Comity and the International Application of the Sherman Act: Encouraging the Courts to Enter the Political Arena

In this article, Mr. Kadish discusses the comity analysis of Timberlane Lumber Company v. Bank of America, and examines what it involves, what it accomplishes, whether it is justified, and whether there are preferable alternatives to it. He concludes that the Timberlane analysis should rejected, or at least limited becauses its use to determine United States\u27 court jurisdiction is at best questionable, because it violates traditional abstention doctrine and current Supreme Court and Congressional treatment of foreigners\u27 activities, because there may be insurmountable practical difficulties in applying the analysis, and because the analysis encourages courts to enter the political arena

Conformance checking and performance improvement in scheduled processes: A queueing-network perspective

Service processes, for example in transportation, telecommunications or the health sector, are the backbone of today's economies. Conceptual models of service processes enable operational analysis that supports, e.g., resource provisioning or delay prediction. In the presence of event logs containing recorded traces of process execution, such operational models can be mined automatically.In this work, we target the analysis of resource-driven, scheduled processes based on event logs. We focus on processes for which there exists a pre-defined assignment of activity instances to resources that execute activities. Specifically, we approach the questions of conformance checking (how to assess the conformance of the schedule and the actual process execution) and performance improvement (how to improve the operational process performance). The first question is addressed based on a queueing network for both the schedule and the actual process execution. Based on these models, we detect operational deviations and then apply statistical inference and similarity measures to validate the scheduling assumptions, thereby identifying root-causes for these deviations. These results are the starting point for our technique to improve the operational performance. It suggests adaptations of the scheduling policy of the service process to decrease the tardiness (non-punctuality) and lower the flow time. We demonstrate the value of our approach based on a real-world dataset comprising clinical pathways of an outpatient clinic that have been recorded by a real-time location system (RTLS). Our results indicate that the presented technique enables localization of operational bottlenecks along with their root-causes, while our improvement technique yields a decrease in median tardiness and flow time by more than 20%

Comparison of Ventricular Refractory Periods Determined by Incremental and Decremental Scanning of an Extrastimulus

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73345/1/j.1540-8159.1989.tb02699.x.pd

Under-Represented Minorities and Medical School Admissions: Preference Factors That Influence the Decision to Matriculate

Currently, the need for the recruitment and retention of qualified Under-Represented Minority (URM) students remains a pressing concern for U.S. medical schools. In response to this need, we analyzed admissions data at our medical school to determine which factors may positively or negatively influence the decision of an URM applicant to matriculate at our school, when compared to their White/Asian counterparts. Presented at the AAMC (Association of American Colleges) Annual Meeting, RIME (Research in Medical Education) Program, November 2007

Advisor/Mentor Role in Guiding Future Primary Care Physicians

One component of UMMS’s mission is to provide affordable, high-quality medical education to state residents and to increase the number of PCPs practicing in underserved areas of the state. This study responds to our growing need to recruit future PCPs by investigating differences in relationships with advisors/mentors between those students who pursue a primary care residency and those who do not. Presented at the AAMC (Association of American Colleges) Annual Meeting, RIME (Research in Medical Education) Program, November 2009

Increasing the Depth of the Recruitment Pool for Future Women Academic Leaders: Should We Begin with Medical School Electives?

A 2002 report from the AAMC Project Implementation Committee indicated, “The pool from which to recruit women academic leaders remains shallow” (Bickel, et al., 2002). Since hen, much attention has been focused on improving conditions for women at the faculty level. Yet, few studies address the possibility that the medical school experience could impact the initial depth in this recruitment pool. Is there a trend in medical school that may be negatively impacting women’s success in pursuing a career in academia? Presented at the AAMC (Association of American Colleges) Annual Meeting, RIME (Research in Medical Education) Program, November 2006

Atlas-Based Analysis of Cardiac Shape and Function: Correction of Regional Shape Bias Due to Imaging Protocol for Population Studies

