Discovery-led refinement in e-discovery investigations: sensemaking, cognitive ergonomics and system design.

Given the very large numbers of documents involved in e-discovery investigations, lawyers face a considerable challenge of collaborative sensemaking. We report findings from three workplace studies which looked at different aspects of how this challenge was met. From a sociotechnical perspective, the studies aimed to understand how investigators collectively and individually worked with information to support sensemaking and decision making. Here, we focus on discovery-led refinement; specifically, how engaging with the materials of the investigations led to discoveries that supported refinement of the problems and new strategies for addressing them. These refinements were essential for tractability. We begin with observations which show how new lines of enquiry were recursively embedded. We then analyse the conceptual structure of a line of enquiry and consider how reflecting this in e-discovery support systems might support scalability and group collaboration. We then focus on the individual activity of manual document review where refinement corresponded with the inductive identification of classes of irrelevant and relevant documents within a collection. Our observations point to the effects of priming on dealing with these efficiently and to issues of cognitive ergonomics at the human–computer interface. We use these observations to introduce visualisations that might enable reviewers to deal with such refinements more efficiently

Screening, intervention and outcome in autism and other developmental disorders: the role of randomized controlled trials

We draw attention to a number of important considerations in the arguments about screening and outcome of intervention in children with autism and other developmental disorders. Autism screening in itself never provides a final clinical diagnosis, but may well identify developmental deviations indicative of autism—or of other developmental disorders—that should lead to referral for further clinical assessment. Decisions regarding population or clinic screening cannot be allowed to be based on the fact that prospective longitudinal RCT designs over decades could never be performed in complex developmental disorders. We propose an alternative approach. Early screening for autism and other developmental disorders is likely to be of high societal importance and should be promoted and rigorously evaluated

‘I will not be thrown out of the country because I’m an immigrant’: Eastern European migrants’ responses to hate crime in a semi-rural context in the wake of Brexit

This article examines Eastern European migrants’ experiences of and responses to hate crime. Following the UK European Union Membership Referendum (‘Brexit’ vote), there was an increase in reported hate crimes against immigrants. The study focuses on the experiences of migrants in Lincolnshire, a region of England which has a significant migrant population, and which had one of the highest ‘leave’ votes. The focus on white migrants in this semi-rural setting offers an original perspective in the field of hate crime studies. We draw on semi-structured interviews and observations to identify temporal, spatial, and relational factors in responses to hate crime. We uncover the insecure occupation of a ‘third space’ constituted by material, discursive, and emotional practices. This positioning was destabilised post referendum; but there was also evidence of the operation of agency within processes of ‘othering’, suggesting a transition from victim identity to emergent political subject

‘I will not be thrown out of the country because I’m an immigrant’: Eastern European migrants’ responses to hate crime in a semi-rural context in the wake of Brexit

This article examines Eastern European migrants’ experiences of and responses to hate crime. Following the UK European Union Membership Referendum (‘Brexit’ vote), there was an increase in reported hate crimes against immigrants. The study focuses on the experiences of migrants in Lincolnshire, a region of England which has a significant migrant population, and which had one of the highest ‘leave’ votes. The focus on white migrants in this semi-rural setting offers an original perspective in the field of hate crime studies. We draw on semi-structured interviews and observations to identify temporal, spatial, and relational factors in responses to hate crime. We uncover the insecure occupation of a ‘third space’ constituted by material, discursive, and emotional practices. This positioning was destabilised post referendum; but there was also evidence of the operation of agency within processes of ‘othering’, suggesting a transition from victim identity to emergent political subject

Goldstini Can Give the Higgs a Boost

Supersymmetric collider phenomenology depends crucially on whether the lightest observable-sector supersymmetric particle (LOSP) decays, and if so, what the LOSP decay products are. For instance, in SUSY models where the gravitino is lighter than the LOSP, the LOSP decays to its superpartner and a longitudinal gravitino via supercurrent couplings. In this paper, we show that LOSP decays can be substantially modified when there are multiple sectors that break supersymmetry, where in addition to the gravitino there are light uneaten goldstini. As a particularly striking example, a bino-like LOSP can have a near 100% branching fraction to a higgs boson and an uneaten goldstino, even if the LOSP has negligible higgsino fraction. This occurs because the uneaten goldstino is unconstrained by the supercurrent, allowing additional operators to mediate LOSP decay. These operators can be enhanced in the presence of an R symmetry, leading to copious boosted higgs production in SUSY cascade decays.Comment: 30 pages, 12 figures; v2: title change, clarifications added, version to appear in JHE

Imputation of missing genotypes: an empirical evaluation of IMPUTE

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Imputation of missing genotypes is becoming a very popular solution for synchronizing genotype data collected with different microarray platforms but the effect of ethnic background, subject ascertainment, and amount of missing data on the accuracy of imputation are not well understood.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We evaluated the accuracy of the program IMPUTE to generate the genotype data of partially or fully untyped single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). The program uses a model-based approach to imputation that reconstructs the genotype distribution given a set of referent haplotypes and the observed data, and uses this distribution to compute the marginal probability of each missing genotype for each individual subject that is used to impute the missing data. We assembled genome-wide data from five different studies and three different ethnic groups comprising Caucasians, African Americans and Asians. We randomly removed genotype data and then compared the observed genotypes with those generated by IMPUTE. Our analysis shows 97% median accuracy in Caucasian subjects when less than 10% of the SNPs are untyped and missing genotypes are accepted regardless of their posterior probability. The median accuracy increases to 99% when we require 0.95 minimum posterior probability for an imputed genotype to be acceptable. The accuracy decreases to 86% or 94% when subjects are African Americans or Asians. We propose a strategy to improve the accuracy by leveraging the level of admixture in African Americans.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our analysis suggests that IMPUTE is very accurate in samples of Caucasians origin, it is slightly less accurate in samples of Asians background, but substantially less accurate in samples of admixed background such as African Americans. Sample size and ascertainment do not seem to affect the accuracy of imputation.</p

