Chemical Control Agents Used Against the Gypsy Moth Essay -- Gypsy Mot

Chemical Control Agents Used Against the Gypsy Moth The gypsy moth (Lymantria dispar) is a highly disruptive species that can, and has played a distinctive role in the lives of many organisms. Included in these organisms are various deciduous trees and shrubs, wildlife species that share the same environment, and even humans. The gypsy moth destroys the beauty of woodlands via defoliation, alters ecosystems and wildlife habitats, and disrupts our own lives. It should therefore come as no surprise that the U.S. Department of Agriculture and many other agencies have taken huge steps to help diminish populations of this small, yet persistent species. In an effort to control these overwhelming populations, five chemical control agents have been used to suppress and/or eradicate the gypsy moth. Following, is a discussion of each chemical and their potentially hazardous effects on humans. The first chemical control agent is Bacillus thuringiensis var. kurstaki (B.t.k.); a bacteria isolated from diseased silk worms and flour moths. The potency of B.t.k. varies among insects and readily destroys lepidopteran larvae within approximately one hour of ingestion. More than 1 million pounds of B.t.k. is applied annually in the U.S., primarily via aerial spraying, but also by ground spraying. It does not persist long in the environment (losing its activity by 50% within 1-3 days), has not been seen to replicate in gypsy moth predators, and does not accumulate in the soil. There seems to be a low level of concern regarding human B.t.k. exposure, although B.t.k. formulations have caused eye, skin, and respiratory tract irritations, especially in ground workers. Some claims reveal that a majority of these workers were not equipped with ... ... 8) U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Northeastern Area State and Private Forestry, Summary: Final Environmental Impact Statement, Radnor, PA, 1995. 9) U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Gypsy Moth Suppression and Eradication Projects, 1985. 10) U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Gypsy Moth Managment in the U.S.: a cooperative approach. Environmental Impact Statement; Appendix F Human Health Risk Assessment, 1995. 11) Wargo, Phillip M., Defoliation by the Gypsy Moth: How it Hurts Your Tree, U.S. Department of Agriculture, No. 223, 1974. 12) White, William B., Hubbard, Schneeberger, and Raimo, Technological Developments in Aerial Spraying, U.S. Department of Agriculture, No. 535, 1974.

Home Schooling and Public Schooling

Never before in the United States have parents been so disgruntled about their children†s education. The main reason behind this massive disruption seems to be that public schools are not living up to parent†s standards. Because of this, parents are taking their child†s education and future into their own hands. Many parents are turning to an â€Å"alternative† means of educating known as home schooling. Home schooling is simply education of school- aged children at home rather than at school. Parents are choosing home schooling over public schools because public schools are not meeting their child†s academic, individual, and/or disability needs. First, parents are choosing home schooling over public schooling because public schools are not meeting student†s academic needs. Parents expect their child will learn to read, write, and acquire basic math skills by the time they graduate. However, public schools throughout the United States are failing to teach these basic academic skills. Recent studies appear to show that many who graduate, as many as 25%, cannot read or write at an eighth grade level. This is a tragic statistic for a nation claiming to be so developed. There are more opportunities to gain an education in the United States than any other country in the world, yet evidence seems to shows that the United States rank at the bottom of industrial nations in reading, writing, and arithmetic. In addition, students are said to be ranking lower than ever on Academic Achievement Tests. Children who attend public schools rank in the â€Å"average zone† whereas, home schooled children typically score above average. To add to this common bit of knowledge