Negligence defined

Adverse events occurred in 3.7% of hospitalizations and 27.6% were due to negligence (defined as care that fell below the standard expected of physicians in that community, and which might therefore lead to legal action). Almost half of adverse (47.7%) events were associated with an operation. The most common non-operative adverse events were adverse drug events, followed by diagnostic mishaps, therapeutic mishaps, procedure related events and others. Permanent disability resulted from 6.5% of adverse events and 13.6% involved the death of a patient. Extrapolations from this data suggested that approximately 100 000 deaths each year were associated with adverse events. Later analyses indicated that 69.6% of adverse events were potentially preventable. 

The U.S. EPA reports negligible recycling of PVC from MSW in the United States, with negligible defined as less than 5000 tons. The Vinyl Institute reports about 9.5 million lb of postconsumer vinyl (of all types) recycled in 1995. In Europe, where PVC has had wider use... 

To define the thennodynamic state of a system one must specify fhe values of a minimum number of variables, enough to reproduce the system with all its macroscopic properties. If special forces (surface effecls, external fields—electric, magnetic, gravitational, etc) are absent, or if the bulk properties are insensitive to these forces, e.g. the weak terrestrial magnetic field, it ordinarily suffices—for a one-component system—to specify fliree variables, e.g. fhe femperature T, the pressure p and the number of moles n, or an equivalent set. For example, if the volume of a surface layer is negligible in comparison with the total volume, surface effects usually contribute negligibly to bulk thennodynamic properties. 

Chemical Reaction Measurements. Experimental studies of incineration kinetics have been described (37—39), where the waste species is generally introduced as a gas in a large excess of oxidant so that the oxidant concentration is constant, and the heat of reaction is negligible compared to the heat flux required to maintain the reacting mixture at temperature. The reaction is conducted in an externally heated reactor so that the temperature can be controlled to a known value and both oxidant concentration and temperature can be easily varied. The experimental reactor is generally a long tube of small diameter so that the residence time is well defined and axial dispersion may be neglected as a source of variation. Off-gas analysis is used to track both the disappearance of the feed material and the appearance and disappearance of any products of incomplete combustion. 

For the solute flux, it is assumed that chemical potential difference owing to pressure is negligible. Thus the driving force is almost entirely a result of concentration differences. The solute flux, J), is defined as in equation 6 ... 

Countercurrent or Cocurrent Flow If the flow of the streams is either completely countercurrent or completely cocurrent or if one or both streams are isothermal (condensing or vaporizing a pure component with negligible pressure change), the correct MTD is the logarithmic-mean temperature difference (LMTD), defined as... 

The theoretical analysis could also be valid for nonisothermal jets assuming that the buoyancy is negligible. Grimitlyn, as reported by Hagstrom, suggests a local Archimedes number defined as ... 

In thermal building simulation, a thermal zone can be a part of a room, a room, or a combination of rooms defined as a part of the conditioned space, throughout which the internal temperature is assumed to have negligible spatial variations. The zone is enclosed by the surrounding walls (floor, ceiling, roof, wall elements) and windows. 

Taft began the LFER attack on steric effects as part of his separation of electronic and steric effects in aliphatic compounds, which is discussed in Section 7.3. For our present purposes we abstract from that treatment the portion relevant to aromatic substrates. Hammett p values for alkaline ester hydrolysis are in the range +2.2 to +2.8, whereas for acid ester hydrolysis p is close to zero (see Table 7-2). Taft, therefore, concluded that electronic effects of substituents are much greater in the alkaline than in the acid series and. in fact, that they are negligible in the acid series. This left the steric effect alone controlling relative reactivity in the acid series. A steric substituent constant was defined [by analogy with the definition of cr in Eq. (7-22)] by Eq. (7-43), where k is the rate constant for acid-catalyzed hydrolysis of an orr/to-substituted benzoate ester and k is the corresponding rate constant for the on/to-methyl ester note that CH3, not H, is the reference substituent. ... 

The system transmits 5 bits/s with a phase-shift-keying system. Four sine waves are necessary to define the phase with a negligible chance of error. Assume a perfect pipe, drill collar ID same as the drill pipe and no wave reflections at the drill pipe ends. 

This has been defined as "the failure to do something a reasonable person would do, or to do something a reasonable person would not do . For an action in liability to succeed in negligence the following conditions must be satisfied ... 

Treatment processes vary widely, and in themselves are reasonably well understood, but even if the nature and pattern of effluent is properly defined, problems often arise from wide variations in contents and flow of the effluent. An effluent plant tends to impose limitations on the main process - for example, it may be seriously affected by rapid dumping of the contents of a tank. These limitations are often flouted through ignorance or negligence. 

It is now appropriate to apply the above considerations of the operation of a well-defined electrochemical cell to the uniform corrosion of a metal in a solution of high conductivity, and under these circumstances both IR and 7/ so, may be regarded as negligible. Thus E will tend to zero, and Ep will tend to be equal to E (within 1-2 mV)... 

Resistance overpotential i/r Since in corrosion the resistance of the metallic path for charge transfer is negligible, resistance overpotential ijr is determined by factors associated with the solution or with the metal surface. Thus resistance overpotential may be defined as... 

A typical Evans diagrams for the corrosion of a single metal is illustrated in Fig. 1.26a (compare with Fig. 1.23 for two separable electrodes), and it can be seen that the E -I and E -I curves are drawn as straight lines that intersect at a point that defines and (it is assumed that the resistance for the solution is negligible). E can of course be determined by means of a reference electrode, but since the anodic and cathodic sites are inseparable direct determination of /co by means of an ammeter is not... 

It is usual to choose a container metal for fused salts sufficiently noble for the displacement reaction (2.16) to be negligible, and the most important aspects of corrosion are, as in aqueous solutions, those which involve reducible impurities, although in a salt melt there is also the additional possibility of a reducible anion (see above). All such factors can be described as controlling the oxidising power of the melt, which can be defined in terms of a redox potential just as in aqueous solutions The redox potential is expressed by relationships of the form... 

Electrical units. The fundamental SI unit is the unit of current which is called the ampere (A), and which is defined as the constant current which, if maintained in two parallel rectilinear conductors of negligible cross-section and of infinite length and placed one metre apart in a vacuum, would produce between these conductors a force equal to 2 x 10 7 newton per metre length. 

Products that are subjected to a load have to be analyzed carefully with respect to the type and duration of the load, the temperature conditions under which the load will be active, and the stress created by the load. A load can be defined as continuous when it remains constant for a period of 2 to 6 hours, whereas an intermittent load could be considered of up to two hours duration and is followed by an equal time for stress recovery. The temperature factor requires greater attention than would be the case with metals. The useful range of temperatures for plastic applications is relatively low and is of a magnitude that in metals is viewed as negligible. 

It is usual to define a screening length ( H) as the distance at which hydrodynamic interaction becomes negligible (Fig. 8) [44]. 

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