Legal Reasoning in Environmental Law : a Study of Structure, Form and Language

This book analyses the structure, form and language of a selected number of international and national legal instruments and reviews how an illustrative range of international and national judicial institutions have responded to the issues before them and the processes of legal reasoning engaged by them in reaching their decisions. This involves a very detailed discussion of these primary sources of international and national environmental law with a view to determining their jurisprudential architecture and the processes of reasoning expected of those responsible for implementing these architectural arrangements. This book is concerned not with the effectiveness or the quality of an environmental legal system but only with its jurisprudential characteristics and their associated processes of legal reasoning.

Manifestations of preoperational reasoning on similar programming tasks

In this research paper, we study a simple programming problem that only requires knowledge of variables and assignment statements, and yet we found that some early novice programmers had difficulty solving the problem. We also present data from think aloud studies which demonstrate the nature of those difficulties. We interpret our data within a neo-Piagetian framework which describes cognitive developmental stages through which students pass as they learn to program. We describe in detail think aloud sessions with novices who reason at the neo-Piagetian preoperational level. Those students exhibit two problems. First, they focus on very small parts of the code and lose sight of the "big picture". Second, they are prone to focus on superficial aspects of the task that are not functionally central to the solution. It is not until the transition into the concrete operational stage that decentration of focus occurs, and they have the cognitive ability to reason about abstract quantities that are conserved, and are equipped to adapt skills to closely related tasks. Our results, and the neo-Piagetian framework on which they are based, suggest that changes are necessary in teaching practice to better support novices who have not reached the concrete operational stage.

The IKBALS project: multi-modal reasoning in legal knowledge based systems

In attempting to build intelligent litigation support tools, we have moved beyond first generation, production rule legal expert systems. Our work integrates rule based and case based reasoning with intelligent information retrieval. When using the case based reasoning methodology, or in our case the specialisation of case based retrieval, we need to be aware of how to retrieve relevant experience. Our research, in the legal domain, specifies an approach to the retrieval problem which relies heavily on an extended object oriented/rule based system architecture that is supplemented with causal background information. We use a distributed agent architecture to help support the reasoning process of lawyers. Our approach to integrating rule based reasoning, case based reasoning and case based retrieval is contrasted to the CABARET and PROLEXS architectures which rely on a centralised blackboard architecture. We discuss in detail how our various cooperating agents interact, and provide examples of the system at work. The IKBALS system uses a specialised induction algorithm to induce rules from cases. These rules are then used as indices during the case based retrieval process. Because we aim to build legal support tools which can be modified to suit various domains rather than single purpose legal expert systems, we focus on principles behind developing legal knowledge based systems. The original domain chosen was theAccident Compensation Act 1989 (Victoria, Australia), which relates to the provision of benefits for employees injured at work. For various reasons, which are indicated in the paper, we changed our domain to that ofCredit Act 1984 (Victoria, Australia). This Act regulates the provision of loans by financial institutions. The rule based part of our system which provides advice on the Credit Act has been commercially developed in conjunction with a legal firm. We indicate how this work has lead to the development of a methodology for constructing rule based legal knowledge based systems. We explain the process of integrating this existing commercial rule based system with the case base reasoning and retrieval architecture.

Beyond rule based reasoning - the meaning and use of cases

Commercial legal expert systems are invariably rule based. Such systems are poor at dealing with open texture and the argumentation inherent in law. To overcome these problems we suggest supplementing rule based legal expert systems with case based reasoning or neural networks. Both case based reasoners and neural networks use cases-but in very different ways. We discuss these differences at length. In particular we examine the role of explanation in existing expert systems methodologies. Because neural networks provide poor explanation facilities, we consider the use of Toulmin argument structures to support explanation (S. Toulmin, 1958). We illustrate our ideas with regard to a number of systems built by the authors

Non-monotonic Reasoning and the Reversibility of Belief Change

Traditional approaches to nonmonotonic reasoning fail to satisfy a number of plausible axioms for belief revision and suffer from conceptual difficulties as well. Recent work on ranked preferential models (RPMs) promises to overcome some of these difficulties. Here we show that RPMs are not adequate to handle iterated belief change. Specifically, we show that RPMs do not always allow for the reversibility of belief change. This result indicates the need for numerical strengths of belief.

