Project description:'If anticoagulants had been administered sooner, my client would not have died' was a central claim put to us, as statistician expert witnesses, by a Claimant's and Defendant's lawyers. To assist other litigants, and without identifying the specific case, we set out the study types that contribute to the evidence base, and their limitations. We then explain why it is difficult to adduce evidence about the relative risk of dying from pulmonary embolism within 12 hours of admission to accident and emergency even when it is well accepted that anticoagulation reduces the risk of dying within the next seven days of patients at objectively confirmed risk of pulmonary embolism. No matter how much we may want an answer, or how tragic an individual outcome, we can only work from the available evidence or work to improve the evidence base, which needs to be resourced.
Project description:Researchers have long used end-of-year discipline rates to identify punitive schools, explore sources of inequitable treatment, and evaluate interventions designed to stem both discipline and racial disparities in discipline. Yet, this approach leaves us with a "static view"-with no sense of how disciplinary responses fluctuate throughout the year. What if daily discipline rates, and daily discipline disparities, shift over the school year in ways that could inform when and where to intervene? This research takes a "dynamic view" of discipline. It leverages 4 years of atypically detailed data regarding the daily disciplinary experiences of 46,964 students from 61 middle schools in one of the nation's largest school districts. Reviewing these data, we find that discipline rates are indeed dynamic. For all student groups, the daily discipline rate grows from the beginning of the school year to the weeks leading up to the Thanksgiving break, falls before major breaks, and grows following major breaks. During periods of escalation, the daily discipline rate for Black students grows significantly faster than the rate for White students-widening racial disparities. Given this, districts hoping to stem discipline and disparities may benefit from timing interventions to precede these disciplinary spikes. In addition, early-year Black-White disparities can be used to identify the schools in which Black-White disparities are most likely to emerge by the end of the school year. Thus, the results reported here provide insights regarding not only when to intervene, but where to intervene to reduce discipline rates and disparities.
Project description:A new family of positive, trace-preserving maps is introduced. It is defined using the mutually unbiased measurements, which generalize the notion of mutual unbiasedness of orthonormal bases. This family allows one to define entanglement witnesses whose indecomposability depends on the characteristics of the associated measurement operators. We provide examples of indecomposable witnesses and compare their entanglement detection properties with the realignment criterion.
Project description:This review summarises recent evidence about the interaction between bone, the immune system and cartilage in disabling conditions such as osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis and spondyloarthritis. These topics have been recently discussed at the 'OsteoRheumatology' conference held in Genoa in October 2014. The meeting, at its 10th edition, has been conceived to bring together distinguished international experts in the fields of rheumatic and metabolic bone diseases with the aim of discussing emerging knowledge regarding the role of the bone tissue in rheumatic diseases. Moreover, this review focuses on new treatments based on underlying the pathophysiological processes in rheumatic diseases. Although, a number of issues still remain to be clarified, it seems quite clear that in clinical practice, as well as in basic and translational research, there is a need for more knowledge of the interactions between the cartilage, the immune system and the bone. In this context, 'OsteoRheumatology' represents a potential new discipline providing a greater insight into this interplay, in order to face the multifactorial and complex issues underlying common and disabling rheumatic diseases.
Project description:We propose a family of positive maps constructed from a recently introduced class of symmetric measurements. These maps are used to define entanglement witnesses, which include other popular approaches with mutually unbiased bases and mutually unbiased measurements. A particular interest is given to indecomposable witnesses that can be used to detect entanglement of quantum states with positive partial transposition. We present several examples for different number of measurements.