Commentary : missing targets on drugs-related deaths, and a Scottish paradox

The 10-year drug strategy for England and Wales was published in February 2008. It dropped drugs-related deaths (DRDs) as a key performance indicator. Scotland retained a necessary strong focus on DRDs. Scotland's DRDs numbered 1006 in 2000–02 and 1009 in 2003–05. The previous Scottish administration's claim that its number of current injectors had decreased substantially between 2000 and 2003 implied, paradoxically, that their DRD rate would have to have increased. Worse was to come: Scotland's DRDs had increased to 876 in 2006 + 2007. We analyse UK's DRDs by sex and age-group to reveal temporal trends (2000–02 versus 2003–05 versus 2006 + 2007) with different public health and epidemiological implications. We also address the above Scottish paradox and assess, by age-group, how consistent Scotland's 876 DRDs in 2006 + 2007 are with Scottish injectors’ DRD rate in 2003–05 of around 1 per 100 injector-years. Public health success in the UK in reducing DRDs at younger ages should not be overshadowed by the late consequence in terms of older-age DRDs of UK's injector epidemics; in the early 1980s in Scotland, and late 1980s in England and Wales. Targets for reducing DRDs should pay heed to UK's injector epidemics

CTC and International Research and Information Systems

There is a long history of creating digital libraries of legal materials in general and of international legal materials in particular. This article highlights the history of several noteworthy examples of earlier digital libraries. It then describes the creation of the Cape Town Convention Academic Project digital library. Finally, the article applies lessons learned from the histories of the earlier libraries to analyse issues the Cape Town Convention library may face in the future

Accounting for false mortality in telemetry tag applications

Deaths of animals in the wild are rarely observed directly, which often limits understanding of survival rates. Telemetry transmitters offer field ecologists the opportunity to observe mortality events in cases as the absence of animal movement. When observations of mortality are based on factors such as the absence of animal movement, live individuals can be mistaken for dead, resulting in biased estimates of survival. Additionally, tag failure or emigration might also influence estimates of survival in telemetry studies. Failing to account for mis-classification, tag failure, and emigration rates can result in overestimates of mortality rates by up two-fold, even when the data are corrected for obviously mistaken entries. We use a multi-state capture–recapture model with a misclassification parameter in estimating both the rate of permanent emigration and/or tag failure and the rate at which individuals are mistakenly identified as dead. We use this method on an annual telemetry survey of three species of native fish in the Murray river, Australia: Murray cod (Maccullochella peelii), trout cod (Maccullochella macquariensis) and golden perch (Macquaria ambigua). Evidence for higher mortality rates in the first year post-implantation occurred for Murray cod and golden perch, which is likely an effect of tagging and/or the transmitter, or transmitters shedding. Using simulations, we confirm that our model approach is robust to a broad range of misclassification and transmitter failure rates. With these simulations we also demonstrate that misclassification models that do not account for emigration will likely be erroneous if live and dead animals have different probabilities of detection. These findings will have a broad interest to ecologists wishing to account for multiple sources of misclassification error in capture-mark-recapture studies, with the caveat that the specifics of the approach are dependent on species, transmitter types and other aspects of experimental design which may or may not be amenable to the misclassification framework

Making molecules by mergoassociation: two atoms in adjacent nonspherical optical traps

Mergoassociation of two ultracold atoms to form a weakly bound molecule can occur when two optical traps that each contain a single atom are merged. Molecule formation occurs at an avoided crossing between a molecular state and the lowest motional state of the atom pair. We develop the theory of mergoassociation for pairs of nonidentical nonspherical traps. We develop a coupled-channel approach for the relative motion of the two atoms and present results for pairs of cylindrically symmetrical traps as a function of their anisotropy. We focus on the strength of the avoided crossing responsible for mergoassociation. We also develop an approximate method that gives insight into the dependence of the crossing strength on aspect ratio

