A Brief Look at Broward County Lawyers’ and Judges’ Attitudes Toward Plea Bargaining as a Tool of Courtroom Efficiency

Even the most rigidly ideological prosecutors acknowledge that they need to plea out most of the less serious criminal charges to ensure justice without incurring an unmanageable backlog of cases. But what do most criminal lawyers and judges think about the plea arrangment system? Is it fair to defendants? Do lawyers use plea bargains to better serve their clients by finding the best deal, or do they use plea bargains to cut their case load for what some call garbage cases? This paper surveys a small sample to see how 21st century Broward County criminal lawyers feel about the plea bargain system, and to compare their attitudes against attitudes measured by Milton Heumann in the mid-20th century Connecticut criminal justice environment. Lawyers and judges that are 40 years and 1,200 miles apart seem point at the same successes and failures of the American plea bargaining system. The paper also looks at the successes and failures of banning plea arrangements, as is the case in Alaska

Learning Word Representations with Hierarchical Sparse Coding

We propose a new method for learning word representations using hierarchical regularization in sparse coding inspired by the linguistic study of word meanings. We show an efficient learning algorithm based on stochastic proximal methods that is significantly faster than previous approaches, making it possible to perform hierarchical sparse coding on a corpus of billions of word tokens. Experiments on various benchmark tasks---word similarity ranking, analogies, sentence completion, and sentiment analysis---demonstrate that the method outperforms or is competitive with state-of-the-art methods. Our word representations are available at \url{http://www.ark.cs.cmu.edu/dyogatam/wordvecs/}

Efficacy and safety of triple drug fixed-dose combination of telmisartan, amlodipine and hydrochlorothiazide in the management of hypertension

Background: High blood pressure (BP) is the most prevalent chronic disease in India and its prevalence is rapidly increasing among urban and rural populations. This study was conducted to assess the efficacy and safety of triple drug fixed dose combination of Telmisartan 40 mg, Amlodipine 5 mg and Hydrochlorothiazide 12.5mg. Methods: 30 hypertensive patients having systolic blood pressure ≥ 160 mmHg and diastolic blood pressure ≥ 100 mmHg who were uncontrolled on dual drug therapy with Telmisartan-Amlodipine or Telmisartan-Hydrochlorothiazide combinations were enrolled in this study. The treatment period was of 120 days and patients were administered once daily fixed dose combination of Telmisartan 40 mg, Amlodipine 5 mg and Hydrochlorothiazide 12.5 mg. Patients were evaluated on 30th, 60th and 120th days of treatment. Results: There was statistically significant (p<0.0001) decrease in systolic blood pressure from baseline to 30th, 60th and 120th day of treatment mean±SD (157.0±8.68 mmHg vs 148.7±8.19, 137.3±7.84, and 127.0±7.02 mmHg) respectively. Similarly the diastolic blood pressure (DBP) was significantly (p<0.0001) reduced from the baseline to the 30th, 60th and 120th day of treatment (100.0±6.43 mmHg vs. 96.0±6.21, 86.6±6.06 and 80.6±2.53 mmHg respectively). Conclusion: Thus triple drug fixed dose combination of Telmisartan, Amlodipine and hydrochlorothiazide was found to be effective and safe option for the optimal management of hypertension.

Evaluation of efficacy and safety of oral olmesartan + chlorthalidone combination in the management of hypertension in Indian patients

Background: Hypertension is a major health problem in India. Being a multifactorial condition often requires the administration of multiple drugs. Despite improvements in the management of hypertension and the availability of effective antihypertensive agents, only 50% of these individuals achieve BP control. The present study was undertaken to evaluate the efficacy and safety of, fixed dose combination of olmesartan 40 mg + chlorthalidone 12.5 mg, in the management of hypertension uncontrolled with olmesartan monotherapy.Methods: 110 patients were enrolled in this Post-Marketing Surveillance (PMS) study. Patients were prescribed to take fixed dose combination for 60 days.Results: There was significant decrease (P 60 years and <60 years achieved the Joint National Committee (JNC VIII) recommended goal respectively. (<150/90 for elder patients aged above 60 year and 140/90 for those aged less than 60 years).Conclusion: Thus fixed dose combination therapy of olmesartan & chlorthalidone has been shown to be excellent in efficacy and tolerability & gives another option for the optimal management of hypertension.

