Claims for wrongful pregnancy and child rearing expenses

Subsequently published as Cordelia Thomas, ‘Claims for wrongful pregnancy and damages for the upbringing of the child’ (2003) 26 University of New South Wales Law Journal 125. With permission of the UNSWLJWrongful birth claims relate to the birth of a child as a consequence of medical negligence. There has been general acceptance by courts in various jurisdictions that costs relating to the pregnancy and birth may be recovered. However the more contentious issue is whether there is liability for the costs of rearing such a child. The English courts have held there is no such liability with respect to a healthy child, while in Australia, the Queensland Court of Appeal has taken the opposite view2. In New Zealand the issue has yet to be decided. The Accident Compensation scheme has limited the development of the law relating to personal injury in general, but the High Court has found that the scheme does not prevent claims for wrongful birth. It is argued that the New Zealand courts should follow the Australian decisions, as the English approach is based on the views of ordinary people on this moral question as perceived by judges. This requires the individual judge’s sense of the moral answer to a question to prevail, albeit in light of the judge’s view of the opinions of ordinary people. It is argued that this is a subjective approach in that, in such a complex and emotionally difficult area of the law, there is unlikely to be uniformity of opinion among the public, or even among judges. As such, this is arguably a matter better resolved by legislation than by the courts

Should the law allow sentiment to triumph over science? The retention of body parts

The use of human body material including tissue and organs has been controversial for many centuries. Concerns arose in the eighteenth century about practices used to obtain corpses for dissection. Scientific studies in biotechnology have placed increased value on the body as a source of research material. At the same time there is now a greater emphasis on individual autonomy. Disputes reflect the striking differences between scientific or utilitarian perspectives and the body’s social meaning. This paper considers issues that have arisen in several countries relating to the use of body parts and considers whether the law in New Zealand is sufficient to prevent such problems from arising in New Zealand. The conclusion is that present legal structures are insufficient to keep pace with technological advances. If biotechnology is to advance, it is essential to address the issues of consent while respecting cultural and religious views of the need for respect for the human body

Nonleptonic Weak Decays of B to D_s and D mesons

Branching ratios and polarization amplitudes for B decaying to all allowed pseudoscalar, vector, axial-vector, scalar and tensor combinations of D_s and D mesons are calculated in the Isgur Scora Grinstein Wise (ISGW) quark model after assuming factorization. We find good agreement with other models in the literature and the limited experimental data and make predictions for as yet unseen decay modes. Lattice QCD results in this area are very limited. We make phenomenological observations on decays in to D_s(2317) and D_s(2460) and propose tests for determining the status and mixings of the axial mesons. We use the same approach to calculate branching ratios and polarization fraction for decays in to two D type mesons.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figures. v3: updated to reflect changes in published paper, conclusions unchanged (see source file for details). Added comments on factorization. v2: experimental data updated, references added, tables of results added, more on axial D_s mixing, added section on D D decay modes and typos correcte

Shallow Surveying in Hazardous Waters

Of order one importance to any study of nearshore processes is knowledge of the bathymetry in shallow water. This is true for studies on open coast sandy beaches where surf zone dynamics drive the system, inlet environments where bathymetric evolution can rapidly change navigation channels, and in more benign, lower-energy coastal environments that evolve slowly over 10’s to 100’s of years. Difficulties in obtaining shallow bathymetry where depth-limited wave breaking occurs, submerged hazards are present, or other harsh environments has led to the development of survey systems on highly maneuverable personal watercraft (Beach, et al., 1994; Cote, 1999; Dugan, et al., 1999; MacMahan, 2001). In this work we discuss shallow water surveying from the Coastal Bathymetry Survey System (CBASS), a Yamaha Waverunner equipped with differential GPS, single-beam 192 KHz acoustic echo-sounder, and onboard navigation system. Data obtained with the CBASS in three regions will be discussed, including an energetic surf zone located in southern California during the 2003 Nearshore Canyon Experiment (NCEX), on Lake Erie in 2002 (and compared with historical surveys dating back 150 years), and around Piscataqua River Inlet, NH, in 2007. Estimated accuracy (for sandy bottoms) in water depths ranging 1–10 m are 0.07-0.10 m in the vertical, and on the order of 0.1-1 m horizontally depending on water depth and bottom slope. The high maneuverability of the personal watercraft makes very shallow water bathymetric surveys possible with acoustic altimeters, particularly in regions where airborne remote sensing systems fail (owing to water clarity issues) or where repeated high resolution surveys are required (e.g., where an erodible bottom is rapidly evolving)

On image segmentation using information theoretic criteria

Image segmentation is a long-studied and important problem in image processing. Different solutions have been proposed, many of which follow the information theoretic paradigm. While these information theoretic segmentation methods often produce excellent empirical results, their theoretical properties are still largely unknown. The main goal of this paper is to conduct a rigorous theoretical study into the statistical consistency properties of such methods. To be more specific, this paper investigates if these methods can accurately recover the true number of segments together with their true boundaries in the image as the number of pixels tends to infinity. Our theoretical results show that both the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) and the minimum description length (MDL) principle can be applied to derive statistically consistent segmentation methods, while the same is not true for the Akaike information criterion (AIC). Numerical experiments were conducted to illustrate and support our theoretical findings.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOS925 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

A single-phase bcc high-entropy alloy in the refractory Zr-Nb-Ti-V-Hf system

We report on the production and characterization of a high-entropy alloy in the refractory Zr-Nb-Ti-V-Hf system. Equiatomic ingots were produced by arc and levitation melting, and were subsequently homogenized by high-temperature annealing. We obtained a coarse-grained, single-phase high-entropy alloy, with a homogeneous distribution of the constituting elements. The phase is a chemically disordered solid solution, based on a bcc lattice with a lattice parameter of 0.336(5) nm.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

High-Dimensional Diffusive Growth

We consider a model of aggregation, both diffusion-limited and ballistic, based on the Cayley tree. Growth is from the leaves of the tree towards the root, leading to non-trivial screening and branch competition effects. The model exhibits a phase transition between ballistic and diffusion-controlled growth, with non-trivial corrections to cluster size at the critical point. Even in the ballistic regime, cluster scaling is controlled by extremal statistics due to the branching structure of the Cayley tree; it is the extremal nature of the fluctuations that enables us to solve the model.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures; reference adde