Is Family Protection a Question of Moral Duty?

The Law Commission undertook a review of succession law in New Zealand at the time of writing. Whether the concept of "moral duty" is a satisfactory basis for determinations under the Family Protection Act 1955 was one of the issues the Commission is addressing in the context of the succession project. This article is based on a paper written by the author for the Law Commission. It examines the rationale behind the introduction of the original family protection legislation and the development of the concept of moral duty in this context. The article discusses a number of reasons for the author's conclusion that the use of the concept of moral obligation should be abandoned and replaced by a more clearly defined test based on dependence and need

What\u27s Yours Is Mine: Reform of the Property Division Regime for Unmarried Couples in New Zealand

In February 2002, when the Property (Relationships) Act came into force, unmarried couples in New Zealand became subject to the same legislative regime for division of property that has applied to married couples since the 1970s. The statutory regime is based on a deferred community property principle. Both partners are free to deal with their own property during the relationship, but at the end of the relationship all property is classified as either relationship property or separate property. Relationship property usually includes all property acquired by either party during the relationship. There is a presumption that this property must be divided equally between the parties when the relationship comes to an end. Separate property, typically property owned prior to the relationship, generally remains with the original owner, though this property too must be shared with the other partner in certain circumstances. Previously, property of unmarried couples was divided upon separation according to the general rules of law and equity. While other jurisdictions apply a deferred property regime to married partners, New Zealand dppears to be the first to apply the regime to unmarried couples to this extent. The requirement that couples who live together but have not undertaken the commitment of marriage must share their property 50/50 raises difficult issues of both law and policy. The most obvious legal issues relate to the determination as to whether, and from what point in time, an unmarried relationship is subject to this property regime. The most important policy issue is whether, when applied to unmarried couples, the deferred property regime leads to fairer results than the traditional treatment. These and other questions are addressed in this article

An investigation of the efficacy of group counseling with emotionally disturbed middle school students

Purpose. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of group counseling on the self-concept of emotionally disturbed students in a public middle school. This study examined the efficacy of non-directive group counseling and structured group counseling and compared the two approaches.;Method. Thirty middle school students diagnosed as emotionally disturbed and enrolled in self-contained special education classes at four different schools were subjects in the study. Two classes were assigned to receive non-directive group counseling and the other two classes received structured group counseling. Both groups received their respective group counseling for ten weeks. Pre and posttesting was accomplished with the Tennessee Self Concept, the Behavior Evaluation Scale, and the projective technique; the Human Figure Drawing. It was hypothesized that by virtue of group counseling there would be significant improvement in self-concept as measured by (1) the Total Positive Scale of the Tennessee Self-Concept Scale, and (2) significant improvement in classroom behavior as measured by the Behavior Quotient of the Behavior Evaluation Scale. Furthermore it was hypothesized that the students who participated in structured group counseling would show significantly greater improvement on the Total Positive Scale, and the Behavior Quotient Scale, and manifest significantly fewer emotional indicators on Human Figure Drawings than students who participated in non-directive group counseling.;Finds and Conclusions. The results were not statistically significant for any of the hypotheses. However, there were positive trends indicated by the direction of posttest means. This suggested that group counseling in general and structured group counseling in particular may have some potential to effect changes with emotionally disturbed students. Moreover, qualitative data seemed to support this indicating that future research along these lines may need to consider elements such as the emotionally disturbed population, instruments, and data gathering strategies

Family Business Interests under the Matrimonial Property and Companies Legislation An Introduction

This article is a preliminary investigation of family business interests under the Matrimonial Property Act 1976 ('MPA') and the Companies Act 1993 ('CA'). This article introduces the reader to the interrelationship of the matrimonial property regime and the legislative regulation of business entities, focusing on the implications of the MPA for the choice of entity, source of finance, division of shares, and allocation of management responsibility. Two principal lessons emerge from the authors' analysis: first, as applied to family ventures, the business entities legislation provides extensive flexibility with its ample allowance for contractual autonomy; and secondly, the matrimonial property regime is unsuitable for family structures involving a business operation. The authors conclude that the current regime for unmarried separate property, accessible by a MPA agreement under s 21, operates in a far more predictable manner and better suits the interests of many spouses.&nbsp

It\u2019s a Matter of Mind! Cognitive Functioning Predicts the Athletic Performance in Ultra- Marathon Runners

The present study was aimed at exploring the influence of cognitive processes on performance in ultra-marathon runners, providing an overview of the cognitive aspects that characterize outstanding runners. Thirty runners were administered a battery of computerized tests right before their participation in an ultra-marathon. Then, they were split according to the race rank into two groups (i.e., faster runners and slower runners) and their cognitive performance was compared. Faster runners outperformed slower runners in trials requiring motor inhibition and were more effective at performing two tasks together, successfully suppressing the activation of the information for one of the tasks when was not relevant. Furthermore, slower runners took longer to remember to execute pre-defined actions associated with emotional stimuli when such stimuli were presented. These findings suggest that cognitive factors play a key role in running an ultra-marathon. Indeed, if compared with slower runners, faster runners seem to have a better inhibitory control, showing superior ability not only to inhibit motor response but also to suppress processing of irrelevant information. Their cognitive performance also appears to be less influenced by emotional stimuli. This research opens new directions towards understanding which kinds of cognitive and emotional factors can discriminate talented runners from less outstanding runners

