The Victim Test under the Human Rights Act 1998 and its Implications for Domestic Violence Cases

The European Court of Human Rights has now clearly established that domestic violence constitutes a human rights issue. However, there are a number of difficulties involved in using the Human Rights Act 1998 in relation to violence against women in the home. One of these obstacles is the restrictive test of standing found in the Act, which is problematic as regards an ‘unseen crime’ such as domestic violence. This article examines this test of standing and the difficulties it poses in the context of violence against women in the home. It then considers alternative models for the standing requirement and assesses whether a change in the test of standing would produce beneficial results as regards the issue of domestic violence.

Peer Rating for Feedback in Group Projects

The National Student Survey (NSS) in the UK has since 2005 questioned final year
undergraduate students on a broad range of issues relating to their university experience.
Across disciplines and universities students have expressed least satisfaction in the areas of
assessment and feedback. In response to these results many educational practitioners have
reviewed and revised their procedures and the UK Higher Education Academy (HEA) has
produced guidelines of best practice to assist academics in improving these specific areas.
The Product Design and Development (PDD) degree at Queen’s University Belfast is
structured with an integrated curriculum with group Design Build Test (DBT) projects as the
core of each year of the undergraduate programme. Based on the CDIO syllabus and
standards the overall learning outcomes for the programme are defined and developed in a
staged manner, guided by Bloom’s taxonomy of learning domains.
Feedback in group DBT projects, especially in relation to the development of personal and
professional skills, represents a different challenge to that of individual assignment feedback.
A review of best practice was carried out to establish techniques which could be applied to
the particular context of the PDD degree without modification and also to identify areas
where a different approach would need to be applied.
A revised procedure was then developed which utilised the structure of the PDD degree to
provide a mechanism for enhanced feedback in group project work, while at the same time
increasing student development of self and peer evaluation skills. Key to this improvement
was the separation of peer ratings from assessment in the perception of the students and the
introduction of more frequent face to face feedback interviews.
This paper details the new procedures developed and additional issues which have been
raised and addressed, with reference to the published literature, during 3 years of operation.

Faithful test of nonlocal realism with entangled coherent states

We investigate the violation of Leggett's inequality for nonlocal realism using entangled coherent states and various types of local measurements. We prove mathematically the relation between the violation of the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt form of Bell's inequality and Leggett's one when tested by the same resources. For Leggett inequalities, we generalize the nonlocal realistic bound to systems in Hilbert spaces larger than bidimensional ones and introduce an optimization technique that allows one to achieve larger degrees of violation by adjusting the local measurement settings. Our work describes the steps that should be performed to produce a self-consistent generalization of Leggett's original arguments to continuous-variable states.

Rotating massive main-sequence stars II. Simulating a population of LMC early B-type stars as a test of rotational mixing

Context. Rotational mixing in massive stars is a widely applied concept, with far-reaching consequences for stellar evolution, nucleosynthesis, and stellar explosions.

Committing to Effective Climate Governance in Northern Ireland: A Defining Test of Devolution

This is the second of a two-part analysis exploring the interaction between UK devolution and governance of the national low carbon transition. It argues that devolution shaped the national climate governance regime created by the Climate Change Act 2008, but will itself be tested and even altered as the traction of the low carbon imperative intensifies. This dynamic is explored in the specific context of the UK’s most devolved region. The first article argued that devolution facilitated and arguably forced Northern Ireland’s devolved administration to give a highly qualified and potentially illusory consent to the regional application of the UK Act. The second article argues that making a more effective commitment to climate governance will be a defining test of its devolution arrangements but will require constitutional arrangements designed for conflict resolution to mature. Failure to do so will have important implications for the UK’s putative ‘national’ low carbon transition and the longer-term viability of devolution in the region.

Factor structure and validity of the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) in a sample of mentally disordered offenders

Investigations of the factor structure of the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) have produced conflicting results. The current study assessed the factor structure of the AUDIT for a group of Mentally Disordered Offenders (MDOs) and examined the pattern of scoring in specific subgroups. The sample comprised 2005 MDOs who completed a battery of tests including the AUDIT. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed that a two-factor solution – alcohol consumption and alcohol-related consequences – provided the best data fit for AUDIT scores. A three-factor solution provided an equally good fit, but the second and third factors were highly correlated and a measure of parsimony also favoured the two-factor solution. This study provides useful information on the factor structure of the AUDIT amongst a large MDO population, while also highlighting the difficulties associated with the presence of people with mental health problems in the criminal justice system.