the press has recently reported the startling news that children schooled at home seemed to be five or more years ahead, of their formally trained peers, in their ability to think. These statistics prove that home schooled children are doing better in all academic areas compared to children attending public schools. Secondly, parents are choosing home schooling over public schooling because public schools are no longer taking a student†s individual needs into consideration. Since students are taught lessons based on an academic calendar year, they are expected to be able to complete specific tasks by the end of that year. When students fail to meet these expectations they are required to repeat the same grade the following school year, or worse yet, passed on without ever gaining the needed skill. For example, at the end of a school year if a student is having difficulties reading but doing well in other subjects he or she will be required to repeat the same grade or will be passed on continually without ever learning how to read. If students were properly tutored in the areas they are having difficulties in they would not have to repeat the same grades or graduate without the tools necessary to be successful. Unfortunately public schools do not give special tutoring to students like they once did. Teachers in the public school systems are teaching students as though they are on an assembly line. They no longer have time to work one on one with them. Unlike public schooling, home schooling allows parents to teach in a style and at a pace that best fits their child†s needs. Home schooled children are not held back in the same grade if they are lagging behind in particular subjects. Their parents can move them to the next grade and tutor them in the subjects they are having trouble with. Children who are home schooled also get individual attention from their parents. They do not have to worry about waiting for their teacher to find time to help them. It is becoming apparent to many parents that home schooling meets the individual needs of their child better than public schooling. Finally, parents of children with physical and mental disabilities are finding that home schooling meets their child†s handicap needs better than public schooling. A major downfall of public schooling is that handicapped students are graded in the same style as the rest of the students. In public schools, children with handicaps are still expected to complete all of their assignments in the same given time as other students. Teachers are not taking these children†s handicaps into consideration. For example, children with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) have trouble staying focused and are easily distracted. As a result of constantly being distracted, they are not able to complete their assignments. This type of grading style has become a great concern for parents of disabled children. Because of situations like this one, parents are making decisions to teach their disabled children at home. By teaching their children at home they are in an environment that is equipped to aid in their development. For instance, children with ADD are in an environment where they will not be influenced by the action of other children and cannot be as easily distracted. In addition, they have special time to complete their assignments, as well as have all of their assignments tailored to fit their abilities and needs. By home schooling, children with learning disabilities are given equal chances of succeeding in their education which they otherwise would not get in public schooling. Public schools may have been the center for learning years ago. However, today they are not meeting children†s academic, individual, and disability needs. As a result, parents are choosing to educate their children through home schooling. Reports show that home schooled children are ahead of children who attend public schools by a noticeable degree. In addition, disabled children are having their needs met better at home than in public schools. They are being given an equal chance at succeeding in their academic endeavors. Parents are choosing home schooling because it currently offers the best solution to their problems facing the public school systems.

