The New ICC Rule on Consolidation: Progress or Change?

In September 2011, the International Chamber of Commerce (\u27ICC\u27) published the tenth revision of its Arbitration Rules. A task force of more than 175 members from forty-one countries revised the ICC Rules, starting in October 2008. These new rules will enter into effect on January 1, 2012, replacing the current ICC Rules that entered into force on January 1, 1998. Numerous changes were made, ranging from the trivial to the significant. This Article analyzes the expansion of the provision on consolidation in an attempt to predict whether there will be material improvement in the consolidation process or whether the changes made will have only a superficial effect

A note on the calculation of reference change values for two consecutive normally distributed laboratory results

Population reference limits are inadequate for personalized analyses of medical laboratory results. Reference change values have been recommended as a valid alternative in assessing individual changes across sequential measurements. In this paper, we investigate the accuracy (type I error) and power (complement of type II error) of reference change values under three different statistical modeling scenarios and show that oversimplified hypotheses lead to misinterpretation of laboratory results. The power is strongly affected by the statistical modeling assumptions: it is shown that positive shifts in the individual average health condition are difficult to detect, while it is much easier to identify negative shifts

Engaging with issues of emotionality in mathematics teacher education for social justice

This article focuses on the relationship between social justice, emotionality and mathematics teaching in the context of the education of prospective teachers of mathematics. A relational approach to social justice calls for giving attention to enacting socially-just relationships in mathematics classrooms. Emotionality and social justice in teaching mathematics variously intersect, interrelate or interweave. An intervention, usng creative action methods, with a cohort of prospective teachers addressing these issues is described to illustrate the connection between emotionality and social justice in the context of mathematics teacher education. Creative action methods involve a variety of dramatic, interactive and experiential tools that can promote personal and group engagement and embodied reflection. The intervention aimed to engage the prospective teachers with some key issues for social justice in mathematics education through dialogue about the emotionality of teaching and learning mathematics. Some of the possibilities and limits of using such methods are considered

Statins attenuate but do not eliminate the reverse epidemiology of total serum cholesterol in patients with non-ischemic chronic heart failure

© 2017 Elsevier B.V. Background In patients with chronic heart failure (CHF) increasing levels of total serum cholesterol are associated with improved survival – while statin usage is not. The impact of statin treatment on the “reverse epidemiology” of cholesterol is unclear. Methods 2992 consecutive patients with non-ischemic CHF due to left ventricular systolic dysfunction from the Norwegian CHF Registry and the CHF Registries of the Universities of Hull, UK, and Heidelberg, Germany, were studied. 1736 patients were individually double-matched on both cholesterol levels and the individual propensity scores for statin treatment. All-cause mortality was analyzed as a function of baseline cholesterol and statin use in both the general and the matched sample. Results 1209 patients (40.4%) received a statin. During a follow-up of 13,740 patient-years, 360 statin users (29.8%) and 573 (32.1%) statin non-users died. When grouped according to total cholesterol levels as low (≤ 3.6 mmol/L), moderate (3.7–4.9 mmol/L), high (4.8–6.2 mmol/L), and very high ( >  6.2 mmol/L), we found improved survival with very high as compared with low cholesterol levels. This association was present in statin users and non-users in both the general and matched sample (p  <  0.05 for each group comparison). The negative association of total cholesterol and mortality persisted when cholesterol was treated as a continuous variable (HR 0.83, 95%CI 0.77–0.90, p  <  0.001 for matched patients), but it was less pronounced in statin users than in non-users (F-test p  <  0.001). Conclusions Statins attenuate but do not eliminate the reverse epidemiological association between increasing total serum cholesterol and improved survival in patients with non-ischemic CHF