Determination of the mineral content and the transparency of the root dentine of human teeth

One hundred and fifty-six teeth were extracted from corpses aged between 15 and 79 years. Of these, 101 teeth were selected for measurement of the mineral content of the root by photon beam absorption. Six or seven cross-sections were measured in each root, and the mean values calculated for the apical, medial, and coronal part within each decade. Further, 20 selected teeth were embedded in methacrylate and the length of the zone of transparency determined in longitudinal sections. There was no significant age dependency of the root's mineral content. There was no correlation between the extent of transparency and the mineral content.     

Behold the shut-eyed sentry!

Whistleblowers, employees of conscience who report on wrongdoing, integrate into their socially useful role one of exposing institutional torpor and bureaucratic incompetence in those official structures responsible for the investigation and correction of wrongdoing. This paper reports on the finding from Australia's largest study into whistleblowers. It shows a crisis of competence in the official capacity of government structures to respond effectively to disclosures made in the public interest.     

Legal Aid in Mental Hospitals

This report on the experience of five in-hospital legal aid projects and one community-based project for the deinstitutionalized examines the workloads of the lawyers and paralegals who labor in this setting and the various approaches and predispositions they bring to the job or learn while they are at it. The caseloads as well as interviews and observations reveal enormous differences in approach from project to project. The work of some lawyers and their aides confirms the utility and importance of making legal aid directly available to patients on the hospital grounds. But the experience of a couple of other projects warns that certain styles of lawyering can be counterproductive and damaging. In general, lawyers in the mental hospital setting must avoid the legalistic and overly adversarial approach to the problems that are brought to them—many of which are of uncertain legal content, credibility, or psychological makeup. Lawyers must also be careful not to have their own legal priorities get in the way of the best interests of their patient-clients or even those of the hospital as a total institution. The best approach to lawyering in the institutional setting is one that softens the "traditional" legal and adversarial aspects in favor of a more mediatory stance in which fact finding, counseling, and the resolution of issues by compromise are dominant functions. And significant legal attention should be devoted to each of the major categories of problems faced by patients—commitment-discharge, institutional, and civil—if the institutional lawyer's credibility and effectiveness are to be maintained both with the patients and the staffs in charge of their treatment and custody.     

URLTA in Operation: An Introduction

The following articles examine the impact of legislation modeled after the Uniform Residential Landlord and Tenant Act (URLTA) in Portland, Oregon, and Cleveland, Ohio. Their conclusion is that the legislation has been only marginally effective, benefiting primarily middle-income tenants in the suburbs or in the cities' better neighborhoods, while largely failing in the aim of helping the inner-city poor and upgrading the quality of slum housing. The general lesson is an old one: law reform attempts at rearranging basic social-legal relationships often fail to achieve their intended effects, particularly when their effectuation is left to the initiative or ingenuity of those individual private parties who are least likely to possess or display these traits.     

Disclosure practices under the EU Prospectus Directive and the role of CESR

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. Key points

• In February 2005, CESR issued its Recommendationsfor the consistent implementation of the Prospectus Regulation.
• SinceJuly 2006, CESR has begun to develop a line of clarificationson disclosure practices under the Prospectus Directive and theProspectus Regulation in the form of common positions basedon Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs).
• This article first analysesthe question to which extent CESR's Recommendations and commonpositions have binding effect, in the sense that individualnational securities regulators are under some form of obligationto apply these.
• Subsequently, the article discusses a selectionof CESR's common positions on FAQs which are of material importancefor day-to-day disclosure practice.