Justice for Injured Workers: The Struggle Continues

This article briefly reviews the role that community legal clinics have played in the injured worker movement. It chronicles the erosion of the basic principles of workers\u27 compensation and the shift in emphasis from compensating workers to containing costs. It exposes the myth of a debt crisis in workers\u27 compensation and explores the effect of this shift on workers\u27 benefits, on workplace health and safety, and ultimately on the viability of a no-fault, publicly-administered workers\u27 compensation system. The article also outlines the threat to the existing system in the workers\u27 compensation proposals of the current government

Justice for Injured Workers: The Struggle Continues

This article briefly reviews the role that community legal clinics have played in the injured worker movement. It chronicles the erosion of the basic principles of workers\u27 compensation and the shift in emphasis from compensating workers to containing costs. It exposes the myth of a debt crisis in workers\u27 compensation and explores the effect of this shift on workers\u27 benefits, on workplace health and safety, and ultimately on the viability of a no-fault, publicly-administered workers\u27 compensation system. The article also outlines the threat to the existing system in the workers\u27 compensation proposals of the current government

Slope Stability Evaluation for an Existing Steep Cut in Weathered Volcanics, Hong Kong

This case study concerns an investigation of a major existing soil slope. It is a 60m (197 ft) high cutting slope, at 40 degrees to 60 degrees to the horizontal, exhibiting a considerably greater degree of stability than was obtained by a series of geotechnical investigations and analyses. The common practice of correlation between widely spaced borings is shown to be inappropriate at this site because of the highly variable ground conditions. Rather, the comprehensive geological comprehensive engineering investigation carried out has enabled a detailed appreciation of the distribution and nature of weathered materials at the site. Transitional materials with soil-like appearance and weak rock properties have been identified. Based on this information, slope stability evaluation was carried out with more realistic results and with greater confidence

Developing a high-resolution x-ray imager using electron-multiplying (EM) CCDs

Applications at synchrotron facilities such as macromolecular crystallography and high energy X-ray diffraction require high resolution imaging detectors with high dynamic range and large surface area. Current systems can be split into two main categories: hybrid pixel detectors and scintillator-coupled Charge-Coupled Devices (CCDs). Whilst both have limitations, CCD-based systems (coupled to fibre-optics to increase imaging area) are often used in these applications due to their small pixels and the high resolution. Electron-Multiplication CCDs (EM-CCDs) are able to suppress the readout noise associated with increased readout speed offering a low noise, high speed detector solution. A previous pilot study using a small-area (8 mm × 8 mm) scintillator-coupled EM-CCD found that through high frame-rates, low noise and novel uses of photon-counting, resolution could be improved from over 80 μm to 25 μm at 2 fps. To further improve this detector system, high speed readout electronics can be used alongside a fibre-optic taper and EM-CCD to create a “best of both worlds” solution consisting of the high resolution of a CCD, along with the low noise, high speed (high dynamic range) and large effective area of pixel detectors. This paper details the developments in the study and discusses the latest results and their implication on the system design

Clonal and microclonal mutational heterogeneity in high hyperdiploid acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

High hyperdiploidy (HD), the most common cytogenetic subtype of B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL), is largely curable but significant treatment-related morbidity warrants investigating the biology and identifying novel drug targets. Targeted deep-sequencing of 538 cancer-relevant genes was performed in 57 HD-ALL patients lacking overt KRAS and NRAS hotspot mutations and lacking common B-ALL deletions to enrich for discovery of novel driver genes. One-third of patients harbored damaging mutations in epigenetic regulatory genes, including the putative novel driver DOT1L (n=4). Receptor tyrosine kinase (RTK)/Ras/MAPK signaling pathway mutations were found in two-thirds of patients, including novel mutations in ROS1, which mediates phosphorylation of the PTPN11-encoded protein SHP2. Mutations in FLT3 significantly co-occurred with DOT1L (p=0.04), suggesting functional cooperation in leukemogenesis. We detected an extraordinary level of tumor heterogeneity, with microclonal (mutant allele fraction <0.10) KRAS, NRAS, FLT3, and/or PTPN11 hotspot mutations evident in 31/57 (54.4%) patients. Multiple KRAS and NRAS codon 12 and 13 microclonal mutations significantly co-occurred within tumor samples (p=4.8x10-4), suggesting ongoing formation of and selection for Ras-activating mutations. Future work is required to investigate whether tumor microheterogeneity impacts clinical outcome and to elucidate the functional consequences of epigenetic dysregulation in HD-ALL, potentially leading to novel therapeutic approaches

Short text messages to encourage adherence to medication and follow-up for people with psychosis (Mobile.Net): randomized controlled trial in Finland

