In Defense of a Principled Judiciary

For decades, the justices themselves undermined the honor which ought to be afforded the third branch of the federal government as they regularly exceeded the proper, limited but vitally important role they ought to play. October term after October term, the justices acted as a permanent constitutional convention, disrupting legislative accommodations and settled precedent with regularity

Online peer support for students

While many UK higher education institutions have websites offering information and advice on common student problems, interactive online support is less common. This article describes a project developing internet-based mutual support for students experiencing psychological problems at University College London

An automated classification approach to ranking photospheric proxies of magnetic energy build-up

We study the photospheric magnetic field of ~2000 active regions in solar cycle 23 to search for parameters indicative of energy build-up and subsequent release as a solar flare. We extract three sets of parameters: snapshots in space and time- total flux, magnetic gradients, and neutral lines; evolution in time- flux evolution; structures at multiple size scales- wavelet analysis. This combines pattern recognition and classification techniques via a relevance vector machine to determine whether a region will flare. We consider classification performance using all 38 extracted features and several feature subsets. Classification performance is quantified using both the true positive rate and the true negative rate. Additionally, we compute the true skill score which provides an equal weighting to true positive rate and true negative rate and the Heidke skill score to allow comparison to other flare forecasting work. We obtain a true skill score of ~0.5 for any predictive time window in the range 2-24hr, with a TPR of ~0.8 and a TNR of ~0.7. These values do not appear to depend on the time window, although the Heidke skill score (<0.5) does. Features relating to snapshots of the distribution of magnetic gradients show the best predictive ability over all predictive time windows. Other gradient-related features and the instantaneous power at various wavelet scales also feature in the top five ranked features in predictive power. While the photospheric magnetic field governs the coronal non-potentiality (and likelihood of flaring), photospheric magnetic field alone is not sufficient to determine this uniquely. Furthermore we are only measuring proxies of the magnetic energy build up. We still lack observational details on why energy is released at any particular point in time. We may have discovered the natural limit of the accuracy of flare predictions from these large scale studies

Active surveillance for favorable-risk prostate cancer: Is there a greater psychological impact than previously thought? A systematic, mixed studies literature review.

OBJECTIVE: Active surveillance (AS) allows men with favorable-risk prostate cancer to avoid or postpone active treatment and hence spares potential adverse effects for a significant proportion of these patients. Active surveillance may create an additional emotional burden for these patients. The aim of the review was to determine the psychological impact of AS to inform future study in this area and to provide recommendations for clinical practice. METHODS: Studies were identified through database searching from inception to September 2015. Quantitative or qualitative noninterventional studies published in English that assessed the psychological impact of AS were included. The Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool was used to assess methodological quality. RESULTS: Twenty-three papers were included (20 quantitative and 3 qualitative). Quantitatively, the majority of patients do not report psychological difficulties; however, when appropriateness of study design is considered, the conclusion that AS has minimal impact on well-being may not be accurate. This is due to small sample sizes, inappropriately timed baseline, and inappropriate/lack of comparison groups. In addition, a mismatch in outcome was noted between the outcome of quantitative and qualitative studies in uncertainty, with qualitative studies indicating a greater psychological impact. CONCLUSIONS: Because of methodological concerns, many quantitative studies may not provide a true account of the burden of AS. Further mixed-methods studies are necessary to address the limitations highlighted and to provide clarity on the impact of AS. Practitioners should be aware that despite findings of previous reviews, patients may require additional emotional support

Low hazard small-scale synthesis and chemical analysis of high purity nitroglycerine (NG)

A previously reported two-phase (99.5% fuming nitric acid/dichloromethane) batch method to prepare high purity 1,2,3-propanetriyl trinitrate (nitroglycerine, NG) was evaluated, simplified and adapted specifically for low hazard small-scale synthesis. The purity of the product, as determined by NMR spectroscopy, HPLC and IR spectroscopic analysis was found to be greater than 99%. The quick synthetic method is highly recommended when small amounts of highly pure NG are required for analytical and related purposes in the absence of a microreactor