Negotiated disclosure : an examination of strategic information management by the police at custodial interrogation

This thesis considers the impact of substantially attenuating a suspect's right to silence on the relative positions of the police and defence in custodial interviews. The main hypothesis argues that these provisions have had a significant, unforeseen impact on the working dynamic between police officers and legal advisers. Interview strategies have developed, which seek to reinforce advantages to the police associated with control of pre-interview evidential disclosure. A second hypothesis postulates that introduction of the inference provisions has influenced suspect behaviour during custodial interrogation, leading to a reduced reliance upon the exercise of silence. The study drew upon data collected from in-depth, tape-recorded interviews with police officers involved at various stages of the investigative process, representing a wide variety of roles and experience. Full transcripts of the interviews were prepared and then subjected to a close-grained, qualitative analysis in which various themes were identified. The findings reveal, inter alia, that pre-interview disclosure has assumed increased significance, and can be instrumental to the interrogation outcome. Police officers are accorded considerable discretion in the management of police-suspect relations, which is evident in the emergence of control strategies for case-related information. Greater openness has flowed from the development of better-trained lawyers, and was manifest in the increased emphasis by police officers on truth-seeking during interview. Evidence emerged of controlled disclosure being used as a mechanism for securing or negotiating the co-operation of an interviewee. The extent of disclosure varied according to a number of factors, although, in serious or complex cases, non-disclosure formed the basis for the strategy. The incremental release of information has been shown to have an unsettling effect on interviewees and can undermine the legal adviser's presence. The police claim fewer no-comment interviews and improved content from the use of these tactics - findings that are echoed in recent studies by the Home Office and in Northern Ireland. The research therefore indicates that there is evidence to support both hypotheses

What can biologists say about galaxy evolution ?

It is possible to borrow from a topic of biology called phylogenetic systematics, concepts and tools for a logical and objective classification of galaxies. It is based on observable properties of objects - characters - either qualitative (like morphology) or quantitative (like luminosity, mass or spectrum). Distance analysis can readily be performed using a method called phenetics and based on characters. But the most promising approach is cladistics. It makes use of characters that can exist in at least two states, one being ancestral and the other one derived. Objects are gathered depending on the derived states they share. We illustrate a first application of this method to astrophysics, that we name astrocladistics, with dwarf galaxies from the Local Group.Comment: Kiel Euroconference (2002) "The Evolution of Galaxies III. From Simple Approaches to Self-Consistent Models", Kluwer Academic Publishers (in press

Current quark mass dependence of nucleon magnetic moments and radii

A calculation of the current-quark-mass-dependence of nucleon static electromagnetic properties is necessary in order to use observational data as a means to place constraints on the variation of Nature's fundamental parameters. A Poincare' covariant Faddeev equation, which describes baryons as composites of confined-quarks and -nonpointlike-diquarks, is used to calculate this dependence The results indicate that, like observables dependent on the nucleons' magnetic moments, quantities sensitive to their magnetic and charge radii, such as the energy levels and transition frequencies in Hydrogen and Deuterium, might also provide a tool with which to place limits on the allowed variation in Nature's constants.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figures, 4 tables, 4 appendice

Horizontal gene transfer converts non-toxigenic Clostridium difficile strains into toxin producers.

Clostridium difficile is a major nosocomial pathogen and the main causative agent of antibiotic-associated diarrhoea. The organism produces two potent toxins, A and B, which are its major virulence factors. These are chromosomally encoded on a region termed the pathogenicity locus (PaLoc), which also contains regulatory genes, and is absent in non-toxigenic strains. Here we show that the PaLoc can be transferred from the toxin-producing strain, 630Δerm, to three non-toxigenic strains of different ribotypes. One of the transconjugants is shown by cytotoxicity assay to produce toxin B at a similar level to the donor strain, demonstrating that a toxigenic C. difficile strain is capable of converting a non-toxigenic strain to a toxin producer by horizontal gene transfer. This has implications for the treatment of C. difficile infections, as non-toxigenic strains are being tested as treatments in clinical trials

Should expectations about the rate of new antiretroviral drug development impact the timing of HIV treatment initiation and expectations about treatment benefits?

Background: Many analyses of HIV treatment decisions assume a fixed formulary of HIV drugs. However, new drugs are approved nearly twice a year, and the rate of availability of new drugs may affect treatment decisions, particularly when to initiate antiretroviral therapy (ART). Objectives: To determine the impact of considering the availability of new drugs on the optimal initiation criteria for ART and outcomes in patients with HIV/AIDS. Methods: We enhanced a previously described simulation model of the optimal time to initiate ART to incorporate the rate of availability of new antiviral drugs. We assumed that the future rate of availability of new drugs would be similar to the past rate of availability of new drugs, and we estimated the past rate by fitting a statistical model to actual HIV drug approval data from 1982-2010. We then tested whether or not the future availability of new drugs affected the model-predicted optimal time to initiate ART based on clinical outcomes, considering treatment initiation thresholds of 200, 350, and 500 cells/mm 3. We also quantified the impact of the future availability of new drugs on life expectancy (LE) and quality-adjusted life expectancy (QALE). Results: In base case analysis, considering the availability of new drugs raised the optimal starting CD4 threshold for most patients to 500 cells/mm 3. The predicted gains in outcomes due to availability of pipeline drugs were generally small (less than 1%), but for young patients with a high viral load could add as much as a 4.9% (1.73 years) increase in LE and a 8% (2.43 QALY) increase in QALE, because these patients were particularly likely to exhaust currently available ART regimens before they died. In sensitivity analysis, increasing the rate of availability of new drugs did not substantially alter the results. Lowering the toxicity of future ART drugs had greater potential to increase benefit for many patient groups, increasing QALE by as much as 10%. Conclusions: The future availability of new ART drugs without lower toxicity raises optimal treatment initiation for most patients, and improves clinical outcomes, especially for younger patients with higher viral loads. Reductions in toxicity of future ART drugs could impact optimal treatment initiation and improve clinical outcomes for all HIV patients. © 2014 Khademi et al

