Objective paper structure comparison: Assessing comparison algorithms

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Forensic Science International. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Forensic Science International, 222, 1-3, (2012) DOI: 10.1016/j.forsciint.2012.07.018More than just being a substrate, paper can also provide evidence for the provenance of documents. An earlier paper described a method to compare paper structure, based on the Fourier power spectra of light transmission images. Good results were obtained by using the 2D correlation of images derived from the power spectra as a similarity score, but the method was very computationally intensive. Different comparison algorithms are evaluated in this paper, using information theoretical criteria. An angular invariant algorithm turned out to be as effective as the original one but 4 orders of magnitude faster, making the use of much larger databases possible

Methods of a national colorectal cancer cohort study: the PIPER Project

A national study looking at bowel cancer in New Zealand has previously been completed (the PIPER Project). The study included 5,610 patients and collected medical information about how each person was found to have bowel cancer and the treatment they received. This paper reports how the study was carried out. The information collected in the study will be used to look at the quality of care being provided to New Zealand patients with bowel cancer, and to find out if differences in care occur based on where people live, their ethnicity and their socioeconomic status

Expert Status and Performance

Expert judgements are essential when time and resources are stretched or we face novel dilemmas requiring fast solutions. Good advice can save lives and large sums of money. Typically, experts are defined by their qualifications, track record and experience [1], [2]. The social expectation hypothesis argues that more highly regarded and more experienced experts will give better advice. We asked experts to predict how they will perform, and how their peers will perform, on sets of questions. The results indicate that the way experts regard each other is consistent, but unfortunately, ranks are a poor guide to actual performance. Expert advice will be more accurate if technical decisions routinely use broadly-defined expert groups, structured question protocols and feedback

Measuring Risk Attitudes Controlling for Personality Traits*

Abstract: This study measures risk attitudes using two paid experiments: the Holt and Laury (2002) procedure and a variation of the game show Deal or No Deal. The participants also completed a series of personality questionnaires developed in the psychology literature including the risk domains of Weber, Blais, and Betz (2002). As in previous studies risk attitudes vary within subjects across elicitation methods. However, this variation can be explained by individual personality traits. Specifically, subjects behave as though the Holt and Laury task is an investment decision while the Deal or No Deal task is a gambling decision

Community Surveillance of Omicron in Ontario: Wastewater-based Epidemiology Comes of Age

Wastewater-based surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 RNA has been implemented at building, neighbourhood, and city levels throughout the world. Implementation strategies and analysis methods differ, but they all aim to provide rapid and reliable information about community COVID-19 health states. A viable and sustainable SARS-CoV-2 surveillance network must not only provide reliable and timely information about COVID-19 trends, but also provide for scalability as well as accurate detection of known or unknown emerging variants. Emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern Omicron in late Fall 2021 presented an excellent opportunity to benchmark individual and aggregated data outputs of the Ontario Wastewater Surveillance Initiative in Canada; this public health-integrated surveillance network monitors wastewaters from over 10 million people across major population centres of the province. We demonstrate that this coordinated approach provides excellent situational awareness, comparing favourably with traditional clinical surveillance measures. Thus, aggregated datasets compiled from multiple wastewater-based surveillance nodes can provide sufficient sensitivity (i.e., early indication of increasing and decreasing incidence of SARS-CoV-2) and specificity (i.e., allele frequency estimation of emerging variants) with which to make informed public health decisions at regional- and state-levels.Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks|| Genome Canada and Ontario Genomics (OGI-209)||NSERC (ALLRP 555041-20 to C.O.)||Ontario Clean Water Agenc

British Romanticism and the Global Climate

As a result of developments in the meteorological and geological sciences, the Romantic period saw the gradual emergence of attempts to understand the climate as a dynamic global system that could potentially be affected by human activity. This chapter examines textual responses to climate disruption cause by the Laki eruption of 1783 and the Tambora eruption of 1815. During the Laki haze, writers such as Horace Walpole, Gilbert White, and William Cowper found in Milton a powerful way of understanding the entanglements of culture and climate at a time of national and global crisis. Apocalyptic discourse continued to resonate during the Tambora crisis, as is evident in eyewitness accounts of the eruption, in the utopian predictions of John Barrow and Eleanor Anne Porden, and in the grim speculations of Byron’s ‘Darkness’. Romantic writing offers a powerful analogue for thinking about climate change in the Anthropocene