Race and Policing: An Agenda for Action

This paper is organized into two parts -- Strategic Voice and Tactical Agency. Strategic Voice argues that problems of race in policing cannot be resolved by the police alone. Other people must help by understanding and ameliorating the social conditions that cause race to be associated with crime and hence become a dilemma for American policing. Rather than accepting these conditions as givens, police leaders with their powerful collective voice should actively call attention to what needs to be changed. Tactical Agency outlines what the police can do on their own initiative to deal with the operational dilemmas of race -- in the communities they serve and in their own organizations

A comparison of the modern and classic golf swing: a clinician's perspective

Objective. There is little descriptive research on the motion the body displays during the golf swing. The purpose of this research is to review the modern golf swing and compare its motion to the classic golf swing. Discussion. The comparison revealed subtle but significant differences in the backswing and the follow-through positions. The potential implications for power and injury, particularly of the lower back, are discussed. The discussion describes a third swing, the hybrid swing, which is a combination of the classic and modern swing. The hybrid swing may potentially reduce the chances of sustaining a low back injury while still retaining the power of the modern swing. Conclusion. The golf swing has evolved over time as a result of a combination of advanced equipment, course design and human experimentation. The hybrid swing is being taught by some golf professionals as a balance between the power-potential of the modern swing and the ‘back-friendly\' nature of the classic swing, though no studies have so far been conducted on its efficacy. Further investigation into the three golf swings, classic, modern and hybrid, is required to determine which swing is the most effective while also being friendly to the body. Such research will make possible the development programmes aimed at reducing golf injury rates, particularly to the lower back. South African Journal of Sports Medicine Vol. 18 (3) 2006: pp. 80-9

Novel steady state of a microtubule assembly in a confined geometry

We study the steady state of an assembly of microtubules in a confined volume, analogous to the situation inside a cell where the cell boundary forms a natural barrier to growth. We show that the dynamical equations for growing and shrinking microtubules predict the existence of two steady states, with either exponentially decaying or exponentially increasing distribution of microtubule lengths. We identify the regimes in parameter space corresponding to these steady states. In the latter case, the apparent catastrophe frequency near the boundary was found to be significantly larger than that in the interior. Both the exponential distribution of lengths and the increase in the catastrophe frequency near the cell margin is in excellent agreement with recent experimental observations.Comment: 8 pages, submitted to Phys. Rev.

A modified version of the Bayley Scales of Infant Development-II for cognitive matching of infants with and without Down syndrome

Background Many measures of infants' early cognitive development, including the BSID-II (The Bayley Scales of Infant Development), mix together test items that assess a number of different developmental domains including language, attention, motor functioning and social abilities, and some items contribute to the assessment of more than one domain. Consequently, the scales may lead to under- or over-estimates of cognitive abilities in some clinical samples and may not be the best measure to use for matching purposes. Method To address this issue we created a modified form of the BSID-II (the BSID-M) to provide a ‘purer’ assessment of the general cognitive capacities in infants with Down syndrome (DS) from 6 to 18 months of age. We excluded a number of items that implicated language, motor, attentional and social functioning from the original measure. This modified form was administered to 17 infants with Down syndrome when 6, 12 and 18 months old and to 41 typically developing infants at 4, 7 and 10 months old. Results The results suggested that the modified form continued to provide a meaningful and stable measure of cognitive functioning and revealed that DS infants may score marginally higher in terms of general cognitive abilities when using this modified form than they might when using the standard BSID-II scales. Conclusions This modified form may be useful for researchers who need a ‘purer’ measure with which to match infants with DS and other infants with intellectual disabilities on cognitive functioning

Community-linked maternal death review (CLMDR) to measure and prevent maternal mortality: a pilot study in rural Malawi.

In Malawi, maternal mortality remains high. Existing maternal death reviews fail to adequately review most deaths, or capture those that occur outside the health system. We assessed the value of community involvement to improve capture and response to community maternal deaths

Formalising design patterns in predicate logic

Design patterns are traditionally outlined in an informal manner. If they could be formalised, we could derive tools that automatically recognise design patterns and refactor designs and code. Our approach is to deploy predicate logic to specify conditions on the class diagrams that describe design patterns. The structure of class diagrams is itself described with a novel meta-notation that can be used for defining any graphical modelling language. As a result, the constraints, while based on UML, are highly readable and have much expressive power. This enables us not only to recognise design patterns in legacy code, but also to reason about them at the design stage, such as showing one pattern to be a special case of another. The paper discusses our specification of the original 23 design patterns and presents a representative sample of some of them

On the Composition of Design Patterns

Design patterns are usually applied in a composed form with each other. It is crucial to be able to formally reason about how patterns can be composed and to prove the properties of composed patterns. Based on our previous work on formal specification of design patterns and formal reasoning about their properties, this paper focuses on the composition of design patterns. A notion of composition of patterns with respect to overlaps is formally defined based on two operations on design patterns, which are the specialisation of a pattern with constraints and the lifting of a pattern with a subset of components as the key. The composition of design patterns is illustrated by the composition of Composite, Strategy and Observer patterns. A case study of the formalisation of the relationship between patterns as suggested by GoF is also reported