Directors\u27 Liability for Corporate Faults and Defaults—An International Comparison

Australia’s new Rudd Government has indicated to business leaders that it intends to review various aspects of corporate law, including the imposition of personal liability on directors for corporate fault. Their concern is that the present corporate law regime is causing directors to be overly cautious in making decisions, to the detriment of the efficient operation of companies and the well-being of our economy. At the same time, the government acknowledges the importance of imposing appropriate sanctions where a company or its officers fail to meet required standards. These are universal concerns. To inform this debate, this article will look at the way in which key aspects of corporate law are dealt with internationally, and outline some reasons for convergence and divergence

Edge Detection for Object Recognition in Aerial Photographs

An important objective in computer vision research is the automatic understanding of aerial photographs of urban and suburban locations. Several systems have been developed to begin to recognize man-made objects in these scenes. A brief review of these systems is presented. This paper introduces the Pennsylvania Landscan recognition system. It is performing recognition of a scale model of the University of Pennsylvania campus. The LandScan recognition system uses features such as shape and height to identify objects such as sidewalks and buildings. Also, this work includes extensive study of edge detection for object recognition Two statistics, edge pixel density and average edge extent, are developed to differentiate between object border edges, texture edges and noise edges. The Quantizer Votes edge detection algorithm is developed to find high intensity, high frequency edges. Future research directions concerning recognition system development, and edge qualities and statistics are motivated by the results of this research

Status of the Tree Mallow Seedbank on Craigleith in 2021

Acknowledgements Scottish Seabird Centre kindly provided funding for this project. Many thanks are due to Lily Parfitt who collected the soil samples, counted and germinated tree mallow seeds for her Honours level project at University of Aberdeen. Thanks are also due to John Hunt and Emily Burton for their help arranging logistics for transportation to Craigleith and their knowledge and continued enthusiasm for studying this fascinating little island. René van der Wal is thanked for introducing me to Craigleith and for many enthusiastic discussions on the ecology of the island. Gratitude is due to John Hunt, Emily Burton and Susan Davies, whose constructive comments improved this report.Publisher PD

The Best Medicine: An Exploration of Laughter and Dark Comedy

A brief and personal exploration of laughter and dark comedy: what laughter is, what it means, and why it matters, with specific emphasis on the contributions of laughter, humor, and dark comedy to modern society. Personal anecdotes and some short fiction writing alternate roughly with sections of more research-based writing to lend an “easy read” style to the piece

Legal Doubletalk and the Concern with Positional Conflicts: A “Foolish Consistency”?

This article explores the question whether lawyers should be able to argue both sides of a legal issue is unrelated cases. Today the ABA and many state bar associations caution against so-called “positional conflicts,” analyzing them as potential conflicts of interest under a multi-factor test. This relatively recent concern misses the real potential for harm: it is precisely when a lawyer decides not to make a contradictory argument for one client in order not to offend or harm another client that an ethical problem is likely to be present. A positional conflict is therefore evidence that any pressure to modify arguments has been overcome. In fact, a rule against positional conflicts only increases lawyers’ incentives to modify or drop arguments for the less-favored client. Thus, there should be no ethical prohibition against positional conflicts. On the other hand, a positional conflict may create credibility problems, despite the widely held professional ideals of independence and detachment. The positional conflict debate exposes fundamental ambivalence about lawyer sincerity, loyalty and independence. Eliminating a rule against positional conflicts will to some extent mitigate those credibility problems, but not entirely

A Study of Faculty In-Service Education Programs in the Public Schools of New Mexico

Teacher education should be a continuous process if the teacher is to achieve full realization of his capabilities. Pre-service education is exceedingly important for achieving this, but it cannot provide complete and adequate preparation. It alone cannot produce full realization of the potentialities of the prospective teacher. Upon entrance into the profession, the beginning teacher, regardless of his adequacy of preparation, is faced with a new environment in which he must use new and relatively unfamiliar materials and tools. Rapid changes in educational procedures soon make the pre-service education of both the beginning teacher and the experienced teacher outmoded. The pre-service education of the teacher can be considered the foundation for the quality of instruction offered by him, but no building is complete with only the foundation, so the structure of teacher competency depends largely upon steady growth in ability

The Freedom to Speak and the Freedom to Listen: The Admissibility of the Criminal Defendant\u27s Taste in Entertainment

In Part I of this Article, I will establish that the First Amendment protects both consumers and producers of expression, although the scope of consumer protection has not been greatly elaborated. Part II discusses attempts to hold the entertainment industry liable for crimes by third persons, as well as legislative efforts to restrict or ban certain kinds of entertainment or art deemed to cause violence. For the most part, these efforts against producers have failed. Part III then shows how a criminal defendant\u27s viewing, listening, or reading habits may be used as evidence against that defendant, and that the constitutional implications of such evidence are rarely discussed. Part IV looks at the analogous issue of First Amendment associational evidence in criminal cases, showing that while the Supreme Court has established that such evidence may violate the Constitution, the lower courts have collapsed the constitutional question into one of relevance with a loose, discretionary standard of review. Part V discusses whether the apparently disparate treatment of consumers and producers under the First Amendment is a really an inconsistency, and examines several counterarguments. Part VI then recommends a change in the approach to admission of evidence of consumption of entertainment or art in criminal trials. The showing of relevancy should be more rigorous, the standard of review should be less deferential, and the harmless-error analysis should be appropriate for a constitutional error

Penalizing Poverty: Making Criminal Defendants Pay for Their Court-Appointed Counsel Through Recoupment and Contribution

Over thirty years ago the United States Supreme Court upheld an Oregon statute that allowed sentencing courts, with a number of important procedural safeguards, to impose on indigent criminal defendants the obligation to repay the cost of their court appointed attorneys. The practice of ordering recoupment or contribution (application fees or co-pays) of public defender attorney\u27s fees is widespread, although collection rates are unsurprisingly low. Developments since the Court\u27s decision in Fuller v. Oregon show that not only is recoupment not cost-effective, but it too easily becomes an aspect of punishment, rather than legitimate cost recovery. In a number of jurisdictions, defendants are ordered to repay the cost of their attorney regardless of their ability to pay and without any notice or opportunity to be heard. Many are ordered to pay as a condition of probation or parole, which means they pay under threat of incarceration. In these jurisdictions, recoupment violates the Sixth Amendment, as well as the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. Constitutional problems are exacerbated by the potential for ethical violations: public defenders may have conflicts of interest when they are required to both submit bills to the court and object to those bills on behalf of their clients. And too often defendants are not warned at the outset that they may be responsible for attorney\u27s fees or how those fees will be calculated. In any other context, a client is entitled under the ethical rules to a clear statement of the basis for the fee at the time the lawyer is engaged. In addition, the thirty years since Fuller have verified that recoupment is bad policy because it imposes punishing debt without real fiscal benefit. It is time to abandon practices that penalize defendants for being poor and exercising their right to counsel