Design of Fuzzy Controller

Design of fuzzy controller for two tank interacting system Mohamed sabith KT Second year M. tech Dept of Electrical Engineering NIT Calicut Calicut, India [email  protected] com Dr. Abraham T Mathew Professor, Dept of Electrical Engineering NIT Calicut Calicut, India [email  protected] ac. in Abstract—The control of liquid level in tanks and flow between tanks is a basic problem in the process Industries. Vital industries such as Petro-chemical industries, Paper making industries, Water treatment industries have the coupled tanks processes. The level of fluid in the tanks and interaction between tanks must be controlled.The aim of the project is to model the the coupled two tank liquid level system and to design a fuzzy controller. For coupled tank systems with non linear and complex characteristics classical PID is difficult to achieve the desired response. Fuzzy logic control is a classic method by which dynamic performance and strong robustness is guaranteed. The projec t compares the performance of the two tank system with classical PID and fuzzy logic control. Index Terms—PID, fuzzy logic, steady state Introduction through two separate pumps whose output is throttled using a control valve.Separate disturbance are made to both the tanks using hand valves. The two tanks are connected by means of hand valve, so the level of tank 1 will affect the tank 2 and vice versa. So this is a highly non linear system. Flow transmitters and pressure transmitters are there which give indication of flow and level respectively in a scale of 4-20 mA. The input from this sensors are taken to a computer which is process by a software in which controller is implemented which will give necessary control signal to throttle the control valve to get the necessary level.A Coupled tanks process is found in the many industries. Generally, The TITO processes have the problems to control their systems because of the existence of interactions between input and output var iables. Many control methods such as 2DOF PID [1], Auto tuning PID [2], CDM [3] and Decoupling [4] have been applied to coupled tanks processes for solving their problems. This paper presents control of two tank interacting system with the help of classical PID and Fuzzy control. The paper is organized as follows.The next section gives details about Coupled-tank process. Section 3 explains about modeling of two tank interacting system. Section 4 explains PID based control. Section 5 explains an implementation of Fuzzy Controller for coupled tank process. Section 6 shows experiment process and results. Finally, conclusions are given in section 7. COUPLED TANK SYSTEM MODELLING OF A TWO TANK INTERACTING SYSTEM Consider the coupled tank, two-input two-output process . The target is to control level of two tanks by the inlet water flow from two pumps P1and P2.The process inputs are flow rate of two pumps u1(t)and u2(t) which is throttled using control valves. The nonlinear plant equation s can be obtained by mass balance equation The overall material balance on the cylindrical tank is: Rate of mass accumulation in the system = rate of mass entering in the system- rate of mass leaving the system There for the dynamics of the tank system can be written as The coupled tank apparatus is shown in the Figure 1. 1. The apparatus is a model consisting of a pump, two cylindrical tanks made of plexiglas, two control valves, and two level transmitters .The two tanks are installed in a manner as shown in the fig 2. 1The water input to both the tank is provided 1 1 = ? 1 ? 1 ? 2 ? ? 1 + ? ( 2 ? ? 2 ? (2 ? ? 1( ) 2 2 = ? 2 ? 2 ? 2 ? ? 2 + ? ( 2 ? ? ( 1 ? 2 ? ? 2 Where A is the cross section area of tank 1 and tank 2, a is the cross section area of outlet hole of tank 1and tank 2 and cross section area of jointed pipe between tank 1 and tank 2 , ? 1 is the valve ratio at the outlet of tank 1, ? 2 is the valve ratio at the outlet of tank 2, ? x is the valve ratio between tank 1 and tank 2. k1,k2 are the gain of the pump. The above equations can be converted to transfer function form and a transfer matrix of the form is obtained. ?1( ) 11( ) 12( ) = ? 