A SiC-based matrix converter topology for inductive power transfer system

Typical inductive power transfer (IPT) systems employ two power conversion stages to generate a high-frequency primary current from low-frequency utility supply. This paper proposes a matrix-converter-based IPT system, which employs high-speed SiC devices to facilitate the generation of high-frequency current through a single power conversion stage. The proposed matrix converter topology transforms a three-phase low-frequency voltage system to a high-frequency single-phase voltage, which, in turn, powers a series compensated IPT system. A comprehensive mathematical model is developed and power losses are evaluated to investigate the efficiency of the proposed converter topology. Theoretical results are presented with simulations, which are performed in MATLAB/Simulink, in comparison to a conventional two-stage converter. Experimental evident of a prototype IPT system is also presented to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed concept.

Five-level current-source inverters with buck-boost and inductive-current balancing capabilities

This paper presents new five-level current-source inverters (CSIs) with voltage/current buck-boost capability, unlike existing five-level CSIs where only voltage-boost operation is supported. The proposed inverters attain self-inductive-current-balancing per switching cycle at their dc front ends without having to include additional balancing hardware or complex control manipulation. The inverters can conveniently be controlled by using the well-established phase-shifted carrier modulation scheme with only two additional linear references and a mapping logic table needed. Existing modulators can therefore be conveniently retrofitted for controlling the presented inverters. By appropriately coordinating the inverter gating signals, their implementations can be realized by using the least number of components without degrading performance. These enhanced features of the inverters have already been verified in simulation and experimentally using a scaled-down laboratory platform.

Contact with existing adipose tissue is inductive for adipogenesis in matrigel

The effect of adipose tissue on inductive adipogenesis within Matrigel (BD Biosciences) was assessed by using a murine chamber model containing a vascular pedicle. Three-chamber configurations that varied in the access to an adipose tissue source were used, including sealed- and open-chamber groups that had no access and limited access, respectively, to the surrounding adipose tissue, and a sealed-chamber group in which adipose tissue was placed as an autograft. All groups showed neovascularization, but varied in the amount of adipogenesis seen in direct relation to their access to preexisting adipose tissue: open chambers showed strong adipogenesis, whereas the sealed chambers had little or no adipose tissue; adipogenesis was restored in the autograft chamber group that contained 2- to 5-mg fat autografts. These showed significantly more adipogenesis than the sealed chambers with no autograft (p < 0.01). Autografts with 1 mg of fat were capable of producing adipogenesis but did so less consistently than the larger autografts. These findings have important implications for adipose tissue engineering strategies and for understanding de novo production of adipose tissue.

Qualitative spatial reasoning about directions in a corridor containing a single turn

An experiment was conducted to investigate the process of reasoning about directions in an egocentric space. Each participant walked through a corridor containing an angular turn ranging in size from 0° to 90°, in 15° increments. A direction was given to participants at the entrance of the corridor and they were asked to answer this direction at the end of this corridor. Considering the fact that participants had to reason the direction in the featureless corridor, two hypotheses were proposed: (i) reasoning about directions falls into qualitative reasoning by using a small number of coarse angular categories (four 90° categories or eight 45° categories: 90° categories consist of front, back, left, right; 45° categories consist of 90° categories and the four intermediates) that reference axes generate; (ii) reasoning about directions would be done by recalling the rotation angle from the traveling direction to the direction that participants tried to answer. In addition, the configuration of reference axes that participants employed was examined. Both hypotheses were supported, and the data designated that reference axes consisted of eight directions: a pair of orthogonal axes and diagonals.

The Number Crunch game : a simple vehicle for building algebraic reasoning skills

A newspaper numbers game based on simple arithmetic relationships is discussed. Its potential to give students of elementary algebra practice in semi-ad hoc reasoning and to build general arithmetic reasoning skills is explored.

Controller synthesis of a bidirectional inductive power interface for electric vehicles

Bidirectional Inductive Power Transfer (IPT) systems are preferred for Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) applications. Typically, bidirectional IPT systems consist of high order resonant networks, and therefore, the control of bidirectional IPT systems has always been a difficulty. To date several different controllers have been reported, but these have been designed using steady-state models, which invariably, are incapable of providing an accurate insight into the dynamic behaviour of the system A dynamic state-space model of a bidirectional IPT system has been reported. However, currently this model has not been used to optimise the design of controllers. Therefore, this paper proposes an optimised controller based on the dynamic model. To verify the operation of the proposed controller simulated results of the optimised controller and simulated results of another controller are compared. Results indicate that the proposed controller is capable of accurately and stably controlling the power flow in a bidirectional IPT system.