Shenfun -- automating the spectral Galerkin method

With the shenfun Python module (github.com/spectralDNS/shenfun) an effort is made towards automating the implementation of the spectral Galerkin method for simple tensor product domains, consisting of (currently) one non-periodic and any number of periodic directions. The user interface to shenfun is intentionally made very similar to FEniCS (fenicsproject.org). Partial Differential Equations are represented through weak variational forms and solved using efficient direct solvers where available. MPI decomposition is achieved through the {mpi4py-fft} module (bitbucket.org/mpi4py/mpi4py-fft), and all developed solver may, with no additional effort, be run on supercomputers using thousands of processors. Complete solvers are shown for the linear Poisson and biharmonic problems, as well as the nonlinear and time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau equation.Comment: Presented at MekIT'17, the 9th National Conference on Computational Mechanic

Interest on lawyers' trust accounts

[Introduction]: In 1963, around £79 million was held in solicitors' trust accounts in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria. None of that earned interest. At the time, banking regulations prohibited the crediting of interest to 'current accounts' - bank accounts characterised by frequent deposits and withdrawals, the latter usually by cheque. In offering solicitors trust account facilities, the banks therefore got sizable sums by interest free loan: 'all the cream off the cake'. That was to change in the 1960s as the Law Institute of Victoria pioneered a scheme for getting banks indirectly to credit interest to trust account deposits and to direct that money to fidelity funds and, later, to legal aid. Interest on Lawyers' Trust Fund Accounts (IOLTA) schemes then spread to other parts of Australia, and were later exported, to New Zealand (NZ), Zimbabwe, South Africa, Canada and the United States(US). Slowly refilled and expanded, Australian IOLTA schemes are now entrenched in the funding base for legal aid and the legal profession infrastnicture. They now add well over $30 million every year to the budgets of the nation's legal aid commissions. IOLTA schemes evidently help the public good, so far as that is promoted by the work of the legal profession. However, despite the genesis of IOLTA schemes in Australia, they have, apart from Adrian Evans' pioneering work on the Victorian IOLTA arrangements, received no scholarly attention. In this article, I therefore explore and evaluate the structure, role and ethics of the present IOLTA schemes in Australia and, agreeing with Evans, conclude that they are, so far as public standards are concerned, structured unethically. I add, however, that the moral character of IOLTA schemes can be salvaged, if they are reformed. In this article, the means by which IOLTA is acquired by public agencies are therefore outlined (Part 2). Then, the different programs that are funded by IOLTA are discussed, with particular focus on legal aid (Part 3). This enables an analysis of the public ethics of IOLTA schemes, which is helped to a significant extent by the literature and adjudication on IOLTA that has emerged in the US and the Scottish case of Brown v Inland Revenue Commissioners. I nevertheless take the judicial reasoning in these cases as exemplifying and guiding moral reflection on the structure of rOLTA schemes, rather than giving them legal direction (Part 4). The discussion of the public ethics of these schemes then informs conclusions on the best form that restructured IOLTA schemes would take (part 5)

Slaving in Australian courts: blackbirding cases, 1869-1871

This article examines major prosecutions in New South Wales and Queensland for blackbirding practices in Melanesian waters, and early regulation under the Imperial Kidnapping Act that was meant to correct problems those prosecutions raised. It considers how legal argument and adjudication appropriated the political debate on the question whether the trade in Melanesian labour to Queensland and Fiji amounted to slaving, and whether references to slaving in Australian courts only compounded the difficulties of deterring recruiting abuses in Melanesia. It is suggested that, even though the Imperial Government conceived of the Kidnapping Act as a measure to deal with slaving, its success in Australian courts depended on its avoiding any reference to the idea of slavery in the legislation itself. This is developed in three parts. Part 1 provides the social context, introducing the trade in Melanesian labour for work in Queensland. Part 2 explores the prosecutions brought under the slave trade legislation and at common law against labour recruiters, especially those arising from incidents involving the Daphne and the Jason. It attempts to uncover the way that lawyers in these cases used arguments from the broader political debate as to whether the trade amounted to slaving. Part 3 concludes with an account of the relatively more effective regulation brought by the Kidnapping Act, with tentative suggestions as to how the arguments about slaving in Australian courts influenced the form that regulation under the Act had to take

Solicitors' will-making duties

Since the recognition that, in will-making practice, solicitors owe duties to beneficiaries as well as to clients, the courts have stated solicitors' will-making duties with some precision. However the law of tort still fails to offer an agreed rationale for them. This article suggests that, tortious principles aside, these duties spring from a clearer articulation of the solicitor's professional role as caretaker of clients' testamentary intentions. This idea explains most adjudication on will-making, while placing reasonably clear limits on solicitors' liabilities. This article's theory of the solicitor's caretaking role is the basis of its criticism of Queensland Art Gallery Board of Trustees v Henderson Trout (a firm) — where duties to one who merely hoped to be a beneficiary were recognised — and its conclusion that the duties stated there are conceptually precarious and practically unsustainable

Photonic crystal fibres: mapping Maxwell's equations onto a Schrodinger equation eigenvalue problem

We consider photonic crystal fibres (PCFs) made from arbitrary base materials and introduce a short-wavelength approximation which allows for a mapping of the Maxwell's equations onto a dimensionless eigenvalue equations which has the form of the Schrodinger equation in quantum mechanics. The mapping allows for an entire analytical solution of the dispersion problem which is in qualitative agreement with plane-wave simulations of the Maxwell's equations for large-mode area PCFs. We offer a new angle on the foundation of the endlessly single-mode property and show that PCFs are endlessly single mode for a normalized air-hole diameter smaller than ~0.42, independently of the base material. Finally, we show how the group-velocity dispersion relates simply to the geometry of the photonic crystal cladding.Comment: 16 pages including 6 figure

Comment on "Pinched Flow Fractionation: Continuous Size Separation of Particles Utilizing a Laminar Flow Profile in a Pinched Microchannel"

[First paragraph] In a recent paper Yamada et al. propose the novel concept of "pinched flow fractionation" (PFF) for the continuous size separation and analysis of particles in microfabricated lab-on-a-chip devices. In their description of the basic principle they claim that especially the width of the pinched and broadened segments will affect theseparation performance. In the following we comment on the physics behind this statement.Comment: Comment on paper by Yamada et al. [Anal. Chem. 76(18), 5465 - 5471 (2004)]. Accepted for Anal. Che