2( ) 21( ) 22( ) 1( ) 2( ) nteraction between processes, the control design needs the decoupling controllers to minimize the cross coupling effects Because of the interaction between processes, the control design needs the decoupling controllers to minimize the cross coupling effects The decoupling controllers consist of two decouplers d12 and d21 . The purpose of using decouple is to decouple the multivariable system. This can be done by choosing the following transfer function. D21=-G21/G22 D12=-G12/G11 SIMULINK SIMULATION OF COUPLED TANK SYSTEM WITH PID CONTROL AND DECOUPLERS The modeled coupled tank system was simulated using simulink .G11 represent the dynamics of the tank 1 ,similarly G22 represent the dynamics of tank2. G12 represent the effect of level of tan k 2 on tank1,and G21 represent the effect of level of tank 1 on tank 2. Due to high interaction between the tanks ,its difficult to control with ordinary PID. So as to avoid the interaction Decouplers were introduced. The advantage with the decoupler is that separate PID controllers can be designed for individual loops. Two individual PID controllers were designed for the two loops and tuning of the controllers were also performed.Tank 1 is subjected to a setpoint input of 15cm at time of 30 seconds and it is having an setpoint of 5cm. Similarly Tank 2 is subjected to a setpoint input of 25cm at time of 50 seconds and it is having an initial setpoint of 10. The response of the simulated system is shown in fig below,both the level of tank 1 and tank 2 follows the setpoint with small peak overshoot. Where h1, h2 are the liquid level in two tanks and u1,u2 are the input into the two tank . Where transfer matrix Gij(s)has the value as following G11(s)= 1 + 2 + 2 1 + +2 1 2 1 1 1 2 + +( + + ) 1 2 1 2 1 2 G22(s)= 2 + 1 + 1 1 + 2 +2 1 2 1 1 1 2 + +( + + ) 1 2 1 2 1 2 2 1 1 + 2 +2 1 2 1 1 1 2 + +( + + ) 1 2 1 2 1 G12(S)= G21(S)= 1 1 1 + 2 +2 1 2 1 1 1 2 + +( + + ) 1 2 1 2 1 2 Design of Decouplers The theoretically modeled system was simulated using simulink as shown in fig. below . G11(s) represents the tank 1 and G22(s) represents the tank 2. The effect of tank 1 on tank 2 is given by G21(s) and the effect of tank 2 on tank 1 is given by G12(s). This coupled tank system is having high interaction and it also exhibits non linear characterstics.Because of the The input variable error(e) is shown below,for all these inputs five membership functions are used. The five membership functions are NB,N,Z,P,PB. Fuzzy controller The traditional control, which includes the classical feedback control , has encountered many difficulties in its applications. The design and analysis of traditional control systems are based on their preci se mathematical models, which are usually very difficult to achieve owing to the complexity, nonlinearity, time varying and incomplete characteristics of the existing practical systems.One of the most effective ways to solve the problem is to use the technique of intelligent control system, or hybrid methodology of the traditional and ntelligent control techniques. The output variable is shown below As i have 2 inputs with 5 membership functions,I used 25 rules(IF THEN ). The surface of the rulebase is as shown below The above fig shows how a fuzzy controller is implemented . The Fuzzy controller takes two input and have one output, error and rate of change of error are given as input to the fuzzy controller . depending on the input the fuzzy controller produces required control action.For all input and output triangular membership functions are used. The input rate of change of error(de) is shown below The two tank system with fuzzy controller is subjected to an input,the first tan k is set to a initial level of 5cm then it is subjected to a step change of 15 cm at 25 seconds,for the second tank it is set to a initial level of 10 cm and final level of 20 cm. With fuzzy controller the outputs obtained is as shown below [1] Suparoek Kangwanrat1, Vittaya Tipsuwannaporn ? Design of PI Controller Using MRAC Techniques for Coupled-Tanks Process? International Conference on Control, Automation and Systems 2010 Oct. 7-30, 2010 in KINTEX, Gyeonggido, Korea [2] V. R. Ravi , T. Thyagarajan ? Application of Adaptive Control Technique to Interacting Non Linear Systems† IEEE Transactions On Systems, Man, And Cybernetics—Part B: Cybernetics, 33( ), 2003, 514–521 [3] [3] Dr. S. AbrahamLincon, P. Selvakumar ? Design of PI Controller using Characteristic Ratio Assignment Method for Coupled Tank SISO Process? International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887) Volume 25– No. 9, July 2011 [4] Li LIANG ? The application of fuzzy PID contr oller in coupled-tank liquid-level control system?IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 25-35, 2010 [5] Jutarut Chaorai-ngern, Arjin Numsomran, Taweepol Suesut, Thanit Trisuwannawat and Vittaya Tipsuwanporn ?PID Controller Design using Characteristic Ratio Assignment Method for Coupled-Tank Process.? Proceedings of the 2005 International Conference on Computational Intelligence for Modelling, Control and Automation CONCLUSION The output obtained for fuzzy controller doesnot show peak overshoot as in th case of a PID controller ,the problem observed with fuzzy controller is that small oscillations will be prescent at steady state REFERENCES