Multiple Systems Estimation (or Capture-Recapture Estimation) to Inform Public Policy

Applications of estimating population sizes range from estimating human or ecological population size within regions or countries to estimating the hidden number of civilian casualties in war. Total enumeration via a census is typically infeasible. However, a series of partial enumerations of a population is often possible, leading to capture-recapture methods, which have been extensively used in ecology to estimate the size of wildlife populations with an associated measure of uncertainty and are most effectively applied when there are multiple capture occasions. Capture-recapture ideology can be more widely applied to multiple data sources by the linkage of individuals across multiple lists, often referred to as multiple systems estimation (MSE). The MSE approach is preferred when estimating capture-shy or hard-to-reach populations, including those who are caught up in the criminal justice system, trafficked, or civilian casualties of war. Motivated by the public policy applications of MSE, each briefly introduced, we discuss practical problems with methodological implications. They include period definition; case definition; scenarios when an observed count is not a true count of the population of interest but an upper bound due to mismatched definitions; exact or probabilistic matching of cases across lists; demographic or other information about the case that influences capture propensities; permissions to access lists; list creation by research teams or interested parties; referrals (if presence on list A results, almost surely, in presence on list B); different mathematical models leading to widely different estimated population sizes; uncertainty in estimation; computational efficiency; external validation; hypothesis generation; and additional independent external information. Returning to our motivational applications, we focus finally on whether the uncertainty that qualified their estimates was sufficiently narrow to orient public policy. </jats:p

British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL) Legal Information Literacy Statement

The Association hosts an annual conference which features a members’ ‘Have your say’ session. At the 2011 session, a BIALL member based in the commercial sector voiced their concern at the legal research competency of recent joiners to their firm, stating that senior partners were asking in-house law librarians to verify the research presented by new trainees. This member also queried the role of academic law librarians, questioning how legal research skills are being taught at academic and vocational level and stating clearly that the legal research skills of new joiners are not meeting the expectations of employers. The following debate prompted one of the authors to propose that BIALL should investigate the issue in depth, with the aim of producing legal IL guidance in the form of a toolkit, similar to legal IL guidance devised in the United States and IL initiatives within the NHS (Choolhun 2012)

Making molecules by mergoassociation: Two atoms in adjacent nonspherical optical traps

Mergoassociation of two ultracold atoms to form a weakly bound molecule can occur when two optical traps that each contain a single atom are merged. Molecule formation occurs at an avoided crossing between a molecular state and the lowest motional state of the atom pair. We develop the theory of mergoassociation for pairs of nonidentical nonspherical traps. We develop a coupled-channel approach for the relative motion of the two atoms and present results for pairs of cylindrically symmetrical traps as a function of their anisotropy. We focus on the strength of the avoided crossing responsible for mergoassociation. We also develop an approximate method that gives insight into the dependence of the crossing strength on aspect ratio

Quantitative analysis questions the role of MeCP2 as a global regulator of alternative splicing

MeCP2 is an abundant protein in mature nerve cells, where it binds to DNA sequences containing methylated cytosine. Mutations in the MECP2 gene cause the severe neurological disorder Rett syndrome (RTT), provoking intensive study of the underlying molecular mechanisms. Multiple functions have been proposed, one of which involves a regulatory role in splicing. Here we leverage the recent availability of high-quality transcriptomic data sets to probe quantitatively the potential influence of MeCP2 on alternative splicing. Using a variety of machine learning approaches that can capture both linear and non-linear associations, we show that widely different levels of MeCP2 have a minimal effect on alternative splicing in three different systems. Alternative splicing was also apparently indifferent to developmental changes in DNA methylation levels. Our results suggest that regulation of splicing is not a major function of MeCP2. They also highlight the importance of multi-variate quantitative analyses in the formulation of biological hypotheses

Indian Ocean tsunami deposits along the West Coast of the Malay-Thai Peninsula: foraminiferal and grain size analysis

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