditional Tail Expectations, risk aggregation, and derive the joint asymptotic distribution of linear combinations of random contractions.Comment: 25 page

New Challenges to Hydrodynamics from Azimuthal Anisotropy at RHIC

This paper presents $v_{4}/v_{2}^2$ ratio as a function of transverse momentum ($p_{t}$), pseudorapidity ($\eta$) and collision centrality in Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}} = 200$ GeV using the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). It is found that $v_{4}/v_{2}^2$ is larger than Hydrodynamic calculations, the centrality and transverse dependence of this ratio can not be fully described by Hydrodynamics, and the pseudorapidity dependence is opposite to what one expects from Hydrodynamics. The $p_{t}$ dependence of $v_{1}$ is also presented. It is found that $v_{1}(p_{t})$ for $|\eta|<1.3$ changes sign, and two possible explanations of the sign change are discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. CIPANP 06 proceedin