Le processus de contestation d’une inscription au rôle d’évaluation foncière

Le financement des municipalités québécoises repose en majeure partie sur des revenus autonomes, dont la principale source découle de leur pouvoir de taxer la richesse foncière. Par conséquent, le législateur, voulant assurer la stabilité financière des municipalités, a strictement encadré le processus de confection et de révision des évaluations foncières par plusieurs lois et règlements. Ceci n’a tout de même pas empêché l’augmentation des demandes de contestations à chaque nouveau rôle. Débutant par une demande de révision administrative, à l’aide d’un simple formulaire, le litige entre la municipalité et le contribuable peut se poursuivre devant le Tribunal administratif du Québec et même la Cour du Québec, la Cour supérieure et la Cour d’appel, où la procédure devient de plus en plus exigeante. La transition du processus administratif à judiciaire crée parfois une certaine friction au sein de la jurisprudence, notamment au niveau de la déférence à accorder à l’instance spécialisée, ou encore à l’égard de la souplesse des règles de preuve applicables devant cette dernière. Par une étude positiviste du droit, nous analysons tout d’abord la procédure de confection du rôle foncier, en exposant les acteurs et leurs responsabilités, ainsi que les concepts fondamentaux dans l’établissement de la valeur réelle des immeubles. Ensuite, nous retraçons chacune des étapes de la contestation d’une inscription au rôle, en y recensant les diverses règles de compétence, de preuve et de procédure applicables à chaque instance. À l’aide de nombreux exemples jurisprudentiels, nous tentons de mettre en lumière les différentes interprétations que font les tribunaux de la Loi sur la fiscalité municipale et autres législations connexes.

Le processus de contestation d’une inscription au rôle d’évaluation foncière

Le financement des municipalités québécoises repose en majeure partie sur des revenus autonomes, dont la principale source découle de leur pouvoir de taxer la richesse foncière. Par conséquent, le législateur, voulant assurer la stabilité financière des municipalités, a strictement encadré le processus de confection et de révision des évaluations foncières par plusieurs lois et règlements. Ceci n’a tout de même pas empêché l’augmentation des demandes de contestations à chaque nouveau rôle. Débutant par une demande de révision administrative, à l’aide d’un simple formulaire, le litige entre la municipalité et le contribuable peut se poursuivre devant le Tribunal administratif du Québec et même la Cour du Québec, la Cour supérieure et la Cour d’appel, où la procédure devient de plus en plus exigeante. La transition du processus administratif à judiciaire crée parfois une certaine friction au sein de la jurisprudence, notamment au niveau de la déférence à accorder à l’instance spécialisée, ou encore à l’égard de la souplesse des règles de preuve applicables devant cette dernière. Par une étude positiviste du droit, nous analysons tout d’abord la procédure de confection du rôle foncier, en exposant les acteurs et leurs responsabilités, ainsi que les concepts fondamentaux dans l’établissement de la valeur réelle des immeubles. Ensuite, nous retraçons chacune des étapes de la contestation d’une inscription au rôle, en y recensant les diverses règles de compétence, de preuve et de procédure applicables à chaque instance. À l’aide de nombreux exemples jurisprudentiels, nous tentons de mettre en lumière les différentes interprétations que font les tribunaux de la Loi sur la fiscalité municipale et autres législations connexes.

Not all older adults have insight into their driving abilities : evidence from an on-road assessment and implications for policy

Purpose To compare self-reported driving ability with objective measures of on-road driving performance in a large cohort of older drivers. Methods 270 community-living adults aged 70 – 88 years recruited via the electoral roll completed a standardized assessment of on-road driving performance and questionnaires determining perceptions of their own driving ability, confidence and driving difficulties. Retrospective self-reported crash data over the previous five years were recorded. Results Participants reported difficulty with only selected driving situations, including driving into the sun, in unfamiliar areas, in wet conditions, and at night or dusk. The majority of participants rated their own driving as good to excellent. Of the 47 (17%) of drivers who were rated as potentially unsafe to drive, 66% rated their own driving as good to excellent. Drivers who made critical errors, where the driving instructor had to take control of the vehicle, had no lower self-rating of driving ability then the rest of the group. The discrepancy in self-perceptions of driving and participants’ safety rating on the on-road assessment was significantly associated with self-reported retrospective crash rates, where those drivers who displayed greater overconfidence in their own driving were significantly more likely to report a crash. Conclusions This study demonstrates that older drivers with the greatest mismatch between actual and self-rated driving ability pose the greatest risk to road safety. Therefore licensing authorities should not assume that when older individuals’ driving abilities begin to decline they will necessarily be aware of these changes and adopt appropriate compensatory driving behaviours; rather, it is essential that evidence-based assessments are adopted.

