Missing the Forest for the Trees: Forest Grove School District v. T.A.

[Excerpt] “The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) guarantees children who qualify as children with disabilities the right to receive a free appropriate public education (FAPE). There are many points at which parents and school districts may disagree regarding the provision of a FAPE, but as the U.S. Supreme Court has determined in Forest Grove School District v. T.A., when parents and a school district disagree regarding whether children should be identified as children with disabilities, an appropriate remedy could be tuition reimbursement.

Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) applied to Pathology Residency Training

JiTT is an active teaching and learning strategy that combines web-based assignments with classroom learning. JiTT sessions can be limited to one-hour; each learning activity is an event by itself and it can be used in small groups composed of learners with heterogeneous backgrounds previously exposed to the material. The main strengths of JiTT are the ability to make student thinking visible, help develop expert-like thinking processes, improve transfer of knowledge and promote reflective learning. We demonstrate our experience in applying this learning strategy to Pathology resident teaching

A result of Hermite and equations of degree 5 and 6

A classical result from 1861 due to Hermite says that every separable equation of degree 5 can be transformed into an equation of the form x^5 + b x^3 + c x + d = 0. Later this was generalized to equations of degree 6 by Joubert. We show that both results can be understood as an explicit analysis of certain covariants of the symmetric groups S_5 and S_6. In case of degree 5, the classical invariant theory of binary forms of degree 5 comes into play whereas in degree 6 the existence of an outer automorphism of S_6 plays an essential role.Comment: 14 page

Buprenorphine in Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome.

Infants exposed in utero to opioids will demonstrate a withdrawal syndrome known as neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS). Buprenorphine is a long-acting opioid with therapeutic use in medication-assisted treatment of opioid dependency in adults and adolescents. Emerging data from clinical trials and treatment cohorts demonstrate the efficacy and safety of sublingual buprenorphine for those infants with NAS who require pharmacologic treatment. Pharmacometric modeling will assist in defining the exposure-response relationships and facilitate dose optimization

Degree bounds for separating invariants

If V is a representation of a linear algebraic group G, a set S of G-invariant regular functions on V is called separating if the following holds: If two elements v,v' from V can be separated by an invariant function, then there is an f from S such that f(v) is different from f(v'). It is known that there always exist finite separating sets. Moreover, if the group G is finite, then the invariant functions of degree <= |G| form a separating set. We show that for a non-finite linear algebraic group G such an upper bound for the degrees of a separating set does not exist. If G is finite, we define b(G) to be the minimal number d such that for every G-module V there is a separating set of degree less or equal to d. We show that for a subgroup H of G we have b(H) <= b(G) <= [G:H] b(H)$, and that b(G) <= b(G/H) b(H)$ in case H is normal. Moreover, we calculate b(G) for some specific finite groups.Comment: 11 page

A dynamic programming approach to constrained portfolios

This paper studies constrained portfolio problems that may involve constraints on the probability or the expected size of a shortfall of wealth or consumption. Our first contribution is that we solve the problems by dynamic programming, which is in contrast to the existing literature that applies the martingale method. More precisely, we construct the non-separable value function by formalizing the optimal constrained terminal wealth to be a (conjectured) contingent claim on the optimal non-constrained terminal wealth. This is relevant by itself, but also opens up the opportunity to derive new solutions to constrained problems. As a second contribution, we thus derive new results for non-strict constraints on the shortfall of inter¬mediate wealth and/or consumption