Pragmatics in legal interpretation

How should pragmatic dimensions of meaning be understood when they occur in the frequently normative use of language in law? In this chapter, referring principally to common law systems, we outline how pragmatic issues arise in the interpretation of legal texts; we describe how legal interpretation has treated indirect and implied meaning; and we ask how far dialogue between linguistic pragmatics and law can enrich thinking and practice in each of these fields

Cost and impact of scaling up interventions to save lives of mothers and children: taking South Africa closer to MDGs 4 and 5

KIMBACKGROUND:South Africa has made substantial progress on child and maternal mortality, yet many avoidable deaths of mothers and children still occur. This analysis identifies priority interventions to be scaled up nationally and projects the potential maternal and child lives saved. DESIGN: We modelled the impact of maternal, newborn and child interventions using the Lives Saved Tools Projections to 2015 and used realistic coverage increases based on expert opinion considering recent policy change, financial and resource inputs, and observed coverage change. A scenario analysis was undertaken to test the impact of increasing intervention coverage to 95%. RESULTS:By 2015, with realistic coverage, the maternal mortality ratio (MMR) can reduce to 153 deaths per 100,000 and child mortality to 34 deaths per 1,000 live births. Fifteen interventions, including labour and delivery management, early HIV treatment in pregnancy, prevention of mother-to-child transmission and handwashing with soap, will save an additional 9,000 newborns and children and 1,000 mothers annually. An additional US$370 million (US$7 per capita) will be required annually to scale up these interventions. When intervention coverage is increased to 95%, breastfeeding promotion becomes the top intervention, the MMR reduces to 116 and the child mortality ratio to 23

Convexity criteria and uniqueness of absolutely minimizing functions

We show that absolutely minimizing functions relative to a convex Hamiltonian $H:\mathbb{R}^n \to \mathbb{R}$ are uniquely determined by their boundary values under minimal assumptions on $H.$ Along the way, we extend the known equivalences between comparison with cones, convexity criteria, and absolutely minimizing properties, to this generality. These results perfect a long development in the uniqueness/existence theory of the archetypal problem of the calculus of variations in $L^\infty.$Comment: 34 page

Texas charter school legislation and the evolution of open-enrollment charter schools.

This article chronicles the evolution of legislation for Texas open-enrollment charter schools to their implementation by demonstrating how these schools have (or have not) used their freedom from state-mandated requirements to develop innovative learning environments as well as to bring innovative curricula into the classroom. The investigative focus was on an analysis of Texas open-enrollment charter school legislation, from 1995 (74th legislative session) to the 77th legislative session in 2001, and the characteristics of the state's 159 open-enrollment charter schools that were in operation during the 2001-2002 academic year. The authors found that charter school legislation has changed in response to concerns of all involved, and focuses on the need for balance between choice, innovation, and public accountability. Although charter schools are free from most state regulations, legislators were clearly interested in ensuring that this freedom does not impede charter schools' ability to provide a quality education to all students who attend them. The currently operating open-enrollment charter schools in Texas are more racially and economically segregated than other public schools in the state, and charter schools that targeted students most at risk for dropping out of school (and returning students who had previously dropped out) differ from other schools in their stated teaching methods. Teacher turnover remains significantly greater than that for other public schools in the state. However, it does not appear to be specifically associated with schools that target disadvantaged students or minority students. The schools' mission statements suggest that innovative school environments are a factor in school design. Texas is poised to continue along the public education choice model. Charter school legislation provides a framework upon which charter schools may build to meet the educational needs of the students who choose to attend them, including the freedom to be creative in meeting students' unique needs. Questions remain about how and why charter schools exist and the contributions they make to the overall public school system, including whether charters are making a difference in what and how much children are learning

Fracture healing following high energy tibial trauma: Ilizarov versus Taylor Spatial Frame

Introduction: The optimal treatment of high energy tibial fractures remains controversial and a challenging orthopaedic problem. The role of external fi xators for all these tibial fractures has been shown to be crucial. Methods: A fi ve-year consecutive series was reviewed retrospectively, identifying two treatment groups: Ilizarov and Taylor Spatial Frame (TSF; Smith & Nephew, Memphis, TN, US). Fracture healing time was the primary outcome measure. Results: A total of 112 patients (85 Ilizarov, 37 TSF) were identifi ed for the review with a mean age of 45 years. This was higher in women (57 years) than in men (41 years). There was no signifi cant difference between frame types (p=0.83). The median healing time was 163 days in both groups. There was no signifi cant difference in healing time between smokers and non-smokers (180 vs 165 days respectively, p=0.07), open or closed fractures (p=0.13) or age and healing time (Spearman's r=0.12, p=0.18). There was no incidence of non-union or re-fracture following frame removal in either group. Conclusions: Despite the assumption of the rigid construct of the TSF, the median time to union was similar to that of the Ilizarov frame and the TSF therefore can play a signifi cant role in complex tibial fractures

