RIGHTS! Civil and Human Rights Law Portal

On September 1, 2020, LLMC, a non-profit Minnesota-based consortium of law libraries, launched the open-access portal RIGHTS! (http://www.llmc.com/rights/home.aspx). If you are looking for primary materials such as current constitutions, human/civil rights acts, Non-Governmental Organizations’ websites, advocacy organizations, and other resources specifically dealing with injustices regarding marginalized parties, this is the place to look. Their stated mission is preserving legal titles and government documents, while making copies inexpensively available digitally through its on-line service, LLMC-Digital (http://www.llmc.com/about.aspx). The original intent was to focus on primarily US and Canadian sources, as seen by the dropdown navigation on the left of the site, but the site also includes other international sources. The page opens at the “Civil and Human Rights Law Portal—Global,” which includes links to various government organizations, judicial information, non-governmental organizations, research and education resources and various documents from different countries. The RIGHTS! site can also be reached through the parent page (http://LLMC.com) with the link to RIGHTS! Located in the right-hand column. The RIGHTS! Portal is sponsored by the Vincent C. Immel Law Library at Saint Louis University.

Correction to: Assessment of Climate Change over the Indian Region

In the original version of the book, belated corrections as listed below are incorporated: Chapter 1: The caption of figure 1.5 has been changed as follows: Spatial patterns of change in the June–to-September seasonal precipitation (mm day −1) over the globe in the left-hand column, and over India in the right-hand column. In the top row are plotted the observed changes for the period (1951-2014) relative to (1900-1930) over the globe based on the CRU dataset, and over India based on the IMD dataset. Plots in the middle row are from the IITM-ESM simulations for the historical period, and the plots in the last row are from the IITM-ESM projections following the SSP5-8.5 scenario. The IITM-ESM simulated changes in the historical period (first and middle rows) are plotted as difference for the period (1951-2014) relative to (1850–1900). Changes under the SSP5-8.5 scenario (last row) are plotted as difference between the far-future (2070–2099) relative to (1850–1900). Chapter 2: On page 40, line 5 the word “business-as-usual” has been changed to “twenty-first century under this high emission scenario”. Chapter 4: On page 88, the last sentence “The business as usual scenario will continue to increase atmospheric CO2 and CH4 loading for next several decades.” has been changed to “Without rapid mitigation policies, atmospheric CO2 and CH4 loading will continue to increase for the next several decades.” The erratum chapters and book have been updated with the changes.

A low-cost automized anaerobic chamber for long-term growth experiments and sample handling

1AbstractThe handling of oxygen sensitive samples and growth of obligate anaerobic organisms requires the stringent exclusion of oxygen, which is omnipresent in our normal atmospheric environment. Anaerobic workstations (aka. Glove boxes) enable the handling of oxygen sensitive samples during complex procedures, or the long-term incubation of anaerobic organisms. Depending on the application requirements, commercial workstations can cost up to 60.000 €. Here we present the complete build instructions for a highly adaptive, Arduino based, anaerobic workstation for microbial cultivation and sample handling, with features normally found only in high cost commercial solutions. This build can automatically regulate humidity, H2 levels (as oxygen reductant), log the environmental data and purge the airlock. It is built as compact as possible to allow it to fit into regular growth chambers for full environmental control. In our experiments, oxygen levels during the continuous growth of oxygen producing cyanobacteria, stayed under 0.03 % for 21 days without needing user intervention. The modular Arduino controller allows for the easy incorporation of additional regulation parameters, such as CO2 concentration or air pressure. This paper provides researchers with a low cost, entry level workstation for anaerobic sample handling with the flexibility to match their specific experimental needs.Specifications table[please fill in right-hand column of the table below]

The Battle between the Correct and Mirror Writings of a Digit in Children’s Recognition Memory

Recent research into character reversals in writings produced by occidental children has shown that they mainly reverse the left-oriented digits (1, 2, 3, 7, and 9) and therefore appear to apply a right-orienting rule. But do they produce similar reversal errors when asked to recognize the digits? In an experiment, based on eye-tracking observations of 50 children (Mage = 5.4 years), children had to point towards a target digit in a 2 × 2 matrix also containing three distractor digits, one of which was the mirror-reversed writing of the correctly written target digit. This recognition task led to a true “battle” in children’s memory between the two writings of the target digit. This battle is shown in the graphical abstract that represents a heat map from a sub-sample of children (on the left side) and the fixation points map from an individual child (on the right side). Rather than following the predicted right-orienting rule, the children’s responses appeared to be biased towards digits in the right-hand column of the 2 × 2 matrices (when the reversed target digit was not in the same column as the correctly written target digit). As a whole, these findings support the hypotheses that many 4- to 6-year-old’s representations of the digit writings are unoriented in their memory and that these children may adopt different solutions to overcome this lack of orientation depending on whether they write or read.