Ship roll damping control

The technical feasibility of roll motion control devices has been amply demonstrated for over 100 years. Performance, however, can still fall short of expectations because of difficulties associated with control system designs, which have proven to be far from trivial due to fundamental performance limitations and large variations of the spectral characteristics of wave-induced roll motion. This tutorial paper presents an account of the development of various ship roll motion control systems together with the challenges associated with their design. It discusses the assessment of performance and the applicability of different mathematical models, and it surveys the control methods that have been implemented and validated with full scale experiments. The paper also presents an outlook on what are believed to be potential areas of research within this topic.

It's not only rock and roll: rockumentary, direct cinema and performative display

The documentary form commonly referred to as rockumentary has become, since its inception in the early 1960s, a staple of American direct cinema. In keeping with its associations with observational direct cinema, rockumentary emphasizes showing over telling; that is, rockumentary privileges the visual capacities of documentary over patterns of exposition. While the ‘documentary display’ of rockumentary is comparable to certain features of  the early ‘cinema of attractions’ it exceeds such features in its focus on  performance. Typically, an emphasis within documentary theory on unmediated and unreconstructed access to the real as the basis of documentary film has not admitted a place for notions of performance before the camera. Rockumentary, with its relentless foregrounding of the performing body and the performance of musicians, revises this  understanding. This essay examines rockumentary within the context of direct cinema as a mode centred on a documentary performative display as it operates within selected works from the 1960s to the present. The film theorist Brian Winston has claimed that ‘[d]irect cinema made the rock performance/tour movie into the most popular and commercially viable documentary form thus far.’ The inverse of this assessment may be closer to the mark: the rockumentary turned direct cinema into a commercially and widely available form, one which the rockumentary has at times returned to and superseded in its scopic attention to performative display.

Interrater reliability assessment using the Test of Gross Motor Development-2

Objectives: The aim was to examine interrater reliability of the object control subtest from the Test of Gross Motor Development-2 by live observation in a school field setting. Design:: Reliability Study - cross sectional. Methods: Raters were rated on their ability to agree on (1) the raw total for the six object control skills; (2) each skill performance and (3) the skill components. Agreement for the object control subtest and the individual skills was assessed by an intraclass correlation (ICC) and a kappa statistic assessed for skill component agreement. Results: A total of 37 children (65% girls) aged 4-8 years (M= 6.2, SD=0.8) were assessed in six skills by two raters; equating to 222 skill tests. Interrater reliability was excellent for the object control subset (ICC= 0.93), and for individual skills, highest for the dribble (ICC= 0.94) followed by strike (ICC= 0.85), overhand throw (ICC= 0.84), underhand roll (ICC= 0.82), kick (ICC= 0.80) and the catch (ICC= 0.71). The strike and the throw had more components with less agreement. Conclusions: Even though the overall subtest score and individual skill agreement was good, some skill components had lower agreement, suggesting these may be more problematic to assess. This may mean some skill components need to be specified differently in order to improve component reliability.

Software for subjective visual vertical assessment: an observational cross-sectional study

Spatial orientation in relation to the gravitational axis is significantly important for the maintenance of the posture, gait and for most of the human's motor activities. The subjective visual vertical exam evaluates the individual's perception of vertical orientation. Objectives: The aims of this study were (1) to develop a virtual system to evaluate the subjective visual vertical exam, (2) to provide a simple tool to clinical practice and (3) to assess the subjective visual vertical values of h ealthy subjects using the new software. Study Design: observational cross-sectional study. Methods: Thirty healthy volunteers performed the subjective visual vertical exam in both static and dynamic conditions. The exam consisted in adjusting a virtual line in the vertical position using the computer mouse. For the static condition, the virtual line was projected in a white background. For the dynamic condition, black circles rotated in clockwise or counterclockwise directions. Six measurements were taken and the mean deviations in relation to the real vertical calculated. Results: The mean values of subjective visual vertical measurements were: static -0.372 degrees; +/- 1.21; dynamic clockwise 1.53 degrees +/- 1.80 and dynamic counterclockwise -1.11 degrees +/- 2.46. Conclusion: This software showed to be practical and accurate to be used in clinical routines.