Background: A text messaging service (short message service [SMS]) has the potential to target large groups of people with long-term illnesses such as serious mental disorders, who may have difficulty with treatment adherence. Robust research on the impact of mobile technology interventions for these patients remains scarce. Objective: The main objective of our study was to investigate the impact of individually tailored short text messages on the rate of psychiatric hospital readmissions, health care service use, and clinical outcomes. In addition, we analyzed treatment costs. Methods: Between September 2011 and November 2012, we randomly assigned 1139 people to a tailored text message intervention (n=569) or usual care (n=570). Participants received semiautomated text messages for up to 12 months or usual care. The primary outcome, based on routinely collected health register data, was patient readmission into a psychiatric hospital during a 12-month follow-up period. Secondary outcomes were related to other service use, coercion, medication, adverse events, satisfaction, social functioning, quality of life, and economic factors (cost analysis). Results: There was 98.24% (1119/1139) follow-up at 12 months. Tailored mobile telephone text messages did not reduce the rate of hospital admissions (242/563, 43.0% of the SMS group vs 216/556, 38.8% of the control group; relative risk 1.11; 95% CI 0.92-1.33; P=.28), time between hospitalizations (mean difference 7.0 days 95% CI –8.0 to 24.0; P=.37), time spent in a psychiatric hospital during the year (mean difference 2.0 days 95% CI –2.0 to 7.0; P=.35), or other service outcomes. People who received text messages were less disabled, based on Global Assessment Scale scores at the time of their readmission, than those who did not receive text messages (odds ratio 0.68; 95% CI 0.47-0.97; P=.04). The costs of treatment were higher for people in the SMS group than in the control group (mean €10,103 vs €9210, respectively, P<.001). Conclusions: High-grade routinely collected data can provide clear outcomes for pragmatic randomized trials. SMS messaging tailored with the input of each individual patient did not decrease the rate of psychiatric hospital visits after the 12 months of follow-up. Although there may have been other, more subtle effects, the results of these were not evident in outcomes of agreed importance to clinicians, policymakers, and patients and their families

Assessment of proton radiation-induced charge transfer inefficiency in the CCD273 detector for the Euclid Dark Energy Mission

Euclid is a medium class mission selected for launch in 2019, with a primary goal to study the dark universe using the weak lensing and baryonic acoustic oscillations techniques. Weak lensing depends on accurate shape measurements, therefore it is beneficial that the effects of radiation-induced charge transfer inefficiency (CTI) in the Euclid CCD over the six year mission are understood and minimised. This paper describes the initial evaluation of the tolerance to radiation induced charge transfer inefficiency (CTI) of the CCD273 produced by e2v technologies plc, making comparisons with the previous CCD selected for Euclid the CCD203. The CCD273 benefits from the inclusion of a charge injection structure for trap suppression and a reduction in the register channel width. The improvement in tolerance to radiation induced serial CTI achieved by reducing the channel width from 50 um to 20 um was measured experimentally to be a factor of 1.7, which compares well to a factor of 1.9 found using a charge volume model

Mitigating radiation-induced charge transfer inefficiency in full-frame CCD applications by ‘pumping’ traps

The charge transfer efficiency of a CCD is based on the average level of signal lost per pixel over a number of transfers. This value can be used to directly compare the relative performances of different structures, increases in radiation damage or to quantify improvements in operating parameters. This number does not however give sufficient detail to mitigate for the actual signal loss/deference in either of the transfer directions that may be critical to measuring shapes to high accuracy, such as those required in astronomy applications (e.g. for Gaia’s astrometry or the galaxy distortion measurements for Euclid) based in the radiation environment of space. Pocket-pumping is an established technique for finding the location and activation levels of traps; however, a number of parameters in the process can also be explored to identify the trap species and location to sub-pixel accuracy. This information can be used in two ways to increase the sensitivity of a camera. Firstly, the clocking process can be optimised for the time constant of the majority of traps in each of the transfer directions, reducing deferred charge during read out. Secondly, a correction algorithm can be developed and employed during the post-processing of individual frames to move most of any deferred signal back into the charge packet it originated from. Here we present the trap-pumping techniques used to optimise the charge transfer efficiency of p- and n-channel e2v CCD204s and describe the use of trap-pumped images for on-orbit calibration and ground based image correction algorithms

VIS: the visible imager for Euclid

Euclid-VIS is a large format visible imager for the ESA Euclid space mission in their Cosmic Vision program, scheduled for launch in 2019. Together with the near infrared imaging within the NISP instrument it forms the basis of the weak lensing measurements of Euclid. VIS will image in a single r+i+z band from 550-900 nm over a field of view of ~0.5 deg2. By combining 4 exposures with a total of 2240 sec, VIS will reach to V=24.5 (10{\sigma}) for sources with extent ~0.3 arcsec. The image sampling is 0.1 arcsec. VIS will provide deep imaging with a tightly controlled and stable point spread function (PSF) over a wide survey area of 15000 deg2 to measure the cosmic shear from nearly 1.5 billion galaxies to high levels of accuracy, from which the cosmological parameters will be measured. In addition, VIS will also provide a legacy imaging dataset with an unprecedented combination of spatial resolution, depth and area covering most of the extra-Galactic sky. Here we will present the results of the study carried out by the Euclid Consortium during the Euclid Definition phase.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure