Prosecuting corporations and officers for industrial manslaughter-recent Australian developments

There have been concerns for some time about whether breaches of duty that cause a worker's death are appropriately dealt with under occupational health and safety legislation, or whether criminal prosecution is warranted in those cases involving recklessness or gross negligence. Defaulting employers are rarely prosecuted under existing criminal laws and there are serious doctrinal barriers to finding a corporation guilty of mens rea offences.
The Australian Capital Territory leads the way in Australia with the recent introduction of new criminal offences of industrial manslaughter for corporations and their senior officers. These laws rely on concepts of corporate liability based on organisational responsibility and corporate culture in the model Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth) , thus avoiding the limitations of the identification doctrine. Other active Australian jurisdictions, whilst initially open to the notion of industrial manslaughter laws, have preferred to make changes to existing OHS laws to deal with the problem of workplace fatalities.
Whilst it has its limitations, and applies only in Australia's smallest jurisdiction, the Australian Capital Territory legislation reflects a commitment to treating workplace deaths with the seriousness they deserve, and making it easier to prosecute corporations whose operations are conducted recklessly or with gross negligence.

Plane wave scattering by a spherical di-electric particle in motion : a relativistic extension of the Mie theory

Light scattering from small spherical particles has applications in a vast number of disciplines including astrophysics, meteorology optics and particle sizing. Mie theory provides an exact analytical characterization of plane wave scattering from spherical dielectric objects. There exist many variants of the Mie theory where fundamental assumptions of the theory has been relaxed to make generalizations. Notable such extensions are generalized Mie theory where plane waves are replaced by optical beams, scattering from lossy particles, scattering from layered particles or shells and scattering of partially coherent (non-classical) light. However, no work has yet been reported in the literature on modifications required to account for scattering when the particle or the source is in motion relative to each other. This is an important problem where many applications can be found in disciplines involving moving particle size characterization. In this paper we propose a novel approach, using special relativity, to address this problem by extending the standard Mie theory for scattering by a particle in motion with a constant speed, which may be very low, moderate or comparable to the speed of light. The proposed technique involves transforming the scattering problem to a reference frame co-moving with the particle, then applying the Mie theory in that frame and transforming the scattered field back to the reference frame of the observer.

Load frequency control of power systems with electric vehicles and diverse transmission links using distributed functional observers

This paper presents a load frequency control scheme using electric vehicles (EVs) to help thermal turbine units to provide the stability fluctuated by load demands. First, a general framework for deriving a state-space model for general power system topologies is given. Then, a detailed model of a four-area power system incorporating a smart and renewable discharged EVs system is presented. The areas within the system are interconnected via a combination of alternating current/high voltage direct current links and thyristor controlled phase shifters. Based on some recent development on functional observers, novel distributed functional observers are designed, one at each local area, to implement any given global state feedback controller. The designed observers are of reduced order and dynamically decoupled from others in contrast to conventional centralized observer (CO)-based controllers. The proposed scheme can cope better against accidental failures than those CO-based controllers. Extensive simulations and comparisons are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.