Background: Cardiovascular imaging studies generate a wealth of data which is typically used only for individual study endpoints. By pooling data from multiple sources, quantitative comparisons can be made of regional wall motion abnormalities between different cohorts, enabling reuse of valuable data. Atlas-based analysis provides precise quantification of shape and motion differences between disease groups and normal subjects. However, subtle shape differences may arise due to differences in imaging protocol between studies. Methods: A mathematical model describing regional wall motion and shape was used to establish a coordinate system registered to the cardiac anatomy. The atlas was applied to data contributed to the Cardiac Atlas Project from two independent studies which used different imaging protocols: steady state free precession (SSFP) and gradient recalled echo (GRE) cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR). Shape bias due to imaging protocol was corrected using an atlas-based transformation which was generated from a set of 46 volunteers who were imaged with both protocols. Results: Shape bias between GRE and SSFP was regionally variable, and was effectively removed using the atlas-based transformation. Global mass and volume bias was also corrected by this method. Regional shape differences between cohorts were more statistically significant after removing regional artifacts due to imaging protocol bias. Conclusions: Bias arising from imaging protocol can be both global and regional in nature, and is effectively corrected using an atlas-based transformation, enabling direct comparison of regional wall motion abnormalities between cohorts acquired in separate studies

Stratigraphy, Sequence, and Crater Populations of Lunar Impact Basins from Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) Data: Implications for the Late Heavy Bombardment

New measurements of the topography of the Moon from the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA)[1] provide an excellent base-map for analyzing the large crater population (D.20 km)of the lunar surface [2, 3]. We have recently used this data to calculate crater size-frequency distributions (CSFD) for 30 lunar impact basins, which have implications for their stratigraphy and sequence. These data provide an avenue for assessing the timing of the transitions between distinct crater populations characteristic of ancient and young lunar terrains, which has been linked to the late heavy bombardment (LHB). We also use LOLA data to re-examine relative stratigraphic relationships between key lunar basins

Residents Report on the Importance of an Undergraduate End of Life Interclerkship

Does the perceived value of a third year End of Life (EOL) Interclerkship change after medical students complete their first year of residency? Several research studies indicate students’ perceptions about specific learning experiences change after graduating from medical school. The value that medical students put on their education of end of life issues increases after they leave medical school. This finding highlights the importance of teaching end of life issues to undergraduate medical students. Presented at the AAMC (Association of American Colleges) Annual Meeting, RIME (Research in Medical Education) Program, November 2006

Information Maximizing Component Analysis of Left Ventricular Remodeling Due to Myocardial Infarction

Background: Although adverse left ventricular shape changes (remodeling) after myocardial infarction (MI) are predictive of morbidity and mortality, current clinical assessment is limited to simple mass and volume measures, or dimension ratios such as length to width ratio. We hypothesized that information maximizing component analysis (IMCA), a supervised feature extraction method, can provide more efficient and sensitive indices of overall remodeling. Methods: IMCA was compared to linear discriminant analysis (LDA), both supervised methods, to extract the most discriminatory global shape changes associated with remodeling after MI. Finite element shape models from 300 patients with myocardial infarction from the DETERMINE study (age 31–86, mean age 63, 20 % women) were compared with 1991 asymptomatic cases from the MESA study (age 44–84, mean age 62, 52 % women) available from the Cardiac Atlas Project. IMCA and LDA were each used to identify a single mode of global remodeling best discriminating the two groups. Logistic regression was employed to determine the association between the remodeling index and MI. Goodness-of-fit results were compared against a baseline logistic model comprising standard clinical indices. Results: A single IMCA mode simultaneously describing end-diastolic and end-systolic shapes achieved best results (lowest Deviance, Akaike information criterion and Bayesian information criterion, and the largest area under the receiver-operating-characteristic curve). This mode provided a continuous scale where remodeling can be quantified and visualized, showing that MI patients tend to present larger size and more spherical shape, more bulging of the apex, and thinner wall thickness. Conclusions: IMCA enables better characterization of global remodeling than LDA, and can be used to quantify progression of disease and the effect of treatment. These data and results are available from the Cardiac Atlas Project (http://www.cardiacatlas.org)