Judicial Control over the Sufficiency of the Evidence in Jury Trials

One has only to read the first few chapters of Thayer\u27s Prelimmary Treatise on Evidence to realize that the history of trial by jury, from its beginning until the present day, records a continuous struggle to prevent the rendition of unreasonable verdicts. When the jury was really a body of witnesses summoned to try the case on their own knowledge, rather than upon evidence produced in court, it was sought to control their verdict by attaint. By this proceeding a new jury would be summoned to re-examine the issue tried by the first jury, and if the second found that the verdict of the first jury was false, the verdict would be reversed and the first jury severely punished by infamy, forfeiture of their property, and imprisonment. This crude method of controlling the jury was employed in this country in colonial times until it became obsolete because of the development of more effective devices

Stabilization of Lime with a Protective Glass Coating

The persistent hydration of lime has severely limited its use as a refractory material. Its hydration is somewhat retarded, but not prevented by heat treatment. A number of investigators have attempted to stabilize lime with chemical additions and have met with limited success. In this investigation an attempt has been made to stabilize lime by introducing a protective coating of glass and by hot pressing to reduce the porosity. Powdered refractory glasses and granular lime were hot pressed in a graphite mold at temperatures ranging from 1250 to 1450°C. The glasses were: 1) calcium-aluminate, 2) alumina-silicate and 3) aluminophosphate. Samples pressed with the alumino-silicate glass showed poor bonding and disintegrated when removed from the mold. Samples made with the calcium-aluminate and the alumino-phosphate glass showed good resistance to hydration when exposed to the atmosphere. Samples pressed with the calcium-aluminate glass at 1450°C withstood immersion in water at room temperature for 72 hours without disintegration

Cost effectiveness analysis of Year 2 of an elementary school-located influenza vaccination program-Results from a randomized controlled trial.

BackgroundSchool-located vaccination against influenza (SLV-I) has the potential to improve current suboptimal influenza immunization coverage for U.S. school-aged children. However, little is known about SLV-I's cost-effectiveness. The objective of this study is to establish the cost-effectiveness of SLV-I based on a two-year community-based randomized controlled trial (Year 1: 2009-2010 vaccination season, an unusual H1N1 pandemic influenza season, and Year 2: 2010-2011, a more typical influenza season).MethodsWe performed a cost-effectiveness analysis on a two-year randomized controlled trial of a Western New York SLV-I program. SLV-I clinics were offered in 21 intervention elementary schools (Year 1 n = 9,027; Year 2 n = 9,145 children) with standard-of-care (no SLV-I) in control schools (Year 1 n = 4,534 (10 schools); Year 2 n = 4,796 children (11 schools)). We estimated the cost-per-vaccinated child, by dividing the incremental cost of the intervention by the incremental effectiveness (i.e., the number of additionally vaccinated students in intervention schools compared to control schools).ResultsIn Years 1 and 2, respectively, the effectiveness measure (proportion of children vaccinated) was 11.2 and 12.0 percentage points higher in intervention (40.7 % and 40.4 %) than control schools. In year 2, the cost-per-vaccinated child excluding vaccine purchase ($59.88 in 2010 US$) consisted of three component costs: (A) the school costs ($8.25); (B) the project coordination costs ($32.33); and (C) the vendor costs excluding vaccine purchase ($16.68), summed through Monte Carlo simulation. Compared to Year 1, the two component costs (A) and (C) decreased, while the component cost (B) increased in Year 2. The cost-per-vaccinated child, excluding vaccine purchase, was$59.73 (Year 1) and $59.88 (Year 2, statistically indistinguishable from Year 1), higher than the published cost of providing influenza vaccination in medical practices ($39.54). However, taking indirect costs (e.g., averted parental costs to visit medical practices) into account, vaccination was less costly in SLV-I ($23.96 in Year 1,$24.07 in Year 2) than in medical practices.ConclusionsOur two-year trial's findings reinforced the evidence to support SLV-I as a potentially favorable system to increase childhood influenza vaccination rates in a cost-efficient way. Increased efficiencies in SLV-I are needed for a sustainable and scalable SLV-I program

Vertebra Shape Classification using MLP for Content-Based Image Retrieval

A desirable content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system would classify extracted image features to support some form of semantic retrieval. The Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, an intramural R&D division of the National Library for Medicine (NLM), maintains an archive of digitized X-rays of the cervical and lumbar spine taken as part of the second national health and nutrition examination survey (NHANES II). It is our goal to provide shape-based access to digitized X-rays including retrieval on automatically detected and classified pathology, e.g., anterior osteophytes. This is done using radius of curvature analysis along the anterior portion, and morphological analysis for quantifying protrusion regions along the vertebra boundary. Experimental results are presented for the classification of 704 cervical spine vertebrae by evaluating the features using a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) based approach. In this paper, we describe the design and current status of the content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system and the role of neural networks in the design of an effective multimedia information retrieval system

On the Lorentz structure of the confinement potential

We investigate the Lorentz structure of the confinement potential through a study of the meson spectrum using Salpeter's instantaneous approximation to the Bethe-Salpeter equation. The equivalence between Salpeter's and a random-phase-approximation (RPA) equation enables one to employ the same techniques developed by Thouless, in his study of nuclear collective excitations, to test the stability of the solutions. The stablity analysis reveals the existence of imaginary eigenvalues for a confining potential that transforms as a Lorentz scalar. Moreover, we argue that the instability persists even for very large values of the constituent quark mass. In contrast, we find no evidence of imaginary eigenvalues for a timelike vector potential --- even for very small values of the constituent mass.Comment: 18 pages using RevTeX 3.0, with 8 figures available upon request, FSU-SCRI-94-1