Property Agents and Motor Dealers Act (Qld) : disclosure, cooling-off and marketeers

The Property Agents and Motor Dealers Act 2000 commenced on 1 July 2001. Significant changes have now been made to the Act by the Property Agents and Motor Dealers Amendment Act 2001 (“the amending Act”). The amending Act contains two distinct parts. First, ss 11-19 of the amending Act provide for increased disclosure obligations on real estate agents, property developers and lawyers together with an extension of the 5 business day cooling-off period imposed by the original Act to all residential property (other than contracts formed on a sale by auction). These provisions are expected to commence on 29 October 2001. The remaining provisions of the amending Act provide for increased jurisdiction and powers to the Property Agents and Motor Dealers Tribunal (“the Tribunal”) enabling the Tribunal to deal with claims against marketeers. These provisions commenced on the date of assent (21 September 2001).

Ending the life of the act/omission dispute: Causation in withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining measures

My aim in this paper is to challenge the increasingly common view in the literature that the law on end of life decision making is in disarray and is in need of urgent reform. My argument is that this assessment of the law is based on assumptions about the relationship between the identity of the defendant and their conduct, and about the nature of causation, which, on examination, prove to be indefensible. I then provide a clarification of the relationship between causation and omissions which proves that the current legal position does not need modification, at least on the grounds that are commonly advanced for the converse view. This enables me, in conclusion, to clarify important conceptual and moral differences between withholding, refusing and withdrawing life-sustaining measures on the one hand, and assisted suicide and euthanasia, on the other.

Seen but not heard? The significance of shareholders under Pt 5.3A of the Corporations Act

The article considers the interests of company members as stakeholders in the event of a company entering voluntary administration and suggests that while shareholders hold a residual interest, they nonetheless have an interest in ensuring that that the company is rescued and perhaps therefore have a role to play in the rescue of the company’s business. In doing so it argues that there is some inconsistency in recent changes in Ch 5 regarding the role of shareholders with some changes recognising their role while others have sought to downplay it.

The human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 : a multidisciplinary workshop

Event report following a multidisciplinary workshop at the Economic and Social Research Council's Genomics Policy and Research Forum, which took place at the University of Edinburgh on 20 January 2011.

The application of the statutory derivative action in Pt 2F.1A of the Corporations Act to companies in liquidation under Ch 5 : Well oiled machine or is Pt 2F.1A in need of a tune up?

The statutory derivative action was introduced in Australia in 2000. This right of action has been debated in the literature and introduced in a number of other jurisdictions as well. However, it is by no means clear that all issues have been resolved despite its operation in Australia for over 10 years. This article considers the application of Pt 2F.1A of the Corporations Act to companies in liquidation under Ch 5. It demonstrates that the application involves consideration of not only proper statutory interpretation but also policy matters around the role and the supervision by the court of a liquidator once a company has entered liquidation.

Learning to act in uncertain environments : technical perspective

The problem of decision making in an uncertain environment arises in many diverse contexts: deciding whether to keep a hard drive spinning in a net-book; choosing which advertisement to post to a Web site visitor; choosing how many newspapers to order so as to maximize profits; or choosing a route to recommend to a driver given limited and possibly out-of-date information about traffic conditions. All are sequential decision problems, since earlier decisions affect subsequent performance; all require adaptive approaches, since they involve significant uncertainty. The key issue in effectively solving problems like these is known as the exploration/exploitation trade-off: If I am at a cross-roads, when should I go in the most advantageous direction among those that I have already explored, and when should I strike out in a new direction, in the hopes I will discover something better?

Shape discrimination using invariants defined from higher-order spectra

An approach to pattern recognition using invariant parameters based on higher-order spectra is presented. In particular, bispectral invariants are used to classify one-dimensional shapes. The bispectrum, which is translation invariant, is integrated along straight lines passing through the origin in bifrequency space. The phase of the integrated bispectrum is shown to be scale- and amplification-invariant. A minimal set of these invariants is selected as the feature vector for pattern classification. Pattern recognition using higher-order spectral invariants is fast, suited for parallel implementation, and works for signals corrupted by Gaussian noise. The classification technique is shown to distinguish two similar but different bolts given their one-dimensional profiles