Hot Routes: Developing a New Technique for the Spatial Analysis of Crime

The use of hotspot mapping techniques such as KDE to represent the geographical spread of linear events can be problematic. Network-constrained data (for example transport-related crime) require a different approach to visualize concentration. We propose a methodology called Hot Routes, which measures the risk distribution of crime along a linear network by calculating the rate of crimes per section of road. This method has been designed for everyday crime analysts, and requires only a Geographical Information System (GIS), and suitable data to calculate. A demonstration is provided using crime data collected from London bus routes

An Energy-conscious Transport Protocol for Multi-hop Wireless Networks

We present a transport protocol whose goal is to reduce power consumption without compromising delivery requirements of applications. To meet its goal of energy efficiency, our transport protocol (1) contains mechanisms to balance end-to-end vs. local retransmissions; (2) minimizes acknowledgment traffic using receiver regulated rate-based flow control combined with selected acknowledgements and in-network caching of packets; and (3) aggressively seeks to avoid any congestion-based packet loss. Within a recently developed ultra low-power multi-hop wireless network system, extensive simulations and experimental results demonstrate that our transport protocol meets its goal of preserving the energy efficiency of the underlying network.Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (NBCHC050053

The economic value of Community Legal Centres

CLCs provide a range of legal services to individuals and their communities. These services include legal representation in courts, tribunals and other dispute resolution venues, as well as preventative services provided in the form of advice, information and referral services, community legal education, law reform and policy reform work. Work by CLCs provides clear private benefits to individuals. The clients of CLCs are most likely to be people who live in disadvantaged circumstances and have legal problems that are typically part of a number of interlinked problems. CLCs play a crucial role in untangling these legal problems and assisting individuals to move on without being penalised by their inability to access other forms of legal assistance. What is less well recognised are the broader public benefits provided to society as a result of the work of CLCs. Such recognition is critical to identifying the total economic value generated by CLCs services. Much of the work of CLCs is preventative in that it reduces the need or extent to which individuals are (or could be) involved with the legal system. CLC work therefore produces invisible benefits including how an individual accesses the publicly funded legal system and welfare services, and how that individual is able to contribute to society in the future. These indirect effects generate avoided costs, in other words costs for which government would have been liable but for the intervention of CLCs. In addition to these avoided costs, other benefits include the intrinsic benefit to society of providing a certain level of social service, welfare, assistance, protection or information to vulnerable citizens. The costing of such benefits is difficult for many reasons but this Report illustrates the need for such costs and benefits to be considered

Improved impact performance of marine sandwich panels using through-thickness reinforcement: Experimental results

This paper presents results from a test developed to simulate the water impact (slamming) loading of sandwich boat structures. A weighted elastomer ball is dropped from increasing heights onto rigidly supported panels until damage is detected. Results from this test indicate that honeycomb core sandwich panels, the most widely used material for racing yacht hulls, start to damage due to core crushing at impact energies around 550 J. Sandwich panels of the same areal weight and with the same carbon/epoxy facings but using a novel foam core reinforced in the thickness direction with pultruded carbon fibre pins, do not show signs of damage until above 1200 J impact energy. This suggests that these will offer significantly improved resistance to wave impact. Quasi-static test results cannot be used to predict impact resistance here as the crush strength of the pinned foam is more sensitive to loading rate than that of the honeycomb core

Could cancer drugs provide ammunition against aging?

Recent advances in our understanding of the molecular and cellular signaling pathways that drive aging have revealed several genetic and environmental manipulations that can increase lifespan across different species. Research on the underlying biology of aging has not only revealed it to be a biologically malleable process but has also paved the way for the development of pharmacological interventions that could increase lifespan and delay the onset and/or progression of age-related disease