IT-CARES: an interactive tool for case-crossover analyses of electronic medical records for patient safety

Background: The significant risk of adverse events following medical procedures supports a clinical epidemiological approach based on the analyses of collections of electronic medical records. Data analytical tools might help clinical epidemiologists develop more appropriate case-crossover designs for monitoring patient safety. Objective: To develop and assess the methodological quality of an interactive tool for use by clinical epidemiologists to systematically design case-crossover analyses of large electronic medical records databases. Material and Methods: We developed IT-CARES, an analytical tool implementing case-crossover design, to explore the association between exposures and outcomes. The exposures and outcomes are defined by clinical epidemiologists via lists of codes entered via a user interface screen. We tested IT-CARES on data from the French national inpatient stay database, which documents diagnoses and medical procedures for 170 million inpatient stays between 2007 and 2013. We compared the results of our analysis with reference data from the literature on thromboembolic risk after delivery and bleeding risk after total hip replacement. Results: IT-CARES provides a user interface with 3 columns: (i) the outcome criteria in the left-hand column, (ii) the exposure criteria in the right-hand column, and (iii) the estimated risk (odds ratios, presented in both graphical and tabular formats) in the middle column. The estimated odds ratios were consistent with the reference literature data. Discussion: IT-CARES may enhance patient safety by facilitating clinical epidemiological studies of adverse events following medical procedures. The tool’s usability must be evaluated and improved in further research.

Police filming English streets in 1935: the limits of mediated identification

This article considers and early example of technologically-mediated visual surveillance: the use of cine cameras by the British police in 1935 in the English town of Chesterfield in an operation to crack down on illegal street betting. The paper argues that the operation and its consequences in the judicial system illustrate a number of issues: unreliable policing on the ground; the enthusiasm for technological approaches to crime; and the limits of those approaches. The paper concludes that the Chesterfield case should prompt us to take another look at the impact of technology on interwar British policing, and its relationship to surveillance. *This article is accompanied by a digititally-converted version of the 1935 film, which can be viewed by clicking on Supplementary Material in the right hand column, or by visiting our Blip TV stream (EDITOR'S NOTE 2014: now removed without notifying us, instead go here). Please also see the MACE archive, which was essential to the completion of this piece.

Correction for Armstrong and Ball, DNA barcodes for biosecurity: invasive species identification

Correction for ‘DNA barcodes for biosecurity: invasive species identification’ by K. F. Armstrong and S. L. Ball (Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 360 , 1813–1823. (doi: 10.1098/rstb.2005.1713 )). On page 1819, the final sentence of the paragraph ending four lines from the bottom of the right-hand column was incorrect, and should read as follows: For example, it was possible to place specimens previously identified as ‘ B. dorsalis complex’ with reasonable bootstrap support and minimal sequence divergence (see figure 2 in the Electronic Appendix) to a likely species, B. caryeae .

Estimating an Origin-Destination Table Under Repeated Counts of In-Out Volumes at Highway Ramps: Use of Artificial Neural Networks

A method is proposed that applies an artificial neural network model to estimate an origin-destination (O-D) matrix for a freeway network for which the data on inflow and outflow at the ramps are gathered regularly. This problem is the same as estimating the elements of an O-D table, given that many sets of data about the right-hand column total (trip production) and the bottom row total (trip attraction) are available. A neural network model is developed to emulate the stimulusresponse process on the freeway traffic, in which the stimulus is the inflow at the entrance ramps and the response the outflow at the exit ramps. After the neural network of a particular structure is trained by many sets of data (e.g., sets of daily volumes), the weights of the neural network are found to represent the ramp-to-ramp volume expressed in the proportion of the in-flow at the corresponding ramps. The model is applied to estimate a ramp-to-ramp O-D table for the Tokyo expressway network. The result is compared with the actual O-D table obtained from a survey. The model is found to be useful not only for estimating the O-D volume with much less data than for the traditional method, but also for verifying the existence of a pattern in the traffic flow.