Independent Review, Miscarriages of Justice, and Computer Evidence: Brian Altman KC’s General Review and the Post Office Scandal

The Altman General Review (General Review)2links the discovery that the Post Office Limited (PO) had prosecuted sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses on the basis of partial, unreliable evidence; the Clarke Advice (Simon Clarke, Barrister);3the subsequent Swift Review (Jonathan Swift KC); and the conduct of the Bates litigation and the Hamilton appeals.4The Altman General Review is an important, perhaps central, document in the PO Scandal. It was a review prompted by the discovery of unreliable expert evidence on an unreliable software system in 2013 that had been relied on to prosecute hundreds of sub-postmasters. That discovery led to a review of prosecutions that had been conducted for the Post Office by Cartwright King. This review (the CK Sift) was also conducted by Cartwright King. Brian Altman was instructed to conduct a review of that review (the General Review).In spite of that discovery, the Post Office continued to deny, including to Parliament in 2015, that there was any evidence of miscarriages of justice until appearing before the Court of Appeal in 2020/21. Those denials were founded in significant part on Altman’s and related work. He told the PO the review of prosecutions being conducted by their solicitors, Cartwright King, was fundamentally sound; this paper looks at the quality of the judgments arrived at to come to that conclusion

Conflicting histories : the archaeology of the iron-working, farming communities in the central and southern coast region of Kenya.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN036184 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Mining Novellas from PubMed Abstracts using a Storytelling Algorithm

Motivation: There are now a multitude of articles published in a diversity of journals providing information about genes, proteins, pathways, and entire processes. Each article investigates particular subsets of a biological process, but to gain insight into the functioning of a system as a whole, we must computationally integrate information across multiple publications. This is especially important in problems such as modeling cross-talk in signaling networks, designing drug therapies for combinatorial selectivity, and unraveling the role of gene interactions in deleterious phenotypes, where the cost of performing combinatorial screens is exorbitant. Results: We present an automated approach to biological knowledge discovery from PubMed abstracts, suitable for unraveling combinatorial relationships. It involves the systematic application of a `storytelling' algorithm followed by compression of the stories into `novellas.' Given a start and end publication, typically with little or no overlap in content, storytelling identifies a chain of intermediate publications from one to the other, such that neighboring publications have significant content similarity. Stories discovered thus provide an argued approach to relate distant concepts through compositions of related concepts. The chains of links employed by stories are then mined to find frequently reused sub-stories, which can be compressed to yield novellas, or compact templates of connections. We demonstrate a successful application of storytelling and novella finding to modeling combinatorial relationships between introduction of extracellular factors and downstream cellular events. Availability: A story visualizer, suitable for interactive exploration of stories and novellas described in this paper, is available for demo/download at https://bioinformatics.cs.vt.edu/storytelling

Handel\u27s Messiah and A Christmas Celebration

Program listing performers and works performe

Critical Analysis of the Value of Drought Information and Impacts on Land Management and Public Health

This paper reviews previous efforts to assign monetary value to climatic or meteorological information, such as public information on drought, climate, early warning systems, and weather forecast information. Methods and tools that have been explored to examine the benefits of climatic and meteorological information include the avoided cost, contingent valuation, choice experiments, benefit transfer, and descriptive approaches using surveys. The second part of this paper discusses specific considerations related to valuing drought information for public health and the Bureau of Land Management. We found a multitude of connections between drought and the land management and health sectors in the literature. The majority of the papers that we summarized only report biophysical change, because the economic losses of drought are not available. Only a few papers reported economic loss associated with drought. To determine the value of drought information, we need to know more about the role it plays in decision making and what sources of drought information are used in different sectors. This inventory of methods and impacts highlights opportunities for further research in valuing drought information in land management and public health