Detergent and sanitizer stresses decrease the thermal resistance of Enterobacter sakazakii in infant milk formula

Infant milk formula has been identified as a potential source of Enterobacter sakazakii. This bacterium can cause a severe form of neonatal meningitis and necrotizing entercolitis. This study determined the effect of acid, alkaline, chlorine and ethanol stresses on the thermal inactivation of E. sakazakii in infant milk formula. Stressed cells were mixed with reconstituted powdered infant milk formula (PIMF) at temperatures between 52 and 58°C for various time periods or mixed with PFMF prior to reconstitution with water at temperatures between 50 and 100°C. The D- and z-values of the cells were determined using linear regression analysis. Detergent and sanitizer stresses decreased the thermal resistance of E. sakazakii in powdered and reconstituted infant milk formula. The values for Z)- acid, alkaline, chlorine and ethanol stressed E. sakazakii at 52-58°C were 14.57-0.54, 12.07-0.37, 10.08-0.40 and 11.61-0.50 min, respectively. The values of alkaline, chlorine and ethanol stressed cells were significantly lower than those of unstressed cells. Only the z-value (4.4°C) of ethanol stressed E. sakazakii was significantly different than that of unstressed cells (4.12°C). Reconstitution at 60°C did not significantly reduce the number of pre-stressed E. sakazakii cells compared with unstressed control cells, whereas significant decreases were obtained at 70°C. Using water at 70°C during the preparation of reconstituted PIMF before feeding infants, may be a suitable and applicable means of reducing the risk of E. sakazakii in the formula. The results of this study may be of use to regulatory agencies, infant milk producers and infant caregivers to design heating processes to eliminate E. sakazakii that may be present in infant milk formula

Joint Learning of Intrinsic Images and Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation of outdoor scenes is problematic when there are variations in imaging conditions. It is known that albedo (reflectance) is invariant to all kinds of illumination effects. Thus, using reflectance images for semantic segmentation task can be favorable. Additionally, not only segmentation may benefit from reflectance, but also segmentation may be useful for reflectance computation. Therefore, in this paper, the tasks of semantic segmentation and intrinsic image decomposition are considered as a combined process by exploring their mutual relationship in a joint fashion. To that end, we propose a supervised end-to-end CNN architecture to jointly learn intrinsic image decomposition and semantic segmentation. We analyze the gains of addressing those two problems jointly. Moreover, new cascade CNN architectures for intrinsic-for-segmentation and segmentation-for-intrinsic are proposed as single tasks. Furthermore, a dataset of 35K synthetic images of natural environments is created with corresponding albedo and shading (intrinsics), as well as semantic labels (segmentation) assigned to each object/scene. The experiments show that joint learning of intrinsic image decomposition and semantic segmentation is beneficial for both tasks for natural scenes. Dataset and models are available at: https://ivi.fnwi.uva.nl/cv/intrinsegComment: ECCV 201

Exploiting temporal information for 3D pose estimation

In this work, we address the problem of 3D human pose estimation from a sequence of 2D human poses. Although the recent success of deep networks has led many state-of-the-art methods for 3D pose estimation to train deep networks end-to-end to predict from images directly, the top-performing approaches have shown the effectiveness of dividing the task of 3D pose estimation into two steps: using a state-of-the-art 2D pose estimator to estimate the 2D pose from images and then mapping them into 3D space. They also showed that a low-dimensional representation like 2D locations of a set of joints can be discriminative enough to estimate 3D pose with high accuracy. However, estimation of 3D pose for individual frames leads to temporally incoherent estimates due to independent error in each frame causing jitter. Therefore, in this work we utilize the temporal information across a sequence of 2D joint locations to estimate a sequence of 3D poses. We designed a sequence-to-sequence network composed of layer-normalized LSTM units with shortcut connections connecting the input to the output on the decoder side and imposed temporal smoothness constraint during training. We found that the knowledge of temporal consistency improves the best reported result on Human3.6M dataset by approximately $12.2\%$ and helps our network to recover temporally consistent 3D poses over a sequence of images even when the 2D pose detector fails