Success Factors of European Syndromic Surveillance Systems: A Worked Example of Applying Qualitative Comparative Analysis

Introduction: Syndromic surveillance aims at augmenting traditional public health surveillance with timely information. To gain a head start, it mainly analyses existing data such as from web searches or patient records. Despite the setup of many syndromic surveillance systems, there is still much doubt about the benefit of the approach. There are diverse interactions between performance indicators such as timeliness and various system characteristics. This makes the performance assessment of syndromic surveillance systems a complex endeavour. We assessed if the comparison of several syndromic surveillance systems through Qualitative Comparative Analysis helps to evaluate performance and identify key success factors. Materials and Methods: We compiled case-based, mixed data on performance and characteristics of 19 syndromic surveillance systems in Europe from scientific and grey literature and from site visits. We identified success factors by applying crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. We focused on two main areas of syndromic surveillance application: seasonal influenza surveillance and situational awareness during different types of potentially health threatening events. Results: We found that syndromic surveillance systems might detect the onset or peak of seasonal influenza earlier if they analyse non-clinical data sources. Timely situational awareness during different types of events is supported by an automated syndromic surveillance system capable of analysing multiple syndromes. To our surprise, the analysis of multiple data sources was no key success factor for situational awareness. Conclusions: We suggest to consider these key success factors when designing or further developing syndromic surveillance systems. Qualitative Comparative Analysis helped interpreting complex, mixed data on small-N cases and resulted in concrete and practically relevant findings

Schistosomiasis and Urinary Bladder Cancer in North Western Tanzania: A Retrospective Review of 185 Patients.

Worldwide, cancers of the urinary bladder are well known to be associated with environmental chemical carcinogens such as smoking and occupational exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. These cancers are typically transitional cell carcinoma (urothelial carcinoma). In areas where schistosomiasis is endemic there is a high incidence of squamous cell carcinoma of the urinary bladder. Schistosomiasis causes chronic granulomatous cystitis leading to squamous metaplasia of transitional epithelium, and subsequently development of squamous cell carcinoma. The western part of Tanzania on the shores of Lake Victoria is such an endemic area. This study was done to document the burden of urinary bladder cancer associated with schistosomiasis in this region. This was a descriptive retrospective study of histologically confirmed cases of urinary bladder cancer seen at the Department of Pathology Bugando Medical Centre (BMC) over a period of 10 years. Data were retrieved from the records of the Departments of Pathology, Medical Records and Surgery. Data were analyzed by the use of contingency tables. A total of 185 patients were diagnosed with cancer of the urinary bladder during the study period, where as 90 (48.6%) were males and 95 (51.4) were females. The mean age at diagnosis was 54.3 years. Squamous cell carcinoma was the most frequent histological type (55.1%), followed by conventional transitional cell carcinoma (40.5%). Eighty three of all cancer cases (44.9%) were found to have schistosomal eggs. Schistosomiasis was commonly associated with squamous cancers compared to non squamous cancers. Most of the cancers associated with schistosomiasis had invaded the muscularis propria of the urinary bladder at the time of diagnosis (p<0.001) and such cancers were frequent below 50 years of age with a significant statistical difference (p<0.001). Poorly differentiated tumors were more frequent in females than males with a significant statistical difference (p=0.006). The majority of urinary bladder cancers seen in the Lake Region were squamous cell carcinoma associated with schistosomiasis. These cancers showed an aggressive behavior and were commonly seen in the younger age groups. Effective control of schistosomiasis in this region should significantly reduce the burden of urinary bladder cancer

Similarities between structural distortions under pressure and chemical doping in superconducting BaFe2As2

The discovery of a new family of high Tc materials, the iron arsenides (FeAs), has led to a resurgence of interest in superconductivity. Several important traits of these materials are now apparent, for example, layers of iron tetrahedrally coordinated by arsenic are crucial structural ingredients. It is also now well established that the parent non-superconducting phases are itinerant magnets, and that superconductivity can be induced by either chemical substitution or application of pressure, in sharp contrast to the cuprate family of materials. The structure and properties of chemically substituted samples are known to be intimately linked, however, remarkably little is known about this relationship when high pressure is used to induce superconductivity in undoped compounds. Here we show that the key structural features in BaFe2As2, namely suppression of the tetragonal to orthorhombic phase transition and reduction in the As-Fe-As bond angle and Fe-Fe distance, show the same behavior under pressure as found in chemically substituted samples. Using experimentally derived structural data, we show that the electronic structure evolves similarly in both cases. These results suggest that modification of the Fermi surface by structural distortions is more important than charge doping for inducing superconductivity in BaFe2As2