The Promise of Priority Review Vouchers as a Legislative Tool to Encourage Drugs for Neglected Diseases

Despite the intellectual property system’s success in promoting the economic well-being of the United States, this system has not achieved all socially valuable ends. Insufficient treatments are applied both to diseases endemic in developing countries, such as malaria, and rare diseases, such as rare childhood cancers. Several legislative tools aim to promote socially valuable drugs and biologics through market incentives. The priority review voucher (PRV) program is the latest and most unique of these legislative tools aimed at encouraging the development of drugs for neglected diseases without burdening taxpayers. The Creating Hope Act—recently signed into law as part of the Food & Drug Administration Safety & Innovation Act—extends the PRV program to rare pediatric diseases. This Issue Brief argues that some provisions in this new legislation may result in undesirable collateral effects that could prevent the legislation from fulfilling its objective of encouraging investment in treatments for rare pediatric diseases

A Dangerous Inheritance: A Child’s Digital Identity

This Comment begins with one family’s story of its experience with social media that many others can relate to in today’s ever-growing world of technology and the Internet. Technology has made it possible for a person’s online presence to grow exponentially through continuous sharing by other Internet users. This ability to communicate and share information amongst family, friends, and strangers all over the world, while beneficial in some regard, comes with its privacy downfalls. The risks to privacy are elevated when children’s information is being revealed, which often stems from a child’s own parents conduct online. Parents all over the world are creating their children’s digital identities before these children even have the chance to develop them on their own. And other safety issues are often overlooked, such as those relating to online pedophiles and identity theft. This Comment argues the need for a legislative solution in the United States incentivizing adults to restrict the types of information that they choose to disclose online. However, such legislation must consider First Amendment hurdles and incorporate realistic and unambiguous restrictions, which are based in tort law and provide for a private right of action that can ultimately serve the specific purpose of protecting children’s privacy until reaching an age when they can do so themselves

Selected Demographic and MMPI Scales as Predictors of Seclusion and Restraint in an Inpatient Psychiatric Adolescent Male Population

Working with troubled adolescents is a challenging and sometimes dangerous occupation. one of the means of control often employed in treatment settings with aggressive youth is seclusion and restraint. This intervention is intended as a means of helping the youth regain control while maintaining the safety of the therapeutic milieu for the other patients and staff members. Research implicates several demographic factors and personality styles which are observed with aggressive acting out in male adolescents. To examine the ability of these variables to predict the aggressive behavior warranting seclusion and restraint, archival data were collected from 186 former inpatient adolescent males (93 who were secluded and restrained, and 93 who were not secluded and restrained) from a private psychiatric hospital. The personality variables were measured by the MMPI. Post hoc findings suggest that the presence of an alcoholic parent figure and physical abuse in the home were demographic variables predictive of aggressive acting out behaviors while in treatment.. The Hysteria, Hypomania, and Schizophrenia scales from the MMPI were personality characteristics found most predictive of aggressive acting out behaviors warranting seclusion and restraint intervention. Combined, these two sets of variables were able to classify the patients into secluded and restrained and non-secluded and restrained groups with 66 percent accuracy. Statistically and practically this accuracy rate was considered an insignificant level for any practical use for the hospital staff. It was recommended that the staff of the hospital used for this study not employ the derived discriminant equation to identify potentially aggressive males due to its low ability to distinguish between the males requiring seclusion and restraint and those who would not need the intervention

Rapid Measurement of Quantum Systems using Feedback Control

We introduce a feedback control algorithm that increases the speed at which a measurement extracts information about a $d$-dimensional system by a factor that scales as $d^2$. Generalizing this algorithm, we apply it to a register of $n$ qubits and show an improvement O(n). We derive analytical bounds on the benefit provided by the feedback and perform simulations that confirm that this speedup is achieved.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures. V2: Minor correction

Writer Identification Using Inexpensive Signal Processing Techniques

We propose to use novel and classical audio and text signal-processing and otherwise techniques for "inexpensive" fast writer identification tasks of scanned hand-written documents "visually". The "inexpensive" refers to the efficiency of the identification process in terms of CPU cycles while preserving decent accuracy for preliminary identification. This is a comparative study of multiple algorithm combinations in a pattern recognition pipeline implemented in Java around an open-source Modular Audio Recognition Framework (MARF) that can do a lot more beyond audio. We present our preliminary experimental findings in such an identification task. We simulate "visual" identification by "looking" at the hand-written document as a whole rather than trying to extract fine-grained features out of it prior classification.Comment: 9 pages; 1 figure; presented at CISSE'09 at http://conference.cisse2009.org/proceedings.aspx ; includes the the application source code; based on MARF described in arXiv:0905.123