Woollahra Sustainability Plan

Woollahra Municipal Council (WMC) is currently undertaking a process to develop the Woollahra Sustainability Plan (WSP). The purpose of the WSP is to provide a long-term and integrated approach to planning for a sustainable community in the Woollahra local government area. The WSP will identify a long-term community derived vision with associated actions to achieve more sustainable practices in Council's function areas and activities, in addition to enabling planning of a more sustainability-focused community. The vision and actions in the WSP will embody the principles of Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD). The WSP development process is being undertaken in three stages. The first is a background stage consisting of audit and gap analysis activities, the second (the subject of this report) is a community visioning and issues stage, and the third will consist of the development of an action plan. The Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF) was engaged to undertake visioning and issues consultation for Stage 2. Objectives for Stage 2 include the following: to inform and involve the community in the preparation of the WSP to build strong partnerships between Council and the community to identify a community derived, long term vision for the future of Woollahra to identify sustainability related issues for Council to address in its Sustainability Plan, including social, economic and environmental issues to involve a range of people in the project including the youth, children, seniors and families and to employ a range of consultation methods and techniques to engage the community and gain the necessary community input and participation in the project

Dihydrobenz[e][1,4]oxazepin-2(3H)-ones, a new anthelmintic chemotype immobilising whipworm and reducing infectivity in vivo

Trichuris trichiura is a human parasitic whipworm infecting around 500 million people globally, damaging the physical growth and educational performance of those infected. Current drug treatment options are limited and lack efficacy against the worm, preventing an eradication programme. It is therefore important to develop new treatments for trichuriasis. Using Trichuris muris, an established model for T. trichiura, we screened a library of 480 novel drug-like small molecules for compounds causing paralysis of the ex vivo adult parasite. We identified a class of dihydrobenz[e][1,4]oxazepin-2(3H)-one compounds with anthelmintic activity against T. muris. Further screening of structurally related compounds and resynthesis of the most potent molecules led to the identification of 20 active dihydrobenzoxazepinones, a class of molecule not previously implicated in nematode control. The most active immobilise adult T. muris with EC50 values around 25–50μM, comparable to the existing anthelmintic levamisole. The best compounds from this chemotype show low cytotoxicity against murine gut epithelial cells, demonstrating selectivity for the parasite. Developing a novel oral pharmaceutical treatment for a neglected disease and deploying it via mass drug administration is challenging. Interestingly, the dihydrobenzoxazepinone OX02983 reduces the ability of embryonated T. muris eggs to establish infection in the mouse host in vivo. Complementing the potential development of dihydrobenzoxazepinones as an oral anthelmintic, this supports an alternative strategy of developing a therapeutic that acts in the environment, perhaps via a spray, to interrupt the parasite lifecycle. Together these results show that the dihydrobenzoxazepinones are a new class of anthelmintic, active against both egg and adult stages of Trichuris parasites. They demonstrate encouraging selectivity for the parasite, and importantly show considerable scope for further optimisation to improve potency and pharmacokinetic properties with the aim of developing a clinical agent

Recovery and Analysis of Diazepam from Dried Blood Stains

This study aims to determine whether it is possible to detect diazepam in bloodstains dried on a glass surface, to assess stability of diazepam in bloodstains over several days and lastly to determine whether dried bloodstains can give reliable quantitative information. One millilitre of blood fortified with different concentrations of diazepam (1, 5, 10, 50 μg/ml) was spotted on a glass surface and allowed to dry at room temperature. Liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) was completed and 100μL of internal standard (flurazepam) was added to the sample, vortexed and allowed to equilibrate for 15 min followed by the addition of 1ml of carbonate-bicarbonate buffer. Diazepam was extracted with 1ml of toluene: heptane (9:1, v/v) and centrifuged for 10min at 4500 rpm. The organic layer collected was analysed by gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC/MS) using selective ion monitoring (SIM) mode. The method was checked for linearity, limit of detection (LOD), limit of quantitation (LOQ), precision, accuracy, extraction recovery and stability. Good linearity was obtained between 1-100 μg/ml (r2=0.9983) for diazepam in dried bloodstains. LOD and LOQ in bloodstains were 0.5-1 μg/ml and 1 μg/ml respectively. Interday precision was 2-10% and accuracy ranged from -66.3% to -39.3%. A scatter plot showed results obtained from dried bloodstains and whole blood was comparable. However, stability study conducted on five days showed that diazepam was not stable in dried bloodstains since an apparent decrease in the measured concentration of diazepam was observed on each day. It was shown that detection of diazepam in dried bloodstains was possible. Stability study showed that diazepam was not stable in dried bloodstains. Therefore, toxicological analysis of diazepam in bloodstains can assist the court based on qualitative information but not on quantitative information since measured concentration varied on different days. Toxicological analysis of dried bloodstains can be important for the police and lawyers since it can help to determine the chronology of events in a crime and helped the court to reconstruct that crime. The new ideas raised in this study compared to other studies are: glass used as a substrate, diazepam drug, stability and recovery study were assessed on 5 days

Conventional versus highly cross-linked polyethylene in primary total knee replacement : a comparison of revision rates using data from the National Joint Registry for England, Wales, and Northern Ireland

There is evidence to support the use of highly cross-linked polyethylene (HXLPE) in patients undergoing total hip arthroplasty. However, the benefits for those undergoing total knee arthroplasty are uncertain, with conflicting reports based on previous cohort analyses. The purpose of the present study was to compare the revision rates following primary total knee arthroplasty with use of HXLPE as compared with conventional polyethylene (CPE) using data from the National Joint Registry (NJR) for England, Wales and Northern Ireland. We performed a retrospective analysis of primary total knee arthroplasties recorded in the NJR from 2003 to 2014. Cobalt-chromium (CoCr)-CPE and CoCr-HXLPE bearing surfaces were compared using all-cause revision, aseptic revision, and septic revision as end points. Survival analyses were conducted using rates per 100 years observed, Kaplan-Meier survival estimates, and Cox regression hazard ratios (HRs) adjusted for age, sex, American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) classification, body mass index (BMI), lead surgeon grade, and implant constraint. Secondary analyses compared the most commonly used HXLPEs (Zimmer Prolong, DePuy XLK, and Stryker X3) against CPE for the 3 most common total knee arthroplasty systems (NexGen, PFC Sigma, and Triathlon). In the present study of 550,658 total knee arthroplasties, the unadjusted aseptic revision rates were significantly lower following procedures performed with CPE (n = 513,744) as compared with those performed with HXLPE total knee replacements (n = 36,914) (0.29 [95% confidence interval (CI), 0.28 to 0.30] compared to 0.38 [95% CI, 0.35 to 0.42], p 35 kg/m, the "second-generation" Stryker X3 HXLPE demonstrated significantly better survival than its respective CPE, with CPE having an HR of 2.6 (95% CI, 1.2 to 5.9) (p = 0.02). Alternative bearings are marketed as having improved wear properties over traditional CoCr-CPE. This registry-based analysis demonstrated no overall survival benefit of HXLPE after a maximum duration of follow-up of 12 years. Because of their increased cost, the routine use of HXLPE bearings may not be justified. However, they may have a role in specific "higher demand" groups such as patients 35 kg/m. Therapeutic Level III. See Instructions for Authors for a complete list of levels of evidence

The Planck Surveyor mission: astrophysical prospects

Although the Planck Surveyor mission is optimized to map the cosmic microwave background anisotropies, it will also provide extremely valuable information on astrophysical phenomena. We review our present understanding of Galactic and extragalactic foregrounds relevant to the mission and discuss on one side, Planck's impact on the study of their properties and, on the other side, to what extent foreground contamination may affect Planck's ability to accurately determine cosmological parameters. Planck's multifrequency surveys will be unique in their coverage of large areas of the sky (actually, of the full sky); this will extend by two or more orders of magnitude the flux density interval over which mm/sub-mm counts of extragalactic sources can be determined by instruments already available (like SCUBA) or planned for the next decade (like the LSA-MMA or the space mission FIRST), which go much deeper but over very limited areas. Planck will thus provide essential complementary information on the epoch-dependent luminosity functions. Bright radio sources will be studied over a poorly explored frequency range where spectral signatures, essential to understand the physical processes that are going on, show up. The Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, with its extremely rich information content, will be observed in the direction of a large number of rich clusters of Galaxies. Thanks again to its all sky coverage, Planck will provide unique information on the structure and on the emission properties of the interstellar medium in the Galaxy. At the same time, the foregrounds are unlikely to substantially limit Planck's ability to measure the cosmological signals. Even measurements of polarization of the primordial Cosmic Microwave background fluctuations appear to be feasible.Comment: 20 pages, Latex (use aipproc2.sty, aipproc2.cls, epsfig.sty), 10 PostScript figures; invited review talk, Proc. of the Conference: "3 K Cosmology", Roma, Italy, 5-10 October 1998, AIP Conference Proc, in press Note: Figures 6 and 7 have been replaced by new and correct version