Dehydration: Need For an Improved Rehydrating Energy Drink

Oral rehydration therapy (ORT) is the cornerstone treatment for managing dehydration. However, ORT cannot “halt” the underlying intestinal fluid loss, a significant mechanism of infectious organisms responsible for causing diarrhea. Reports have demonstrated the role of calcium in treating contagious diarrhea through the calcium-sensing receptor (CaSR), which is absent in oral rehydration solution (ORS).  CaSR is a novel target that has demonstrated its effectiveness in treating diarrhea. CaSR is activated by a simple calcium agonist, an easily accessible, inexpensive, and safe-to-use option in the pediatric population. Adding nutrients would be simple and may increase the efficacy of the current ORS treatment. Maltodextrin (MDs) over glucose in ORS has shown benefits in these patients as the osmolality of MDs is significantly lower than that of disaccharide sugars. Thus, adding multivitamins, nutrients, and energy boosters to WHO- ORS may improve the efficacy of ORS in treating diarrhea, reducing malnutrition, and providing energy to curb fatigue

Does the afferent tubular segment in an orthotopic bladder substitution compromise ureteric antireflux properties? an experimental study in dogs

Objective: To study the effects of a short ureter on renal function and histology in an orthotopic bladder substitution model using a long afferent limb, in a canine model. Materials and methods: The study included nine adult mongrel dogs. A 40-cm segment of ileum was isolated, the distal half detubularized, configured into a U-shape and sutured to form a flat plate; this was then used to augment the bladder. The proximal half of the isolated ileum remained in continuity with the enterocystoplasty to form an isoperistaltic ileal ‘chimney’. The left ureter was divided at its lumbar part and anastomosed to the chimney using a refluxing end-to-side Nesbit technique. The contralateral ureter was divided at its lower end and then anastomosed directly to the augmented segment of the bladder in a similarly refluxing manner to act as a control. The assessment after surgery included biochemical studies, ascending cystography, intravenous urography (IVU) and radioisotope renography at 6 weeks. The last two methods were repeated at intervals of 3 and 6 months after surgery. Urine culture was obtained and both kidneys were examined histopathologically at 6 months. Results: The biochemical values assessed in all dogs were comparable to those before surgery. The urine culture obtained from the augmented bladders showed significant bacterial growth in all dogs. IVU at all follow-up sample times showed a normal configuration of both kidneys. Ascending cystography showed reflux in four of nine dogs on the right and six on the left side. There was a progressive decrease in the mean selective renographic clearance values of each of the right and left kidneys at intervals of 6 weeks, 3 and 6 months. The mean percentage reduction of renographic clearance was significantly higher in the left kidneys at 6 weeks and 3 months. Histopathological examination showed evidence of interstitial nephritis in all nine dogs and pyelonephritis in four of the left kidneys, while none of the right kidneys showed evidence of inflammation. Conclusion: Adequate peristalsis in a healthy long ureter is superior to the ileal segment substitution for protecting the kidney tissue against inflammation in the absence of an anatomical antireflux mechanism

Retrofitting Word Vectors to Semantic Lexicons

Vector space word representations are learned from distributional information of words in large corpora. Although such statistics are semantically informative, they disregard the valuable information that is contained in semantic lexicons such as WordNet, FrameNet, and the Paraphrase Database. This paper proposes a method for refining vector space representations using relational information from semantic lexicons by encouraging linked words to have similar vector representations, and it makes no assumptions about how the input vectors were constructed. Evaluated on a battery of standard lexical semantic evaluation tasks in several languages, we obtain substantial improvements starting with a variety of word vector models. Our refinement method outperforms prior techniques for incorporating semantic lexicons into the word vector training algorithms.Comment: Proceedings of NAACL 201

Concordance between a neuroradiologist, a consultant radiologist and trained reporting radiographers interpreting MRI head examinations: An empirical study

Introduction: This study assessed agreement between MRI reporting radiographers and a consultant radiologist compared with an index neuroradiologist when reporting MRI head (brain/internal auditory meati [IAMs]) examinations. The effect on patient management of any discordant reports was also examined. Methods: Two trained MRI reporting radiographers (RRs), a consultant radiologist (CR) and an index neuroradiologist (INR) reported on a random sample of 210 MRI examinations. The radiographers reported during clinical practice and the radiologists in clinical practice conditions. Two independent consultant physicians (neuro-rehabilitation and neuropsychiatry) compared these reports with the index neuroradiologist report for agreement and the clinical importance of discrepant reports. Results: Overall observer agreement between the RRs and CR was comparable in relation to agreement with the INR: RR; 93/210 (44.3%); and the CR; 83/210 (39.4%) for all head MRI examinations (p = 0.32). For brain examinations the difference was similar: RR; 64/180 (35.6%); and CR; 54/190 (30.0%), p = 0.26. Agreement rates for the IAMs examinations were identical, 29/30 (97.7%). For all head MRI examinations (n = 210) there was a very small observed difference of <0.5% in mean agreement between the reporting radiographers and the consultant radiologist (p = 0.92) for examinations where a major disagreement would have been likely to have led to a change in patient management. Conclusion: MRI reporting radiographers reported during clinical practice on MRI head examinations to a level of agreement comparable with a consultant radiologist. Implications for practice: This is an area in which radiographers could provide additional reporting roles to the reporting service to increase capacity. Wider potential benefits include cost-effectiveness and role development/retention of radiographers