Assessment of patient setup errors in IGRT in combination with a six degrees of freedom couch

PURPOSE The range of patient setup errors in six dimensions detected in clinical routine for cranial as well as for extracranial treatments, were analyzed while performing linear accelerator based stereotactic treatments with frameless patient setup systems. Additionally, the need for re-verification of the patient setup for situations where couch rotations are involved was analyzed for patients treated in the cranial region. METHODS AND MATERIALS A total of 2185 initial (i.e. after pre-positioning the patient with the infrared system but before image guidance) patient setup errors (1705 in the cranial and 480 in the extracranial region) obtained by using ExacTrac (BrainLAB AG, Feldkirchen, Germany) were analyzed. Additionally, the patient setup errors as a function of the couch rotation angle were obtained by analyzing 242 setup errors in the cranial region. Before the couch was rotated, the patient setup error was corrected at couch rotation angle 0° with the aid of image guidance and the six degrees of freedom (6DoF) couch. For both situations attainment rates for two different tolerances (tolerance A: ± 0.5mm, ± 0.5°; tolerance B: ± 1.0 mm, ± 1.0°) were calculated. RESULTS The mean (± one standard deviation) initial patient setup errors for the cranial cases were -0.24 ± 1.21°, -0.23 ± 0.91° and -0.03 ± 1.07° for the pitch, roll and couch rotation axes and 0.10 ± 1.17 mm, 0.10 ± 1.62 mm and 0.11 ± 1.29 mm for the lateral, longitudinal and vertical axes, respectively. Attainment rate (all six axes simultaneously) for tolerance A was 0.6% and 13.1% for tolerance B, respectively. For the extracranial cases the corresponding values were -0.21 ± 0.95°, -0.05 ± 1.08° and -0.14 ± 1.02° for the pitch, roll and couch rotation axes and 0.15 ± 1.77 mm, 0.62 ± 1.94 mm and -0.40 ± 2.15 mm for the lateral, longitudinal and vertical axes. Attainment rate (all six axes simultaneously) for tolerance A was 0.0% and 3.1% for tolerance B, respectively. After initial setup correction and rotation of the couch to treatment position a re-correction has to be performed in 77.4% of all cases to fulfill tolerance A and in 15.6% of all cases to fulfill tolerance B. CONCLUSION The analysis of the data shows that all six axes of a 6DoF couch are used extensively for patient setup in clinical routine. In order to fulfill high patient setup accuracies (e.g. for stereotactic treatments), a 6DoF couch is recommended. Moreover, re-verification of the patient setup after rotating the couch is required in clinical routine.

Providing 30Mbit/s to Spain’s final third. -A techno-economic assessment.

Since the Digital Agenda for Europe released the Europe2020 flagship, Member States are looking for ways of fulfilling their agreed commitments to fast and ultrafast internet deployment. However, Europe is not a homogenous reality. The economic, geographic, social and demographic features of each country make it a highly diverse region to develop best practices over Next Generation Access Networks (NGAN) deployments. There are special concerns about NGAN deployments for “the final third”, as referred to the last 25% of the country’s population who, usually, live in rural areas. This paper assesses, through a techno-economic analysis, the access cost of providing over 30 Mbps broadband for the final third of Spain`s population in municipalities, which are classified into area types, referred to as geotypes. Fixed and mobile technologies are compared in order to determine which is the most cost-effective technology for each geotype. The demographic limit for fixed networks (cable, fibre and copper) is also discussed. The assessment focuses on the supply side and the results show the access network cost only. The research completes a previous published assessment (Techno-economic analysis of next generation access networks roll-out. The case of platform competition, regulation and public policy in Spain) by including the LTE scenario. The LTE scenario is dimensioned to provide 30 Mbps (best effort) broadband, considering a network take-up of 25%. The Rocket techno-economic model is used to assess a ten-year study period deployment. Nevertheless, the deployment must start in 2014 and be completed by 2020, in order to fulfil the Digital Agenda’s goals. The feasibility of the deployment is defined as the ability to recoup the investment at the end of the study period. This ability is highly related to network take-up and, therefore, to service adoption. Network deployment in each geotype is compared with the cost of the deployment in the Urban geotype and broadband expected penetration rates for clarity and simplicity. Debating the cost-effective deployments for each geotype, while addressing the Digital Agenda’s goals regarding fast and ultrafast internet, is the main purpose of this paper. At the end of the last year, the independent Spanish regulation agency released the Spain broadband coverage report at the first half of 2013. This document claimed that 59% and 52% of Spain’s population was already covered by NGAN capable of providing 30 Mbps and 100 Mbps broadband respectively. HFC, with 47% of population coverage, and FTTH, with 14%, were considered as a 100 Mbps capable NGAN. Meanwhile VDSL, with 12% of the population covered, was the only NGAN network considered for the 30 Mbps segment. Despite not being an NGAN, the 99% population coverage of HSPA networks was also noted in the report. Since mobile operators are also required to provide 30 Mbps broadband to 90% of the population in rural areas by the end of 2020, mobile networks will play a significant role on the achievement of the 30 Mbps goal in Spain’s final third. The assessment indicates the cost of the deployment per cumulative households coverage with 4 different NGANs: FTTH, HFC, VDSL and LTE. Research shows that an investment ranging from €2,700 (VDSL) to €5,400 (HFC) million will be needed to cover the first half of the population with any fixed technology assessed. The results state that at least €3,000 million will be required to cover these areas with the least expensive technology (LTE). However, if we consider the throughput that fixed networks could provide and achievement of the Digital Agenda’s objectives, fixed network deployments are recommended for up to 90% of the population. Fibre and cable deployments could cover up to a maximum of 88% of the Spanish population cost efficiently. As there are some concerns about the service adoption, we recommend VDSL and mobile network deployments for the final third of the population. Despite LTE being able to provide the most economical roll-out, VDSL could also provide 50 Mbps from 75% to 90% of the Spanish population cost efficiently. For this population gap, facility based competition between VDSL providers and LTE providers must be encouraged. Regarding 90% to 98.5% of the Spanish population, LTE deployment is the most appropriate. Since costumers in less populated the municipalities are more sensitive to the cost of the service, we consider that a single network deployment could be most appropriate. Finally, it has become clear that it is not possible to deliver 30Mbps to the final 1.5% of the population cost-efficiently and adoption predictions are not optimistic either. As there are other broadband alternatives able to deliver up to 20 Mbps, in the authors’ opinion, it is not necessary to cover the extreme rural areas, where public financing would be required.

