The Prediction of Court Appearance: A Study of Bail in Cleveland

Bail is an ancient device designed to allow persons charged with criminal offenses to be released from jail pending their trial, while assuring the defendant\u27s later appearance in court. Every decision to release a criminal defendant prior to trial involves an evaluation of numerous factors that might affect the likelihood of his later court appearance. This note presents the results of a study of bail in Cleveland, Ohio (the Cleveland Study ), designed to aid in that evaluation by developing an objective method of predicting the later court appearance of felony defendants

Student perceptions of scholarly writing: student generation of collaborative rubrics to score scholarly writing

Scholarly writing is an important skill in all fields of study. Despite a strong focus on writing in many courses, faculty and students have disparate expectations related to scholarly writing. Herein, a classroom exercise is presented in which students were asked to develop a rubric that would be used to evaluate their summative writing assessment. Students were provided with a list of elements that commonly represent good scholarly writing, asked to define what effectively demonstrating these elements looks like, and asked to assign the weight that would be given to each element. The weights given to each element by students were compared to a faculty-generated, departmental writing rubric. Students assigned significantly higher weights to ideas, and significantly lower weight to sentence fluency. Overall, students favored content over writing mechanics. A random selection of student papers was scored using both the departmental rubric and the student rubric, with about a half-letter grade difference between the two groups, though the difference was not statistically significant. The outcomes suggest this exercise may be valuable in offering insight into student perceptions of scholarly writing and in furthering student engagement in the writing process

Adaptation of High-Throughput Screening in Drug Discovery—Toxicological Screening Tests

High-throughput screening (HTS) is one of the newest techniques used in drug design and may be applied in biological and chemical sciences. This method, due to utilization of robots, detectors and software that regulate the whole process, enables a series of analyses of chemical compounds to be conducted in a short time and the affinity of biological structures which is often related to toxicity to be defined. Since 2008 we have implemented the automation of this technique and as a consequence, the possibility to examine 100,000 compounds per day. The HTS method is more frequently utilized in conjunction with analytical techniques such as NMR or coupled methods e.g., LC-MS/MS. Series of studies enable the establishment of the rate of affinity for targets or the level of toxicity. Moreover, researches are conducted concerning conjugation of nanoparticles with drugs and the determination of the toxicity of such structures. For these purposes there are frequently used cell lines. Due to the miniaturization of all systems, it is possible to examine the compound’s toxicity having only 1–3 mg of this compound. Determination of cytotoxicity in this way leads to a significant decrease in the expenditure and to a reduction in the length of the study

Pathogenesis of adolescent idiopathic scoliosis in girls - a double neuro-osseous theory involving disharmony between two nervous systems, somatic and autonomic expressed in the spine and trunk: possible dependency on sympathetic nervous system and hormones with implications for medical therapy

Anthropometric data from three groups of adolescent girls - preoperative adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS), screened for scoliosis and normals were analysed by comparing skeletal data between higher and lower body mass index subsets. Unexpected findings for each of skeletal maturation, asymmetries and overgrowth are not explained by prevailing theories of AIS pathogenesis. A speculative pathogenetic theory for girls is formulated after surveying evidence including: (1) the thoracospinal concept for right thoracic AIS in girls; (2) the new neuroskeletal biology relating the sympathetic nervous system to bone formation/resorption and bone growth; (3) white adipose tissue storing triglycerides and the adiposity hormone leptin which functions as satiety hormone and sentinel of energy balance to the hypothalamus for long-term adiposity; and (4) central leptin resistance in obesity and possibly in healthy females. The new theory states that AIS in girls results from developmental disharmony expressed in spine and trunk between autonomic and somatic nervous systems. The autonomic component of this double neuro-osseous theory for AIS pathogenesis in girls involves selectively increased sensitivity of the hypothalamus to circulating leptin (genetically-determined up-regulation possibly involving inhibitory or sensitizing intracellular molecules, such as SOC3, PTP-1B and SH2B1 respectively), with asymmetry as an adverse response (hormesis); this asymmetry is routed bilaterally via the sympathetic nervous system to the growing axial skeleton where it may initiate the scoliosis deformity (leptin-hypothalamic-sympathetic nervous system concept = LHS concept). In some younger preoperative AIS girls, the hypothalamic up-regulation to circulating leptin also involves the somatotropic (growth hormone/IGF) axis which exaggerates the sympathetically-induced asymmetric skeletal effects and contributes to curve progression, a concept with therapeutic implications. In the somatic nervous system, dysfunction of a postural mechanism involving the CNS body schema fails to control, or may induce, the spinal deformity of AIS in girls (escalator concept). Biomechanical factors affecting ribs and/or vertebrae and spinal cord during growth may localize AIS to the thoracic spine and contribute to sagittal spinal shape alterations. The developmental disharmony in spine and trunk is compounded by any osteopenia, biomechanical spinal growth modulation, disc degeneration and platelet calmodulin dysfunction. Methods for testing the theory are outlined. Implications are discussed for neuroendocrine dysfunctions, osteopontin, sympathoactivation, medical therapy, Rett and Prader-Willi syndromes, infantile idiopathic scoliosis, and human evolution. AIS pathogenesis in girls is predicated on two putative normal mechanisms involved in trunk growth, each acquired in evolution and unique to humans