Ramos v. Franklin, 139 Nev. Adv. Op. 6 (Mar. 16, 2023)

NRS 125C.050 provides that certain relatives and other persons may petition for visitation with a minor child.2 Under the statute, a court may only order visitation when the minor child’s parents “deny or unreasonably restrict visits with the child.”3 When the parents of the child have joint custody and one parent provides the petitioner with sufficient contact with the minor child so that visitation was not denied or unreasonably restricted, the petition for visitation fails regardless of the parent who provides contact

Monk v. Ching, M.D., 139 Nev. Adv. Op. 18 (Jul. 6, 2023)

NRS 41A.071 provides that any action for professional negligence shall be dismissed if it is filed without an affidavit which supports the allegations. A Nurse is not categorically barred from providing an affidavit for a professional negligence action against a physician. But the affidavit must specify the acts of negligence of each respondent and how each action breached a standard of care to a reasonable degree of medical certainty. Moreover, NRS 41A.100 provides an exception to the affidavit requirement when foreign objects are left in a body during surgery. Gauze which are left in a wound as part of post- operative care are not foreign objects left during surgery for the purposes of the statute

Elk Point Country Club HOA v. K. H. Brown, LLC, 138 Nev. Adv. Op. 60 (Aug. 18, 2022)

When a planned communities’ governing documents restrict real property use to residential use only, NRS 116.340(1)(a) permits a real property owner to use real property for transient commercial use so long as the governing documents of the community do not prohibit such use. Transient commercial use is the use of property, for remuneration, as transient lodging, if the term of occupancy is thirty days or less—i.e., short-term rentals. It is a reversable error to interpret bylaws and governing documents as prohibiting rentals when they use the terms “tenants” an

Toward an equation-oriented framework for diagnosis of complex systems

Diagnosis of complex systems is a critical area for most real-world systems. Given the wide range of system types, including physical systems, logic circuits, state-machines, control systems, and software, there is no commonlyaccepted modeling language or inference algorithms for model-Based Diagnosis (MBD) of such systems. Designing a language that can be used for modeling such a wide class of systems, while being able to efficiently solve the model, is a formidable task. The computational efficiency with which a given model can be solved, although often neglected by designers of modeling languages, is a key to parameter identification and answering MBD challenges. We address this freedom-of-modeling versus model-solving efficiency trade-off challenge by evolving a language for MBD of physical system, called LYDIA. In this paper we report on the abilities of LYDIA to model a class of physical systems, the algorithms that we use for solving MBD problems and the results that we have obtained for several challenging systems

A manifesto for Reality-based Safety Science

In the field of safety science, we have stopped competing empirically. The theorists fight each other with keynotes and editorials, the empiricists tinker within the boundaries of existing theory, and the practitioners use neither theory nor evidence to determine their activities. As a result, safety science is advancing very slowly, despite a high and increasing volume of research activity and publication. The journal Safety Science alone has published over a thousand articles in the past five years and has rejected over five thousand. Some of those articles were the capstones of PhD projects. Some were the outputs of publicly or industry-funded research. Most represented hundreds of hours of intellectual labour, and substantial emotional commitment. Taken together, this is a massive program of work that has had a marginal impact on moving existing theory or improving safety practice. Whilst it is tempting to believe that this is just the normal grunt-work of science – small steps, dead ends, and occasional breakthroughs – a close examination of the work being produced makes clear that the unproductive effort is not necessary swarf from the machine-work of making knowledge, but waste caused by poorly directed or poorly designed research. Such squandering of energy, talent and resources makes us furious. This paper, targeted at the Special Issue on the Future of Safety Science, is a proposal for how we should frame our empirical contributions so that safety science (and the journal Safety Science) has a positive future. For a field of research to move forward, each new project or paper must strive to change what has come before – adding, synthesising, testing, tearing down or making anew. Not every piece of work will be successful in creating lasting change – but every piece of work must genuinely try to advance current theory. The paper frames and justifies a set of commitments by the authors in order to find a brighter future for safety science and invites readers to share those commitments

Tracking counterpart signatures in Saturn's auroras and ENA imagery during large-scale plasma injection events

Saturn's morningside auroras consist mainly of rotating, transient emission patches, following periodic reconnection in the magnetotail. Simultaneous responses in global energetic neutral atom (ENA) emissions have been observed at similar local times, suggesting a link between the auroras and large‐scale injections of hot ions in the outer magnetosphere. In this study, we use Cassini's remote sensing instruments to observe multiple plasma injection signatures within coincident auroral and ENA imagery, captured during 9 April 2014. Kilometric radio emissions also indicate clear injection activity. We track the motion of rotating signatures in the auroras and ENAs to test their local time relationship. Two successive auroral signatures—separated by ~4 hr UT—form postmidnight before rotating to the dayside while moving equatorward. The first has a clear ENA counterpart, maintaining a similar local time mapping throughout ~9 hr observation. Mapping of the ionospheric equatorward motion post‐dawn indicates a factor ~5 reduction of the magnetospheric source region's radial speed at a distance of ~14‐20 RS, possibly a plasma or magnetic boundary. The second auroral signature has no clear ENA counterpart; viewing geometry was relatively unchanged, so the ENAs were likely too weak to detect by this time. A third, older injection signature, seen in both auroral and ENA imagery on the nightside, may have been sustained by field‐aligned currents linked with the southern planetary period oscillation system, or the re‐energization of ENAs around midnight local times. The ENA injection signatures form near magnetic longitudes associated with magnetotail thinning