Variazioni nella percezione e tolleranza al dolore attraverso l'esercizio fisico

Muscoloskeletal pain is the gold standard in “commercial” pharmacological treatment. Physical activity is supposed to decrease pain perception, with other specific benefits. In scientific literature, the term “analgesia post exercise” is very common since the early 80’s. However, there are no absolute certainties about the true effects of exercise in pain treatment after recovery. Our work wants to examine this topic, and will try to understand how healty volunteers respond to a noxious stimulus after exercise and after recovery from exercise of various intensity and duration. We evaluated the responses to two types of exercise: a) strong and short exercise, and b) medium and very long exercise. The first part of the study analyses a group of 30 athletes: 15 cyclists and 15 volunteers coming from other sports: we evaluated pain perception and tolerance thresholds with two different kind of noxious stimuli. In the second part we evaluated pain perception and tolerance in a group of 27 ultratrailers, before, after and after 15 min recovery from a running race of 80km and 5.500m of positive slope. Results of the first two experimets, show a return to basal values after recovery for cyclists group and for the control group we notice the tendence to an hyperalgesia post-recovery. Both groups, immediately after having finished the test, show an analgesic response to pain test. Third test gave us a yperalgesic response in both after and after recovery test. The use of exercise in treatment of chronic pain, combined to pharmacologic treatment has to be more investigated, taking into account intensity and time of exercise, with the goal of lenghten the time of analgesi

Stable diquark matter ?

Two-quark correlations ({\it diquarks}) may play an important role in hadronic physics, particularly near the deconfinement point. This opens the possibility of a net energy gain by means of a (non-perturbative) quark pairing effect, perheps up to stabilize diquark droplets. We address in this work the possibility of a self-bound, stable state of bulk diquark matter.Comment: 10p. PlainTeX, 2 Figures available upon request. IAG-USP Report No 3

THE HISTORIC REVIEW OF THE BEGINNING OF CROATIAN\u27S VETERINARY MEDICINE TEXTS ON ANIMAL PARTURITION

In this paper the historic review of the beginning of the veterinary literature dealing with domestic animal parturition will be presented. It is belived that the first intervention in healing an animal started with domestication. It has been known that the nomad shepard tribes who made their living by stock- breeding used to help animals during parturition. People have been graduallly improving that skill from the prehistoric period onwards up to the period of the establisment of modern, scientific human and veterinary medicine. The first veterinary literature in Croatia appeared in the I6th century whereas the first more significant veterinary texts were written in the l8 th century by Enlighteners to whom the credit goes for starting the croatian veterinary literature. However, the scientific texts dealing with veterinary medicine and the first original veterinary medicine textbooks in croatian language, appear only in the I9 th century. First veterinary medicine papers on parturition of domestic animal appeared in the mid 20th century. The problem areas dealth with in those texts remaind the same in scientific and practical achievements in veterinary medicine in 20th and 2lth century

Transmission Expansion Planning Using Cycle Flows

The common linear optimal power flow (LOPF) formulation that underlies most transmission expansion planning (TEP) formulations uses bus voltage angles as auxiliary optimization variables to describe Kirchhoff's voltage law. As well as introducing a large number of auxiliary variables, the angle-based formulation has the disadvantage that it is not well-suited to considering the connection of multiple disconnected networks, It is, however, possible to circumvent these auxiliary variables and reduce the required number of constraints by expressing Kirchhoff's voltage law directly in terms of the power flows, based on a cycle decomposition of the network graph. In computationally challenging benchmarks such as generation capacity expansion with multi-period LOPF, this equivalent reformulation was shown in previous work to reduce solving times for LOPF problems by an order of magnitude. Allowing line capacity to be co-optimized in a discrete TEP problem makes it a non-convex mixed-integer problem. This paper develops a novel cycle-based reformulation for the TEP problem with LOPF and compares it to the standard angle-based formulation. The combinatorics of the connection of multiple disconnected networks is formalized for both formulations, a topic which has not received attention in the literature. The cycle-based formulation is shown to conveniently accommodate synchronization options. Since both formulations use the big-$M$ disjunctive relaxation, useful derivations for suitable big-$M$ values are provided. The competing formulations are benchmarked on a realistic generation and transmission expansion model of the European transmission system at varying spatial and temporal resolutions. The cycle-based formulation solves up to 31 times faster for particular cases, while averaging at a speed-up of factor 4.Comment: Accepted for ACM e-Energy 2020, 11 pages, 12 Figures, 2 Table

Monitoring a PGD solver for parametric power flow problems with goal-oriented error assessment

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: [García-Blanco, R., Borzacchiello, D., Chinesta, F., and Diez, P. (2017) Monitoring a PGD solver for parametric power flow problems with goal-oriented error assessment. Int. J. Numer. Meth. Engng, 111: 529–552. doi: 10.1002/nme.5470], which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/nme.5470/full. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.The parametric analysis of electric grids requires carrying out a large number of Power Flow computations. The different parameters describe loading conditions and grid properties. In this framework, the Proper Generalized Decomposition (PGD) provides a numerical solution explicitly accounting for the parametric dependence. Once the PGD solution is available, exploring the multidimensional parametric space is computationally inexpensive. The aim of this paper is to provide tools to monitor the error associated with this significant computational gain and to guarantee the quality of the PGD solution. In this case, the PGD algorithm consists in three nested loops that correspond to 1) iterating algebraic solver, 2) number of terms in the separable greedy expansion and 3) the alternated directions for each term. In the proposed approach, the three loops are controlled by stopping criteria based on residual goal-oriented error estimates. This allows one for using only the computational resources necessary to achieve the accuracy prescribed by the end- user. The paper discusses how to compute the goal-oriented error estimates. This requires linearizing the error equation and the Quantity of Interest to derive an efficient error representation based on an adjoint problem. The efficiency of the proposed approach is demonstrated on benchmark problems.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft