A double-blind study of the efficacy of apomorphine and its assessment in "off-periods in Parkinson's disease

Five patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease with severe response fluctuations were selected for a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled study, concerning the clinical effects of subcutaneous apomorphine and its assessment in `off¿-periods. The study was designed as five n = 1 studies, in which every patient was his own control. The effect of apomorphine was studied by using the Columbia rating scale and quantitative assessments, using tapping, walking and pinboard. There was a significant positive effect of apomorphine, in a mean optimal dose of 2.7 mg, with a mean latency of onset of 7.3 min and a mean duration of response of 96 min. After pretreatment with domperidone, no significant adverse effects were observed. Tapping showed the highest correlation with rigidity and bradykinesia. Walking showed a high correlation with stability and gait. Pinboard testing did not give additional information. The first conclusion was that apomorphine proved to be a significantly effective dopamine agonist, proven now also by a double blind placebo-controlled study. Secondly it was concluded that assessment of clinical effect in parkinsonian patients can be performed best by combining the Columbia item tremor with tapping and walking scores

Deductive Modeling to Determine an Optimum Jury Size and Fraction Required to Convict

In 1970, the United States Supreme Court held in Williams v. Florida that due process is not violated if a state chooses to conduct criminal cases with six-person juries rather than twelve-person juries. Two years later, in Apodaca v. Oregon, the Court held that due process is not violated if a state chooses to have juries decide criminal cases by a majority of ten out of twelve jurors. Those cases were followed by a substantial literature, but there is still no systematic analysis of the fundamental issue raised by Williams and Apodaca: What is the relation between jury size, or a requirement of unanimity, and conviction of the guilty and acquittal of the innocent

Time-Oriented Models and the Legal Process: Reducing Delay and Forecasting the Future

This article describes a series of models for analyzing the legal process that emphasize either time-saving or the prediction of future events from past events

High-magnetic field phase diagram and failure of magnetic Gr\"uneisen scaling in LiFePO4_4

We report the magnetic phase diagram of single-crystalline LiFePO$_4$ in magnetic fields up to 58~T and present a detailed study of magneto-elastic coupling by means of high-resolution capacitance dilatometry. Large anomalies at \tn\ in the thermal expansion coefficient $\alpha$ imply pronounced magneto-elastic coupling. Quantitative analysis yields the magnetic Gr\"uneisen parameter $\gamma_{\rm mag}=6.7(5)\cdot 10^{-7}$~mol/J. The positive hydrostatic pressure dependence $dT_{\rm N}/dp = 1.46(11)$~K/GPa is dominated by uniaxial effects along the $a$-axis. Failure of Gr\"uneisen scaling below $\approx 40$~K, i.e., below the peak temperature in the magneto-electric coupling coefficient [\onlinecite{toft2015anomalous}], implies several competing degrees of freedom and indicates relevance of recently observed hybrid excitations~[\onlinecite{yiu2017hybrid}]. A broad and strongly magnetic-field-dependent anomaly in $\alpha$ in this temperature regime highlight the relevance of structure changes. Upon application of magnetic fields $B||b$-axis, a pronounced jump in the magnetisation implies spin-reorientation at $B_{\rm SF} = 32$~T as well as a precursing phase at 29~T and $T=1.5$~K. In a two-sublattice mean-field model, the saturation field $B_{\rm sat,b} = 64(2)$~T enables the determination of the effective antiferromagnetic exchange interaction $J_{\rm af} = 2.68(5)$~meV as well as the anisotropies $D_{\rm b} = -0.53(4)$~meV and $D_{\rm c} = 0.44(8)$~meV

Further support for the alignment of cattle along magnetic field lines: reply to Hert et al.

Hert et al. (J Comp Physiol A, 2011) challenged one part of the study by Begall et al. (PNAS 105:13451–13455, 2008) claiming that they could not replicate the finding of preferential magnetic alignment of cattle recorded in aerial images of Google Earth. However, Hert and co-authors used a different statistical approach and applied the statistics on a sample partly unsuitable to examine magnetic alignment. About 50% of their data represent noise (resolution of the images is too poor to enable unambiguous measurement of the direction of body axes, pastures are on slopes, near settlements or high voltage power-lines, etc.). Moreover, the authors have selected for their analysis only ~ 40% of cattle that were present on the pastures analyzed. Here, we reanalyze all usable data and show that cattle significantly align their body axes in North–South direction on pastures analyzed by Hert and co-authors. This finding thus supports our previous study. In addition, we show by using aerial Google Earth images with good resolution, that the magnetic alignment is more pronounced in resting than in standing cattle