The Duty of the Favored Driver Under the Right of Way Statute to Maintain a Reasonable and Proper Lookout

Must the favored driver keep a lookout to the left? The court evaded the issue in the case of Massengale v. Svangren. In that case two cars were approaching an intersection at approximately the same time and at approximately the same speed, 30 miles per hour. Neither driver saw the other until it was too late to avoid the collision. The majority of the court preferred to place its finding on the ground that since the favored driver had the right to assume that the disfavored driver would observe him and yield the right of way, the favored driver\u27s failure to look until too late could not be a proximate cause of the collision. The opinion refused to decide whether the favored driver had a duty to look to his left

Evidence—Patient Physician Privilege—Waiver of Privilege to One Physician as Waiver to Other Physician—Waiver by Patient\u27s Own Testimony

P sought recovery for injuries arising out of an automobile accident. During trial P introduced three physicians who testified that P had suffered disability in his right arm involving weakness, numbness, and difficulty of movement. P himself took the stand and testified that the injuries described by his doctors resulted from the accident and that, prior to the accident, he had not consulted a doctor for years. The jury returned a verdict for P for $21,000. The trial court granted D a new trial on the issue of damages because of newly discovered evidence consisting of another physician who would testify that during the four years preceeding the accident he treated the P a total of twenty times for such ailments as contusions, rheumatic condition, and neuritis all in the right shoulder. Held: Waiver of privileges as to one physician is a waiver to all other physicians; order for new trial affirmed. McUne v. Puqua, 142 Wash. Dec. 60, 253 P.2d 632 (1953)

Guardian Ad Litem—Right of Alleged Incompetent to Contest Appointment

In an action brought by an ex-husband to enjoin an ex-wife\u27s privilege of visiting their children, the trial court on the motion and evidence of incompetency offered by P appointed a guardian ad litem for D. The appointment was resisted by D. On application for a writ of prohibition to prevent appointment of guardian ad litem, Held: D is entitled to a full and fair hearing and an opportunity to defend against the appointment of a guardian ad litem. Graham v. Graham, 40 Wn. 2d 64, 240 P. 2d 564 (1952)

An automated classification approach to ranking photospheric proxies of magnetic energy build-up

We study the photospheric magnetic field of ~2000 active regions in solar cycle 23 to search for parameters indicative of energy build-up and subsequent release as a solar flare. We extract three sets of parameters: snapshots in space and time- total flux, magnetic gradients, and neutral lines; evolution in time- flux evolution; structures at multiple size scales- wavelet analysis. This combines pattern recognition and classification techniques via a relevance vector machine to determine whether a region will flare. We consider classification performance using all 38 extracted features and several feature subsets. Classification performance is quantified using both the true positive rate and the true negative rate. Additionally, we compute the true skill score which provides an equal weighting to true positive rate and true negative rate and the Heidke skill score to allow comparison to other flare forecasting work. We obtain a true skill score of ~0.5 for any predictive time window in the range 2-24hr, with a TPR of ~0.8 and a TNR of ~0.7. These values do not appear to depend on the time window, although the Heidke skill score (<0.5) does. Features relating to snapshots of the distribution of magnetic gradients show the best predictive ability over all predictive time windows. Other gradient-related features and the instantaneous power at various wavelet scales also feature in the top five ranked features in predictive power. While the photospheric magnetic field governs the coronal non-potentiality (and likelihood of flaring), photospheric magnetic field alone is not sufficient to determine this uniquely. Furthermore we are only measuring proxies of the magnetic energy build up. We still lack observational details on why energy is released at any particular point in time. We may have discovered the natural limit of the accuracy of flare predictions from these large scale studies

Retention and growth of urinary stones: insights from imaging

Recent work in nephrolithiasis has benefited from 2 special kinds of imaging: endoscopic study of patient kidneys with high-quality instruments, and examination of stones with microscopic computed tomography (micro CT). The combination of these has provided new evidence that there is more than 1 mechanism by which stones are retained in the kidney until they achieve sizes to be clinically relevant. This review describes what is known about the formation of stones on Randall's plaque, the formation of stones on ductal plugs and the ways in which stones may grow in free solution within the calyceal or pelvic spaces. Studies of urolithiasis need to recognize that any group of "stone formers" likely includes patients who differ fundamentally regarding which mechanism of stone formation is the primary route for their stones. Separation of patients on the basis of which mechanism (or combination of mechanisms) underlies their disease will be important for advancing research in the area of urolithiasis

Automated Detection of Coronal Loops using a Wavelet Transform Modulus Maxima Method

We propose and test a wavelet transform modulus maxima method for the au- tomated detection and extraction of coronal loops in extreme ultraviolet images of the solar corona. This method decomposes an image into a number of size scales and tracks enhanced power along each ridge corresponding to a coronal loop at each scale. We compare the results across scales and suggest the optimum set of parameters to maximise completeness while minimising detection of noise. For a test coronal image, we compare the global statistics (e.g., number of loops at each length) to previous automated coronal-loop detection algorithms