Living in a Stop and Frisk World

Living in a Stop and Frisk World Today around 1,400 citizens in New York City will have their constitutional rights violated through an unlawful search. The legal term for the controversial search is stop and frisk. The New York Police Department continues to pressure its officers to stop and frisk citizens, and these situations are happening at an alarmingly increasing rate. For the New York Police Department, it seems to be a game of numbers as they continue to force their officers to conduct stop and frisks through quotas (Gangi).While New York City has seen a decrease in crime over Mayor Bloomberg's term, it is difficult to directly correlate the stop and frisk policy with these decreases. This unlawful practice needs to stop as it is a controversial practice that many people believe is a direct violation of the human rights inherent for citizens. Furthermore, it could turn New York City into a police state. If an officer does not fill his monthly quota of stops, summons or arres ts, he is subject to discipline (Gangi). Often, this discipline will leave a unsettling paper trail behind the officer and prevent them from being able to move up in the ranking.This commonality has been explained by many New York Police Department officers confidentially in, â€Å"The Hunted and the Hated: An Inside Look at the NYPD's Stop-and-Frisk. † Last year, nearly 686,000 people were stopped on the street; a startling increase from only 97,000 in 2002. This amounts to a 600% increase in stops in less than ten years, and searches will continue to increase as the police department tries to keep these numbers up every year (Gangi). Factually speaking, the number has increased every single year since Mayor Bloomberg took office (Long).Crime is down, but can it accurately be attributed to an increase of stop and frisks? Stop and frisk can not be directly and certainly not solely attributed to the decrease of crime. Additionally, stop and frisk is highly subject to racial pr ofiling. Both Tuttle of TheNation. com and Lieberman of New York Civil Liberties Union agree that the stop and frisk program is a waste of resources, explaining its high failure rate: â€Å"the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program continues to have a 90 percent failure rate. It remains a tremendous waste of resources, sows mistrust between police and he communities they serve, and routinely violates fundamental rights. (Zelon)† These are key reasons why New York City is the only large metropolis using stop and frisk as their main crime deterrent. It is an aggressive practice that ruins the relationship between the community and police department (Gangi). Ruthless practices such as stop and frisk are alienating the minority communities and terrorizing the youth. Police have admitted to targeting areas where crime is highest, but the stop and frisk approach ruins any opportunity for help from the community directly.These officers are stationed in parts of New York City that the y are disconnected from outside of work. The community knows their area best, yet the officers garner little respect amongst the community. When a community member sees something, they are less likely to say anything to the abusive New York Police Department (Eterno). Furthermore, this puts the officers in much more danger and results in a much more aggressive and assertive force as a result. Not to mention, community members are more willing to follow the law if they believe the system is fair and equal.Sociologist Tom Tyler’s research on this matter has concluded that people often obey laws in which they consider fair and legitimate; these stop and frisk police encounters are seens as unfair and racial (Braid). Community policing is a key aspect to crime fighting, and both Washington and Los Angeles have made it a main focus of their crime stopping strategy. From 2002 to 2012, New York City has had a 12% decrease in murders annually, and during the same period, Washington s aw a 43% decrease and Los Angeles had a 50% decrease in murders.Both cities have taken a less aggressive approach and focused on a less aggressive community driven strategy. Unlike New York City, these cities focus on building up communities and targeting key violent factors (Gangi). Being apart of the community as a police officer lets you work with community members living within the area and target the direct source of violence and crime. Truants within the community are at the highest risk of becoming juvenile offenders. With such hatred from the ommunity, the police department does not get information or leads about these truants until they’re in police hands for committing a crime . Not to mention, these communities become so violent due to only 2 or 3% of the population (Baird). Additionally, as the officers continue to press the streets, they are unable to work with the communities and violence ensues once again. Breaking these community lines is a waste of resources and is costing taxpayers millions of dollars every year.This policy is not only harming and scaring our youth, but it’s estimated that for every 100,000 stops it costs the taxpayers of New York 10 million dollars (Howell). Last year, New York City and the New York Police Department stopped over 650,000 people and accumulated hundreds of lawsuits for its racial and aggressive tactics (Tuttle). Under the law, suspects must appear to be committing a crime or about to commit a crime. Unfortunately, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin has uncovered â€Å"overwhelming evidence that there in fact exists a centralized stop and frisk program that has led to thousands of unlawful stops. Eterno)† Thousands of stops being performed unlawfully will turn into suits against the City of New York. Taxpayers do not want to pay for a program that is constitutionally illegal, has an extremely high failure rate and publicly targets minorities. Since New York City is the largest city in the United St ates, the police department should be a role model for other cities. Instead, the New York Police Department actively practices racial profiling, working against communities rather than in conjunction with them.At first, the aggressive stop and frisk program lowered illegal guns on the street. More recently, however, Mayor Bloomberg has taken it too far by turning the program into a regulated, quota-driven exercise that has effectively used racial profiling and intimidation as a scare tactic against minorities. If New York City is to be proactive in lowering its crime rate, it ought to focus on building communities, endorsing community leaders, and no longer allowing its Police Department to engage in the controversial stop and frisk program.

