Defining the Concept of Crime: A Humanistic Perspective

This paper argues that the traditional definition of crime is too narrow and unnecessarily constrictive of criminological work. Definitions more in accord with the objectives of a humanistic criminology must be developed. The traditional debate over the definition of crime has not been grounded within the context of the more fundamental images of crime that actually guide criminological work. By clarifying these underlying images (paradigms) and displaying the value questions and domain assumptions contained within them, we are in position to develop first order and second order definitions of crime which are more suitable to the task of humanistic criminology

Critical Criminology, Traditional Crime, and Public Policy

Critical criminologists have often ignored the serious problem of traditional or common street crime. As a result, crime prevention policy has been forfeited to the political right or to those who advocate ineffective liberal reforms. This paper argues that critical criminology can make a contribution to the formulation of public policy concerning traditional crime. Recent theoretical developments within the criitical perspective on crime, as.well as a variety of supporting data, are reviewed and specific policy recommendations to reduce traditional crime are offered. These progressive recommendations constitute an important alternative to the individualistic approaches (liberal or conservative) which now dominate crime prevention policy

Humanistic Perspectives in Criminology

In the past two decades, the field of criminology has changed dramatically. Mainstream criminology, which focused primarily on the etiology of behavior taken for granted as criminal, has been successively challenged by a number of different sociological theories and perspectives. These challenges have come from the labeling or interactionist perspective, various pluralistic conflict theories, and a number of radical, critical, or Marxist approaches. Although there are many differences among these theoretical developments, they share a common set of humanistic concerns. All of these perspectives attempt to combine a theoretical explanation of crime and social control with a practical concern for human liberation and social justice. All of these perspectives are concerned, in one way or another, with the way in which the social structuring of crime and social control affects the human rights, survival, and material well-being of people

Evolutionary Analysis of Snf1-Related Protein Kinase2 (SnRK2) and Calcium Sensor (SCS) Gene Lineages, and Dimerization of Rice Homologs, Suggest Deep Biochemical Conservation across Angiosperms

Members of the sucrose non-fermenting related kinase Group2 (SnRK2) subclasses are implicated in both direct and indirect abscisic acid (ABA) response pathways. We have used phylogenetic, biochemical, and transient in vivo approaches to examine interactions between Triticum tauschii protein kinase (TtPK1) and an interacting protein, Oryza sativa SnRK2-calcium sensor (OsSCS1). Given that TtPK1 has 100% identity with its rice ortholog, osmotic stress/abscisic acid-activated protein kinase (OsSAPK2), we hypothesized that the SCS and TtPK1 interactions are present in both wheat and rice. Here, we show that SnRK2s are clearly divided into four pan-angiosperm clades with those in the traditionally defined Subclass II encompassing two distinct clades (OsSAPK1/2 and OsSAPK3), although OsSAPK3 lacks an Arabidopsis ortholog. We also show that SCSs are distinct from a second lineage, that we term SCSsister, and while both clades pre-date land plants, the SCSsister clade lacks Poales representatives. Our Y2H assays revealed that the removal of the OsSCS1 C-terminal region along with its N-terminal EF-hand abolished its interaction with the kinase. Using transient in planta bimolecular fluorescence complementation experiments, we demonstrate that TtPK1/OsSCS1 dimerization co-localizes with DAPI-stained nuclei and with FM4- 64-stained membranes. Finally, OsSCS1- and OsSAPK2-hybridizing transcripts co-accumulate in shoots/coleoptile of drying seedlings, consistent with up-regulated kinase transcripts of PKABA1 and TtPK1. Our studies suggest that interactions between homologs of the SnRK2 and SCS lineages are broadly conserved across angiosperms and offer new directions for investigations of related proteins.Organismic and Evolutionary Biolog

Impact of partial-volume correction in oncological PET studies:A systematic review and meta-analysis

Purpose: Positron-emission tomography can be useful in oncology for diagnosis, (re)staging, determining prognosis, and response assessment. However, partial-volume effects hamper accurate quantification of lesions &lt;2–3× the PET system’s spatial resolution, and the clinical impact of this is not evident. This systematic review provides an up-to-date overview of studies investigating the impact of partial-volume correction (PVC) in oncological PET studies.Methods: We searched in PubMed and Embase databases according to the PRISMA statement, including studies from inception till May 9, 2016. Two reviewers independently screened all abstracts and eligible full-text articles and performed quality assessment according to QUADAS-2 and QUIPS criteria. For a set of similar diagnostic studies, we statistically pooled the results using bivariate meta-regression.Results: Thirty-one studies were eligible for inclusion. Overall, study quality was good. For diagnosis and nodal staging, PVC yielded a strong trend of increased sensitivity at expense of specificity. Meta-analysis of six studies investigating diagnosis of pulmonary nodules (679 lesions) showed no significant change in diagnostic accuracy after PVC (p = 0.222). Prognostication was not improved for non-small cell lung cancer and esophageal cancer, whereas it did improve for head and neck cancer. Response assessment was not improved by PVC for (locally advanced) breast cancer or rectal cancer, and it worsened in metastatic colorectal cancer.Conclusions: The accumulated evidence to date does not support routine application of PVC in standard clinical PET practice. Consensus on the preferred PVC methodology in oncological PET should be reached. Partial-volume-corrected data should be used as adjuncts to, but not yet replacement for, uncorrected data.</p