Caracterización genotípica y nuevos tipos de secuencia multilocus de exoU+ de Pseudomonas aeruginosa presente en diferentes infecciones clínicas y entornos

Introducción: The exoU gene, a marker for highly virulent strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, is the major contributor to a wide varietyof healthcare-associated infections. Methods: In this study, the antibiotic susceptibility profile, prevalence and genotyping of exoU+ P.aeruginosa were demonstrated. A total of 101 isolates of P. aeruginosa were analysed from different clinical and environmental sources. Results: The antibiotic susceptibility profile classified these isolates as extensively drug resistant (35.6%), multidrug resistant (40.5%) and non-multidrug resistant (23.7%). The prevalence of exoU gene was screened by PCR and 23 exoU+ genotypes were detected which all were clinical isolates. Multilocus sequence typing (MLST) analysis of seven loci assigned these exoU+ genotypes to 21 sequence types (STs) from which 16 new STs were identified. The prevalent STs were ST-308 and ST-235. Phylogenetic analysis using the concatenated nucleotide sequences of the seven housekeeping genes, exoU and the ITS region differentiated these exoU+ strains into five main groups. However, distinct evolutionary origins for some new sequence types were also indicated. Conclusions: The studied isolates showed the coexistence of exoU- and exoU+ genotypes of clinical P. aeruginosa in Kurdistan with a majority of MDR and XDR pattern. The prevalent STs found in other hospitals worldwide and at the international level

SARS CoV subunit vaccine: Antibodymediated neutralisation and enhancement

1. A SARS vaccine was produced based on recombinant native full-length Spike-protein trimers (triSpike) and efficient establishment of a vaccination procedure in rodents. 2. Antibody-mediated enhancement of SARS-CoV infection with anti-SARS-CoV Spike immune-serum was observed in vitro. 3. Antibody-mediated infection of SARS-CoV triggers entry into human haematopoietic cells via an FcγR-dependent and ACE2-, pH-, cysteine-protease-independent pathways. 4. The antibody-mediated enhancement phenomenon is not a mandatory component of the humoral immune response elicited by SARS vaccines, as pure neutralising antibody only could be obtained. 5. Occurrence of immune-mediated enhancement of SARS-CoV infection raises safety concerns regarding the use of SARS-CoV vaccine in humans and enables new ways to investigate SARS pathogenesis (tropism and immune response deregulation)

An artificial neural network approach to recognise kinetic models from experimental data

The quantitative description of the dynamic behaviour of reacting systems requires the identification of an appropriate set of kinetic model equations. The selection of the correct model may pose substantial challenges as there may be a large number of candidate kinetic model structures. In this work, a model selection approach is presented where an Artificial Neural Network classifier is trained for recognising appropriate kinetic model structures given the available experimental evidence. The method does not require the fitting of kinetic parameters and it is well suited when there is a high number of candidate kinetic mechanisms. The approach is demonstrated on a simulated case study on the selection of a kinetic model for describing the dynamics of a three-component reacting system in a batch reactor. The sensitivity of the approach to a change in the experimental design and to a change in the system noise is assessed

Gray's time-varying coefficients model for posttransplant survival of pediatric liver transplant recipients with a diagnosis of cancer

Transplantation is often the only viable treatment for pediatric patients with end-stage liver disease. Making well-informed decisions on when to proceed with transplantation requires accurate predictors of transplant survival. The standard Cox proportional hazards (PH) model assumes that covariate effects are time-invariant on right-censored failure time; however, this assumption may not always hold. Gray's piecewise constant time-varying coefficients (PC-TVC) model offers greater flexibility to capture the temporal changes of covariate effects without losing the mathematical simplicity of Cox PH model. In the present work, we examined the Cox PH and Gray PC-TVC models on the posttransplant survival analysis of 288 pediatric liver transplant patients diagnosed with cancer. We obtained potential predictors through univariable (P < 0.15) and multivariable models with forward selection (P < 0.05) for the Cox PH and Gray PC-TVC models, which coincide. While the Cox PH model provided reasonable average results in estimating covariate effects on posttransplant survival, the Gray model using piecewise constant penalized splines showed more details of how those effects change over time. © 2013 Yi Ren et al

Bioanalytical Assay of Antimicrobial Polymers Binding to Bacterial Cells

Branched polyethylenimine (BPEI) has an antimicrobial effect on bacteria. The killing mechanism of BPEI centers on its cationic properties. The mechanism of action against Gram-positive bacteria is less understood but recent reports erroneously suggest that membrane depolarization occurs. To the contrary, data from our laboratory suggests that BPEI binds to the anionic sites provided by the biopolymer wall teichoic acid (WTA). To test the validity of this hypothesis, we measure the amount BPEI binding to whole, intact, bacterial cells of Bacillus subtilis. Comparative measurements are made with Bacillus subtilis bacteria that contain WTA and Bacillus subtilis genetic mutants that lack WTA. Using equilibrium dialysis, Bacillus subtilis bacteria were exposed to different solution concentrations of BPEI. Removal of small aliquots from solution and subsequent assay with the ninhydrin test were used to measure the amount of BPEI remaining in solution and the amount of BPEI bound to the bacterial cell walls. These data were used to obtain the amount of bound vs. unbound BPEI and determine the equilibrium constant. These data influence the understanding of BPEI antimicrobial properties and impacts the development of antibiotics to treat human disease