The Supreme Court As Risk Manager: An Analysis of Skinner

Examining a recent case in which the U.S. Supreme Court approved the collection of blood and urine samples from railroad employees, the authors conclude that, in attempting to improve railroad safety, both majority and minority opinions reflected undue emphasis on technical issues and inadequate attention to the intangible social values underlying traditional Constitutional rights to privacy

An insider's view of the political economy of the too big to fail doctrine

An explanation of the relationship between interbank exposure and the too big to fail doctrine, with an examination of the interbank exposure of U.S. banks between March 1984 and March 1990.Bank supervision ; Bank failures

Exploring patient and family satisfaction in pediatric neurological surgery

Introduction Patient and family satisfaction during outpatient visits is correlated with a continuance of care and likelihood to recommend the practice to others. Additionally, patient-family satisfaction can determine the success of the practice and influence medical outcomes. Utilizing a well-validated surveys instrument, patient and family satisfaction can be explored in the office setting. Methods During a consecutive 36 month period, a standardized and validated patient satisfaction survey instrument was provided to the family members of patients who presented to two pediatric neurosurgery clinics associated with Nemours Children\u27s Health System. The completed surveys were analyzed statistically to identify correlations between overall satisfaction, defined as “Likelihood to Recommend (LTR) the Practice”, and relevant practice and provider variables. Results The factors that exhibited the greatest correlation to LTR were: ‘Cheerfulness of Practice’ (r = 0.74), ‘Ability to Get Desired Appointment’ (r = 0.70), ‘Likelihood of Recommending Care Provider’ (r = 0.65), ‘Staff Worked Together’ (r = 0.65), and ‘Waiting Area Comfort and Pleasantness’ (r = 0.60). Discussion and conclusions Patient and family satisfaction surveys are useful for gaining insight into pediatric neurosurgical practices. Data from this cohort suggest that the environment in which patient care is delivered, timeliness of appointments and positive perceptions of the healthcare team correlate most strongly with overall satisfaction. © 201

Hydrothermal Treatment of Creosote-Impregnated Wood

This paper describes the treatment of creosote-treated wood in anoxic supercritical water (SC). Decommissioned (ca. 15 yr) creosote-treated pine utility pole wood, which had been chipped was hydro-treated directly. During treatment, the creosote-derived hydrocarbon residues in the wood were nearly completely (>99%) recovered, and the wood itself was transformed into a mixture of hydrocarbons including substituted benzenes, phenolics, and light PAHs. These wood-derived transformation products served to reconstitute the "light end" of the creosote, which had been largely lost while in service. Thus, the hazardous waste (creosote hydrocarbon mixture) was recovered, and the solid waste (wood) was transformed into a complementary product mixture in a single pass. Solid residues after 12-20 h of treatment wer

Continuity, Divergence, and the Evolution of Brain Language Pathways

Recently, the assumption of evolutionary continuity between humans and non-human primates has been used to bolster the hypothesis that human language is mediated especially by the ventral extreme capsule pathway that mediates auditory object recognition in macaques. Here, we argue for the importance of evolutionary divergence in understanding brain language evolution. We present new comparative data reinforcing our previous conclusion that the dorsal arcuate fasciculus pathway was more significantly modified than the ventral extreme capsule pathway in human evolution. Twenty-six adult human and twenty-six adult chimpanzees were imaged with diffusion-weighted MRI and probabilistic tractography was used to track and compare the dorsal and ventral language pathways. Based on these and other data, we argue that the arcuate fasciculus is likely to be the pathway most essential for higher-order aspects of human language such as syntax and lexical–semantics

A Flexible Alignment Fixture for the Fabrication of Replication Mandrels

NASA uses precision diamond turning technology to fabricate replication mandrels for its X-ray Calibration Facility (XRCF) optics. The XRCF optics are tubular, and the internal surface contains a parabolic profile over the first section and a hyperbolic profile over the last. The optic is fabricated by depositing layers of gold and nickel on to the replication mandrel and then separating it from the mandrel. Since the mandrel serves as a replication form, it must contain the inverse image of the surface. The difficulty in aligning the mandrel comes from the fabrication steps which it undergoes. The mandrel is rough machined and heat treated prior to diamond turning. After diamond turning, silicon rubber separators which are undercut in radius by 3 mm (0.12 in.) are inserted between the two end caps of the mandrel to allow the plating to wrap around the ends (to prevent flaking). The mandrel is then plated with a nickel-phosphor alloy using an electroless nickel process. At this point, the separators are removed and the mandrel is reassembled for the final cut on the DTM. The mandrel is measured for profile and finish, and polished to achieve an acceptable surface finish. Wrapping the plating around the edges helps to prevent flaking, but it also destroys the alignment surfaces between the parts of the mandrel that insure that the axes of the parts are coincident. Several mandrels have been realigned by trial-and-error methods, consuming significant amounts of setup time. When the mandrel studied in this paper was reassembled, multiple efforts resulted in a minimum radial error motion of 100 microns. Since 50 microns of nickel plating was to be removed, and a minimum plating thickness of 25 microns was to remain on the part, the radial error motion had to be reduced to less than 25 microns. The mandrel was therefore not usable in its current state

Quantitative assessment of prefrontal cortex in humans relative to nonhuman primates

Significance A longstanding controversy in neuroscience pertains to differences in human prefrontal cortex (PFC) compared with other primate species; specifically, is human PFC disproportionately large? Distinctively human behavioral capacities related to higher cognition and affect presumably arose from evolutionary modifications since humans and great apes diverged from a common ancestor about 6–8 Mya. Accurate determination of regional differences in the amount of cortical gray and subcortical white matter content in humans, great apes, and Old World monkeys can further our understanding of the link between structure and function of the human brain. Using tissue volume analyses, we show a disproportionately large amount of gray and white matter corresponding to PFC in humans compared with nonhuman primates.</jats:p

Multiple Mating Results in Multiple Paternity in Richardson's Ground Squirrels, Spermophilus richardsonii

Microsatellite DNA primers developed from Columbian Ground Squirrels (Spermophilus columbianus) were used to establish paternity in a Manitoba population of Richardson’s Ground Squirrels (Spermophilus richardsonii). Primers resolving variation at six microsatellite loci allowed ascription of paternity to 32 of 85 offspring born among litters of 15 breeding females sampled. While the failure to unambiguously document paternity for all juveniles precludes the use of these data to address questions of sperm competition and male mating success, the results do provide direct evidence that multiple mating by female Richardson’s Ground Squirrels results in multiple paternity within litters