Modulations of Saturn's UV Auroral Oval Location by Planetary Period Oscillations

It is well known that Saturn's magnetospheric dynamics are greatly influenced by the so-called planetary period oscillations (PPOs). Based on Cassini Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) imagery, it has been shown previously that the UV auroral intensity is clearly modulated in phase with rotating field-aligned current (FAC) systems associated with the PPOs. Here we expand upon this investigation by using the same data set to examine the PPO-induced spatial modulation of the main auroral oval. We present a robust algorithm used for determining the location of the main emission in Cassini-UVIS images. The location markers obtained are then used to calculate the statistical location of the auroral oval and its periodic displacement due to the PPO FACs and the related ionospheric flows. We find that the largest equatorward displacement of the main arc lags behind the PPO-dependent statistical brightening of the UV aurora by roughly 45–90° in both hemispheres and is not colocated with it as the present model based on magnetometer observations suggests. We furthermore find the center of the auroral oval by fitting circles to the main emission and analyze its elliptic motion as the entire oval is displaced in phase with the PPO phases. It is demonstrated that the periodic displacements of both the auroral oval arc and its center are larger when the two PPO systems rotate in relative antiphase than when they are in phase, clearly indicating that interhemispheric PPO FAC closure modulates not only the intensity but also the location of the main UV auroral emission

Integration and continuity of primary care: polyclinics and alternatives - a patient-centred analysis of how organisation constrains care co-ordination

Background An ageing population, the increasing specialisation of clinical services and diverse health-care provider ownership make the co-ordination and continuity of complex care increasingly problematic. The way in which the provision of complex health care is co-ordinated produces – or fails to produce – six forms of continuity of care (cross-sectional, longitudinal, flexible, access, informational and relational). Care co-ordination is accomplished by a combination of activities by patients themselves; provider organisations; care networks co-ordinating the separate provider organisations; and overall health-system governance. This research examines how far organisational integration might promote care co-ordination at the clinical level. Objectives To examine (1) what differences the organisational integration of primary care makes, compared with network governance, to horizontal and vertical co-ordination of care; (2) what difference provider ownership (corporate, partnership, public) makes; (3) how much scope either structure allows for managerial discretion and ‘performance’; (4) differences between networked and hierarchical governance regarding the continuity and integration of primary care; and (5) the implications of the above for managerial practice in primary care. Methods Multiple-methods design combining (1) the assembly of an analytic framework by non-systematic review; (2) a framework analysis of patients’ experiences of the continuities of care; (3) a systematic comparison of organisational case studies made in the same study sites; (4) a cross-country comparison of care co-ordination mechanisms found in our NHS study sites with those in publicly owned and managed Swedish polyclinics; and (5) the analysis and synthesis of data using an ‘inside-out’ analytic strategy. Study sites included professional partnership, corporate and publicly owned and managed primary care providers, and different configurations of organisational integration or separation of community health services, mental health services, social services and acute inpatient care. Results Starting from data about patients’ experiences of the co-ordination or under-co-ordination of care, we identified five care co-ordination mechanisms present in both the integrated organisations and the care networks; four main obstacles to care co-ordination within the integrated organisations, of which two were also present in the care networks; seven main obstacles to care co-ordination that were specific to the care networks; and nine care co-ordination mechanisms present in the integrated organisations. Taking everything into consideration, integrated organisations appeared more favourable to producing continuities of care than did care networks. Network structures demonstrated more flexibility in adding services for small care groups temporarily, but the expansion of integrated organisations had advantages when adding new services on a longer term and a larger scale. Ownership differences affected the range of services to which patients had direct access; primary care doctors’ managerial responsibilities (relevant to care co-ordination because of their impact on general practitioner workload); and the scope for doctors to develop special interests. We found little difference between integrated organisations and care networks in terms of managerial discretion and performance. Conclusions On balance, an integrated organisation seems more likely to favour the development of care co-ordination and, therefore, continuities of care than a system of care networks. At least four different variants of ownership and management of organisationally integrated primary care providers are practicable in NHS-like settings. Future research is therefore required, above all to evaluate comparatively the different techniques for coordinating patient discharge across the triple interface between hospitals, general practices and community health services; and to discover what effects increasing the scale and scope of general practice activities will have on continuity of care