Modern methods for traditional tasks: Developing an electronic version of student fieldwork assessment at The University of Queensland.

Fieldwork placements are an integral part of many professional tertiary programmes. At The University of Queensland, Occupational Therapy students undertake block fieldwork affiliations off campus at a wide range of sites as part of their studies. Students’ fieldwork performance has traditionally been assessed using a hard copy format of the Student Placement Evaluation Form (SPEF), which is posted to the university on completion by the clinical supervisor. This project aimed to develop an electronic version of the UQ Occupational Therapy Student Placement Evaluation Form (SPEF), to allow the assessment to be completed and returned in an on line format. Practitioners had become very comfortable with using the existing print based form so in order to encourage and assist users to extend beyond their comfort zones, numerous steps were taken to ease the learning process including incorporating the existing page layout, consistent colour coding, considerable user instruction, testing and software enhancement cycles. Additionally, the e-version of the SPEF aimed to provide a range of benefits such as on screen assistance in the form of instructions, roll overs and feedback to supervisors, increased accuracy, faster completion, cost savings to the School, up to date design, improved security and confidential and anonymous storage of fieldwork results for potential future research.

An analytical model for web-warping in variable width flexible roll forming

The development of ultra/advanced high strength steels (U/AHSS) has challenged traditional forming methods due to their higher strength and reduced formability. An alternative method is flexible roll forming, which allows the manufacture of sheet metal of high strength and limited ductility into complex and weight-optimized components. However, one major problem in flexible roll forming is the web-warping defect, which is the deviation in height of the web over the length of the profile. The authors’ previous work developed an analytical model to predict the magnitude of web-warping. That model was purely geometric and neglected the effect of material properties. This work develops an analytical solution for the prediction of web-warping that considers both geometric and material parameters. The model results were validated by comparison with numerical and experimental results. The impact of this new model will be the ability to provide a rapid initial design assessment before an intensive numerical analysis of flexible roll forming is conducted.

The Scored Patient-Generated Subjective Global Assessment (PG-SGA) and its Association with Quality of Life in Ambulatory Patients Receiving Radiotherapy

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the scored Patient-generated Subjective Global Assessment (PG-SGA) tool as an outcome measure in clinical nutrition practice and determine its association with quality of life (QoL). DESIGN: A prospective 4 week study assessing the nutritional status and QoL of ambulatory patients receiving radiation therapy to the head, neck, rectal or abdominal area. SETTING: Australian radiation oncology facilities. SUBJECTS: Sixty cancer patients aged 24-85 y. INTERVENTION: Scored PG-SGA questionnaire, subjective global assessment (SGA), QoL (EORTC QLQ-C30 version 3). RESULTS: According to SGA, 65.0% (39) of subjects were well-nourished, 28.3% (17) moderately or suspected of being malnourished and 6.7% (4) severely malnourished. PG-SGA score and global QoL were correlated (r=-0.66, P<0.001) at baseline. There was a decrease in nutritional status according to PG-SGA score (P<0.001) and SGA (P<0.001); and a decrease in global QoL (P<0.001) after 4 weeks of radiotherapy. There was a linear trend for change in PG-SGA score (P<0.001) and change in global QoL (P=0.003) between those patients who improved (5%) maintained (56.7%) or deteriorated (33.3%) in nutritional status according to SGA. There was a correlation between change in PG-SGA score and change in QoL after 4 weeks of radiotherapy (r=-0.55, P<0.001). Regression analysis determined that 26% of the variation of change in QoL was explained by change in PG-SGA (P=0.001). CONCLUSION: The scored PG-SGA is a nutrition assessment tool that identifies malnutrition in ambulatory oncology patients receiving radiotherapy and can be used to predict the magnitude of change in QoL.