Judicial Bypass in Nebraska: How the Nebraska Supreme Court’s Decision in \u3ci\u3eIn re Anonymous 5\u3c/i\u3e, 286 Neb. 640, 838 N.W.2d 226 (2013) Illustrates the Complexity of Parental Consent Laws for State Wards Seeking Abortion

I. Introduction II. Background ... A. Parental Consent Laws for Minors Seeking Abortion ... B. Teen Pregnancy and Abortion in Foster Care ... C. Nebraska’s Parental Consent Law and the Supreme Court’s Holding in Anonymous 5 III. Analysis ... A. Nebraska’s Parental Consent Law Grants Judges an Impermissible, “Absolute, and Possibly Arbitrary, Veto” over a State Ward’s Access to Abortion ... B. Nebraska’s Parental Consent Law Imposes an Undue Burden on State Wards Seeking an Abortion ... C. Nebraska’s Abortion Law Needs Reform to Clarify Parental Consent Requirements and Judicial Bypass Considerations for State Wards ... 1. Consent Requirements ... 2. Judicial Bypass Considerations IV. Conclusio

All-Payer Claims Database Development Manual: Establishing a Foundation for Health Care Transparency and Informed Decision Making

With support from the Gary and Mary West Health Policy Center, the APCD Council has developed a manual for states to develop all-payer claims databases. Titled All-Payer Claims Database Development Manual: Establishing a Foundation for Health Care Transparency and Informed Decision Making, the manual is a first-of its-kind resource that provides states with detailed guidance on common data standards, collection, aggregation and analysis involved with establishing these databases

Extending Foster Care to Age 21: Weighing the Costs to Government against the Benefits to Youth

The Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008 allows states to claim federal reimbursement for the costs of caring for and supervising Title IV-E eligible foster youth until their 21st birthday. This issue brief provides preliminary estimates of what the potential costs to government and the benefits to young people would be if states extend foster care to age 21. The analysis focuses on the increase in postsecondary educational attainment associated with allowing foster youth to remain in care until they are 21 years old and the resulting increase in lifetime earnings associated with postsecondary education. Researchers estimate that lifetime earnings would increase an average of two dollars for every dollar spent on keeping foster youth in care beyond age 18

Symmetry and Duplication

The symmetry and duplication in bee hives and ant colonies will be compared to tiling the plane in TI-84

Convincing Oregon\u27s Dairy Industry They Have a Problem with Phosphorus

Dairy nutritionists historically balanced milk cow rations for phosphorus at .45 to .5 % DM of the total ration. New studies have shown a high producing milk cow only requires a diet at .38% DM. Thirty-seven farms were studied to determine and compare P feeding levels in Oregon. The results of the project were then incorporated into educational programs. The average farm studied was over feeding by 18%. Eighty-nine percent of producers surveyed indicated this project increased their understanding of the problem we face as an industry. Approximately 50% of producers participating reduced P feeding on their farm

Proof‐of‐concept modular fluid handling prototype integrated with microfluidic biochemical assay modules for point‐of‐care testing

Large populations around the world suffer from numerous but treatable health issues, caused by either lifestyle choices or environmental factors. Over the past decades, point-of-care testing kits have been developed to circumvent the reliance on laboratories, by allowing users to perform preliminary health or environmental testing from the privacy of their homes. However, these kits heavily rely on the precision of the user to perform the procedures, leading to increased variability in final assessments. To eliminate user-induced errors, we present an integrated, completely sealed, and disposable point-of-care testing prototype that exploits the benefits of microfluidics and 3D-printing fabrication techniques. The palm-sized modular prototype consists of a manually operated fluid handling device that allows precise mixing, filtration, and delivery of fluids to an on-board microfluidic assay unit for subsequent detection of specific biochemical analytes, with a minimized risk of contamination

Steady viscoelastic flow around high-aspect-ratio, low-blockage-ratio microfluidic cylinders

We employ a state-of-the-art microfabrication technique (selective laser-induced etching, SLE) to produce microfluidic cylinder geometries that explore new geometrical regimes. Using SLE, two microchannels are fabricated in monolithic fused silica substrate with height H = 2 mm and width W = 0.4 mm (aspect ratio α = H/W = 5) containing cylinders of radius r = 0.02 mm (blockage ratio β = 2r/W = 0.1), centered at the channel mid-width, W/2. An ‘sc’ channel contains a single cylinder, while a ‘dc’ channel contains two axiallyaligned cylinders separated by a distance L = 1 mm (L = 50r). Compared with cylinder geometries fabricated by soft lithography (which typically have α ≪ 1 and β ≳ 0.5), these rigid glass devices provide a quasi-two-dimensional flow along the direction of the cylinder axis and also more clearly reveal the effects of the strong extensional wake regions located at the leading and trailing stagnation points. Using flow velocimetry and quantitative birefringence measurement techniques, we study the behaviour of a well-characterized viscoelastic polymer solution in flow around the cylinders. The small cylinder radii result in low inertia and very high elasticity numbers El ≈ 2400. For the sc device, we report strong flow modification effects around the cylinder as the flow rate is incremented. This is associated with the deformation of polymer molecules primarily in the upstream wake region, leading to the onset of a purely elastic flow asymmetry upstream of the cylinder. Stretched polymer molecules are advected around the cylinder and relax downstream of the cylinder, resulting in an extremely long elastic wake extending for > 300r downstream. In the dc channel, at lower flow rates, similar flow modification effects are observed to develop around, and downstream of, both cylinders. However, at higher flow rates the wake of the first cylinder extends > 50r downstream, and begins to interact with the second cylinder. The second cylinder becomes encapsulated by the wake of the first and is effectively obviated from the flow field. The results will be of relevance to understanding practical applications of viscoelastic fluids, for example in particle suspension and porous media flows, and also for benchmarking against numerical simulations using viscoelastic constitutive models

Diagnostic quality assessment of compressed sensing accelerated magnetic resonance neuroimaging.

PURPOSE: To determine the efficacy of compressed sensing (CS) reconstructions for specific clinical magnetic resonance neuroimaging applications beyond more conventional acceleration techniques such as parallel imaging (PI) and low-resolution acquisitions. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Raw k-space data were acquired from five healthy volunteers on a 3T scanner using a 32-channel head coil using T2 -FLAIR, FIESTA-C, time of flight (TOF), and spoiled gradient echo (SPGR) sequences. In a series of blinded studies, three radiologists independently evaluated CS, PI (GRAPPA), and low-resolution images at up to 5× accelerations. Synthetic T2 -FLAIR images with artificial lesions were used to assess diagnostic accuracy for CS reconstructions. RESULTS: CS reconstructions were of diagnostically acceptable quality at up to 4× acceleration for T2 -FLAIR and FIESTA-C (average qualitative scores 3.7 and 4.3, respectively, on a 5-point scale at 4× acceleration), and at up to 3× acceleration for TOF and SPGR (average scores 4.0 and 3.7, respectively, at 3× acceleration). The qualitative scores for CS reconstructions were significantly better than low-resolution images for T2 -FLAIR, FIESTA-C, and TOF and significantly better than GRAPPA for TOF and SPGR (Wilcoxon signed rank test, P \u3c 0.05) with no significant difference found otherwise. Diagnostic accuracy was acceptable for both CS and low-resolution images at up to 3× acceleration (area under the ROC curve 0.97 and 0.96, respectively.) CONCLUSION: Mild to moderate accelerations are possible for those sequences by a combined CS and PI reconstruction. Nevertheless, for certain sequences/applications one might mildly reduce the acquisition time by appropriately reducing the imaging resolution rather than the more complicated CS reconstruction. J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2016;44:433-444