The Equilibrium State of Molecular Regions in the Outer Galaxy

A summary of global properties and an evaluation of the equilibrium state of molecular regions in the outer Galaxy are presented from the decomposition of the FCRAO Outer Galaxy Survey and targeted 12CO and 13CO observations of four giant molecular cloud complexes. The ensemble of identified objects includes both small, isolated clouds and clumps within larger cloud complexes. 12CO velocity dispersions show little variation with cloud sizes for radii less than 10 pc. It is demonstrated that the internal motions of regions with molecular masses greater than 10**4 msuns are bound by self gravity, yet, the constituent clumps of cloud complexes and isolated molecular clouds with M < 10**3 msuns are not in self gravitational equilibrium. The required external pressures to maintain the equilibrium of this population are (1-2)x10**4 cm-3-K.Comment: To appear in ApJ, 32 pages, 13 figures, 2 table

Quantifying effects of radiotherapy-induced microvascular injury; review of established and emerging brain MRI techniques

Microvascular changes are increasingly recognised not only as primary drivers of radiotherapy treatment response in brain tumours, but also as an important contributor to short- and long-term (cognitive) side effects arising from irradiation of otherwise healthy brain tissue. As overall survival of patients with brain tumours is increasing, monitoring long-term sequels of radiotherapy-induced microvascular changes in the context of their potential predictive power for outcome, such as cognitive disability, has become increasingly relevant. Ideally, radiotherapy-induced significant microvascular changes in otherwise healthy brain tissue should be identified as early as possible to facilitate adaptive radiotherapy and to proactively start treatment to minimise the influence on these side-effects on the final outcome. Although MRI is already known to be able to detect significant long-term radiotherapy induced microvascular effects, more recently advanced MR imaging biomarkers reflecting microvascular integrity and function have been reported and might provide a more accurate and earlier detection of microvascular changes. However, the use and validation of both established and new techniques in the context of monitoring early and late radiotherapy-induced microvascular changes in both target-tissue and healthy tissue currently are minimal at best. This review aims to summarise the performance and limitations of existing methods and future opportunities for detection and quantification of radiotherapy-induced microvascular changes, as well as the relation of these findings with key clinical parameters. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Evaluation Research and Institutional Pressures: Challenges in Public-Nonprofit Contracting

This article examines the connection between program evaluation research and decision-making by public managers. Drawing on neo-institutional theory, a framework is presented for diagnosing the pressures and conditions that lead alternatively toward or away the rational use of evaluation research. Three cases of public-nonprofit contracting for the delivery of major programs are presented to clarify the way coercive, mimetic, and normative pressures interfere with a sound connection being made between research and implementation. The article concludes by considering how public managers can respond to the isomorphic pressures in their environment that make it hard to act on data relating to program performance.This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 23. The Hauser Center Working Paper Series was launched during the summer of 2000. The Series enables the Hauser Center to share with a broad audience important works-in-progress written by Hauser Center scholars and researchers

Clinical relevance of the radiation dose bath in lower grade glioma, a cross-sectional pilot study on neurocognitive and radiological outcome

AIM: To investigate the clinical relevance of the radiotherapy (RT) dose bath in patients treated for lower grade glioma (LGG). METHODS: Patients (n = 17) treated with RT for LGG were assessed with neurocognitive function (NCF) tests and structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and categorized in subgroups based on tumour lateralisation. RT dose, volumetric results and cerebral microbleed (CMB) number were extracted for contralateral cerebrum, contralateral hippocampus, and cerebellum. The RT clinical target volume (CTV) was included in the analysis as a surrogate for focal tumour and other treatment effects. The relationships between RT dose, CTV, NCF and radiological outcome were analysed per subgroup. RESULTS: The subgroup with left-sided tumours (n = 10) performed significantly lower on verbal tests. The RT dose to the right cerebrum, as well as CTV, were related to poorer performance on tests for processing speed, attention, and visuospatial abilities, and more CMB. In the subgroup with right-sided tumours (n = 7), RT dose in the left cerebrum was related to lower verbal memory performance, (immediate and delayed recall, r = −0.821, p = 0.023 and r = −0.937, p = 0.002, respectively), and RT dose to the left hippocampus was related to hippocampal volume (r = −0.857, p = 0.014), without correlation between CTV and NCF. CONCLUSION: By using a novel approach, we were able to investigate the clinical relevance of the RT dose bath in patients with LGG more specifically. We used combined MRI-derived and NCF outcome measures to assess radiation-induced brain damage, and observed potential RT effects on the left-sided brain resulting in lower verbal memory performance and hippocampus volume

Pan-Cancer Analysis of lncRNA Regulation Supports Their Targeting of Cancer Genes in Each Tumor Context

Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are commonly dys-regulated in tumors, but only a handful are known toplay pathophysiological roles in cancer. We inferredlncRNAs that dysregulate cancer pathways, onco-genes, and tumor suppressors (cancer genes) bymodeling their effects on the activity of transcriptionfactors, RNA-binding proteins, and microRNAs in5,185 TCGA tumors and 1,019 ENCODE assays.Our predictions included hundreds of candidateonco- and tumor-suppressor lncRNAs (cancerlncRNAs) whose somatic alterations account for thedysregulation of dozens of cancer genes and path-ways in each of 14 tumor contexts. To demonstrateproof of concept, we showed that perturbations tar-geting OIP5-AS1 (an inferred tumor suppressor) andTUG1 and WT1-AS (inferred onco-lncRNAs) dysre-gulated cancer genes and altered proliferation ofbreast and gynecologic cancer cells. Our analysis in-dicates that, although most lncRNAs are dysregu-lated in a tumor-specific manner, some, includingOIP5-AS1, TUG1, NEAT1, MEG3, and TSIX, synergis-tically dysregulate cancer pathways in multiple tumorcontexts