Amaranth Advisors

Amaranth Advisors LLC was created in 2000 as a multi-strategy hedge fund with approximately $600 million in capital. It sought to employ a diverse group of arbitrage trading strategies particularly featuring convertible bonds, mergers and utilities. In 2002, Amaranth added energy commodity trading to its slate of strategies with JP Morgan Chase clearing Amaranth’s commodity trades. A multi-strategy fund runs several different strategies in-house that contribute to the total performance of the fund. A single-strategy fund concentrates the whole portfolio on one strategy. Amaranth was long natural gas futures. They enjoyed huge profits from natural gas futures and option trades in 2005 and early 2006. Brian Hunter used borrowed money to double-down on his bets. Buying more futures contracts of this same kind supported their price by increasing demand, which then increased the price gains. It seemed that Brian Hunter was acting on his own entity and that there was little to no communication between the star trader and the management team. Even though the firm emphasized that its fund was multi-strategy, most of the recent losses were driven by adverse natural gas trades. Prior to this debacle, most investors who viewed reports from this firm saw no reason to worry about its performance although some privy to their portfolio positions expressed concern. Amaranth’s misfortunes were solely a result of poor risk management. Also, even though the firm lost over $6 billion in a matter of days, the losses had minimal impact in the industry as a whole. The hearings on natural gas speculation by the permanent subcommittee on investigations of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs clearly demonstrate that the Amaranth debacle could have been easily avoided had ICE like NYMEX had the ability to limit Amaranth positions. In 2006, NYMEX examined Amaranth’s positions and calculated that Amaranth held about 51% of the open interest in the September natural gas futures contract which would expire at the end of the month. NYMEX determined that this was too large and on August 8 NYMEX compliance officials notified Amaranth of their concerns. During a follow up notification on August 9 NYMEX further notified Amaranth that they should not reduce September positions simply by shifting those positions to the October contract. Amaranth complied with NYMEX’s directions and subsequently reduced its September and October positions. However, at the same time Amaranth increased its positions in September and October in ICE contracts and as a results increased their overall positions in natural gas. The events that followed in late August and September led to huge losses with Amaranth losing significant value. The losses were created due to overconfidence, lack of transparency, and lack of risk management. Amaranth enjoyed huge profits and thought prices would just keep rising. There was no communication between Hunter and the management team. Also, investors had no knowledge that the majority of the portfolio was invested in natural gas positions. Leverage played a huge role in the losses. A hedge fund will typically borrow money, with certain funds borrowing sums many times greater than the initial investment. If a hedge fund has borrowed $9 for every $1 received from investors, a loss of only 10% of the value of the investments of the hedge fund will wipe out 100% of the value of the investor's stake in the fund, once the creditors have called in their loans. Risk management at Amaranth failed in August and September of 2006, resulting in the massive loss of over $5 billion in about a week. In the commodities markets only 10 percent was required as collateral for margin calls. Amaranth could also borrow at up to eight times assets to achieve massive amounts of leverage. Amaranth’s systems didn’t appear to measure correctly how much risk it faced and what steps would limit losses effectively. The risk models use historic data but the natural gas markets were more volatile in 2006, which made models useless. Amaranth used spread trades in natural gas futures and options markets to hedge their bets and control risk. Still, these spreads can widen and losses can increase. Going forward, appropriate due diligence should be done by the management team to make sure this does not happen again. Amaranth could have also protected with better downside protection such as put options.

Social Media Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words - 1

Social Media - Essay Example Social media in businessBusiness executives use social media in advertising, networking, and marketing via blogs. Company and products adverts on social sites to target customers who frequently use the social sites. Customers communicate with the company via these social sites in a less formal way. Users can get good business deals and ideas from their friends who are on the social networks as they interact.Many political blogs responding to mainstream news released via radios or TVs are now available in the social media. They are also using the social media to campaign for elections at the grassroots or national level. The uprising and ousting of political leaders in the northern-Africa Islamic countries were made possible by social site.Social media used in educationSocial media subscriptions can provide homework assignments, assigning reading materials thus enhancing e-learning and up-to-date information. Social media has enabled students to carry out projects beyond individual ca pabilities together.Social media in entertainmentiPhones and blackberries equally contain music and games for entertainment. Some social sites such as MySpace are entertainment oriented. TVs are also playing different genres of music for entertainment.Social media for charitable activitiesDonations to the Haiti earthquake via the social media were overwhelming. Social media is also used in delivering source news. Social media has specifically provided news to millions of people.

Family Law Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words - 3

Family Law - Essay Example The treatment mentioned above includes any diagnostic procedures and anaesthetic administration ancillary to the main treatment. As per section 12 of the Act, an infant can also be described as a minor.2 However, this right of consent for children over 16 but below 18 is not absolute. As family law is of discretionary nature , all previously decided cases need not constitute precedents to be binding on judges who are expected to decide by giving weightage to cases independently for the unique factors surrounding them. It does not imply, however, that case law comprises of unconnected decisions since judges functioning with wide discretion develop particular â€Å"patterns, rules of thumb and general principles.† Therefore, there are limits within which judges can firm up their discretion. Thus when there is no guidance from the legislature, courts have assumed to act giving due regard to â€Å"fair outcome and â€Å"best interests of the child.3 Courts also draw guidance fro m the international treaties even though some of them may not have been adopted in domestic law. Thus, the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989 (UNRC) which the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) also consults for interpretation of article 8 of the ECHR.4 that governs the rights of children. Parekh5 points out that law relating to the child’s consent is not yet clear as far as â€Å"best interests of the child† is concerned. He quotes the authors Kennedy and Grub 6 as having classified the child development into three stages of early childhood, Gillick competent child and the child of 16-18 years of age. Consent by children under 16 years of age is not clear as it is governed by the common law. Consent is valid one only if given by persons having capacity to decide. Hence, during the first stage of development of childhood, parent alone can consent for medical or surgical treatment. In the second stage of Gillick competent child which case will be