On Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to The United States Court of Appeals for The Eighth Circuit, Brief of Law Professors Paul F. Rothstein, et. al., Office of the President v. Office of Independent Counsel

This Court should grant review not only because this is a case of national importance and prominence, but also because the decision below is a conspicuous departure from settled principles of evidence law. The panel majority concluded that communications between government lawyers and government officials are not protected by the attorney-client privilege, at least when those communications are sought by a federal grand jury. That conclusion conflicts with the predominant common-law understanding that the attorney-client privilege applies to government entities and that where the privilege applies, it is absolute (i.e., it protects against disclosure in all types of legal and investigative proceedings). In particular, the Court of Appeals\u27 decision rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of this Court\u27s decisions in Upjohn Co. v. United States, 449 U.S. 383 (1981), and United States v. Nixon, 418 U.s. 683 (1974). Moreover, this case warrants further review because the decision below has profound implications beyond the parties to this dispute. The Court of Appeals\u27 ruling, if allowed to stand, will create widespread uncertainty among federal, state, and local officials concerning the extent to which their communications with their agency lawyers, for the purpose of seeking legal advice in the conduct of governmental affairs, are protected by the attorney-client privilege. Unless this Court grants review and resolves this uncertainty, the decision below will likely have an adverse effect on the current and future operation of not only the Office of the President of the United States, but also government at all levels. At the very least, a decision of such vast implications (as in the present case) should be made by the highest court in the land. We accordingly urge the Court to grant the petition for review

HIRDES - The High-Resolution Double-Echelle Spectrograph for the World Space Observatory Ultraviolet (WSO/UV)

The World Space Observatory Ultraviolet (WSO/UV) is a multi-national project grown out of the needs of the astronomical community to have future access to the UV range. WSO/UV consists of a single UV telescope with a primary mirror of 1.7m diameter feeding the UV spectrometer and UV imagers. The spectrometer comprises three different spectrographs, two high-resolution echelle spectrographs (the High-Resolution Double-Echelle Spectrograph, HIRDES) and a low-dispersion long-slit instrument. Within HIRDES the 102-310nm spectral band is split to feed two echelle spectrographs covering the UV range 174-310nm and the vacuum-UV range 102-176nm with high spectral resolution (R>50,000). The technical concept is based on the heritage of two previous ORFEUS SPAS missions. The phase-B1 development activities are described in this paper considering performance aspects, design drivers, related trade-offs (mechanical concepts, material selection etc.) and a critical functional and environmental test verification approach. The current state of other WSO/UV scientific instruments (imagers) is also described.Comment: Accepted for publication in Advances in Space Researc

Claiming Space and Struggling for Recognition Partispace Working Paper Two

Aiming at contributing to a better understanding of the current developments, paradoxes and ways to deal with youth political participation in Europe, the main research question of the PARTISPACE project is: How and where do 15- to 30 year-old young people participate differently across social milieus and youth cultural scenes and across eight European cities (framed by different national welfare, education and youth policies)? In relation to this research question, this report was intended to analyse case studies which explore participation practices in formal, non-formal and informal contexts and reconstruct practices, meanings, relationship and dynamics of different forms of youth participation in a comparative perspective and local constellations of youth participation. In so doing, the report has outlined a mosaic of the different practices, activities, styles and spaces wherein young people situate their participation in the eight countries involved in the PARTISPACE project

Methodology based on genetic heuristics for in-vivo characterizing the patient-specific biomechanical behavior of the breast tissues

[EN] This paper presents a novel methodology to in-vivo estimate the elastic constants of a constitutive model proposed to characterize the mechanical behavior of the breast tissues. An iterative search algorithm based on genetic heuristics was constructed to in-vivo estimate these parameters using only medical images, thus avoiding invasive measurements of the mechanical response of the breast tissues. For the first time, a combination of overlap and distance coefficients were used for the evaluation of the similar- ity between a deformed MRI of the breast and a simulation of that deformation. The methodology was validated using breast software phantoms for virtual clinical trials, compressed to mimic MRI-guided biopsies. The biomechanical model chosen to characterize the breast tissues was an anisotropic neo-Hookean hyperelastic model. Results from this analysis showed that the algorithm is able to find the elastic constants of the constitutive equations of the proposed model with a mean relative error of about 10%. Furthermore, the overlap between the reference deformation and the simulated deformation was of around 95% showing the good performance of the proposed methodology. This methodology can be easily extended to characterize the real biomechanical behavior of the breast tissues, which means a great novelty in the field of the simulation of the breast behavior for applications such as surgical planing, surgical guidance or cancer diagnosis. This reveals the impact and relevance of the presented work.This project has been funded by MECD (reference AP2009-2414) and US National Institutes of Health (R01 Grant #CA154444), and the US National Science Foundation (III Grant #0916690). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH, and NSF. The authors of this manuscript have no conflict of interest with the presented workLago, MA.; Rupérez Moreno, MJ.; Martínez Martínez, F.; Martinez-Sanchis, S.; Bakic, P.; Monserrat, C. (2015). Methodology based on genetic heuristics for in-vivo characterizing the patient-specific biomechanical behavior of the breast tissues. Expert Systems with Applications. 42(21):7942-7950. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2015.05.058S79427950422

Enhancement of CURB65 score with proadrenomedullin (CURB65-A) for outcome prediction in lower respiratory tract infections: Derivation of a clinical algorithm

Proadrenomedullin (ProADM) confers additional prognostic information to established clinical risk scores in lower respiratory tract infections (LRTI). We aimed to derive a practical algorithm combining the CURB65 score with ProADM-levels in patients with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) and non-CAP-LRTI

Non-formal spaces of socio-cultural accompaniment: Responding to young unaccompanied refugees – reflections from the Partispace project.

Drawing on research in progress in the Partispace project we make a case for the recognition of the importance of non-formal spaces in response to young refugees across three different national contexts: Frankfurt in Germany; Gothenburg in Sweden; and Manchester in the UK. It is argued that recognition of local regulation and national controls of immigration which support climates of hostility makes it important to recognise and affirm the significance of non-formal spaces and ‘small spaces close to home’ which are often developed in the ‘third space’ of civil society and arise from the impulses driven by the solidarity of volunteers. In these contexts it is important that practices of hospitality can develop which symbolically reconstitute refugees as hosts and subjects of a democratic conversation, without which there is no possible administrative solution to the refugee crisis. It is essential that educational spaces such as schools, colleges and universities forge strong bonds with such emergent spaces