Suicide plaintiff dies

Charles E. Hall, who petitioned the Florida courts to allow his physician to assist him in suicide, died in March. Hall sought a judge's permission to have his doctor administer a lethal dose of morphine. The Florida Supreme Court ruled that the State's interest in preserving life outweighed Hall's privacy rights in physician-assisted suicide. Hall was bedridden, nearly sightless, and unable to communicate.     

Nebraska lets uninfected plaintiff sue for distress damages

Penny Hartwig was stuck twice by hypodermic needles left in a trash can at the Oregon Trail Eye Clinic. The clinic could not determine what the needles were used for and did not test them to determine if they were contaminated. Two days later, a nurse from the clinic advised Hartwig to be tested for HIV, to refrain from unprotected sexual intercourse, and to avoid exposing others to her blood or bodily fluids. Hartwig sued the clinic for negligence, and a jury awarded her $3,000 for the physical pain she suffered from the wounds. She did not receive any compensation for her emotional distress, because the trial judge ruled that she did not prove that the needles were tainted with HIV. Hartwig appealed, and the Supreme Court reversed the trial judge's ruling, stating that since Hartwig was required to conduct her life as if she were infected with HIV until she was certain of her status, she is allowed to recover damages for anxiety and distress resulting from that uncertainty.     

A plea for new psychometric models in educational assessment

OBJECTIVE: To describe the weaknesses of the current psychometric approach to assessment as a scientific model. DISCUSSION: The current psychometric model has played a major role in improving the quality of assessment of medical competence. It is becoming increasingly difficult, however, to apply this model to modern assessment methods. The central assumption in the current model is that medical competence can be subdivided into separate measurable stable and generic traits. This assumption has several far-reaching implications. Perhaps the most important is that it requires a numerical and reductionist approach, and that aspects such as fairness, defensibility and credibility are by necessity mainly translated into reliability and construct validity. These approaches are more and more difficult to align with modern assessment approaches such as mini-CEX, 360-degree feedback and portfolios. This paper describes some of the weaknesses of the psychometric model and aims to open a discussion on a conceptually different statistical approach to quality of assessment. FUTURE DIRECTIONS: We hope that the discussion opened by this paper will lead to the development of a conceptually different statistical approach to quality of assessment. A probabilistic or Bayesian approach would be worth exploring.     

Failed bias-by-association lawsuit costs plaintiff $29,000

U.S. District Judge Joe Kendall ruled that the plaintiff's discrimination lawsuit was filed frivolously, and that he had to pay his former employer more than $29,000 for attorney's fees incurred in its defense against the lawsuit. The plaintiff was unable to show that Charter Furniture Rental Inc. was aware of his sexual orientation or his partner's AIDS-related illness. The plaintiff made every effort to conceal his homosexuality. He claimed his live-in partner was just a roommate. The plaintiff missed time at work after his partner's health began to decline in 1995. His firing came soon after his partner's death. He filed a complaint with the Texas Commission on Human Rights, which found no reasonable basis to believe the law had been violated. The employer insisted it had done nothing wrong and did not know about the plaintiff's sexual orientation or his partner's AIDS. Attorney's fees were sought based on the accusation that the plaintiff's attorney failed to perform an adequate pre-filing investigation. The judge ruled that the only basis for the plaintiff's firing had been poor work performance.