Establishing the most appropriate databases for addressing source level propositions.

The organization and regulation of forensic science services are scrutinized and evaluated in the light of important and extensive recent developments. The tension between free market competition and external regulation is identified as the central focus for inquiry, and this tension is explored through an analysis of two principal themes in the Runciman Royal Commission's recommendations, namely: (i) free market competition in forensic science services and (ii) regulation of the forensic science community by a Forensic Science Advisory Council. Contextual links with broader developments in the forms of government, administration and political participation are suggested. It is argued that the market approach to forensic science services is flawed in principle. After drawing attention to one fundamental objection--that the language of market exchange irrevocably distorts and debases the pursuit of criminal justice--the economic arguments are considered squarely on their merits. Economic theory is used to derive three predictions which, when taken together, provide a powerful case against extending the market mechanism to forensic science services. The proposal for external regulation by a Forensic Science Advisory Council is endorsed as long overdue, but it is suggested that effective regulation is incompatible with free market principles.

The forensic science service--past, present and future.

The activities of preparing and issuing Forensic Science Services reports are a public service of great importance for society and for the executive and judicial branches. However, notably, it has difficulties in meeting due dates, causing damage to all involved and generating additional costs for governments. In practice, it is observed that knowledge in the area of operations management is not used to determine the allocations of Forensic Science services at Criminalistics Technical Sections. Therefore, the objective of this research is to develop and apply knowledge related to the operations scheduling of Forensic Science reports. To fulfill the objective, the case study research method was applied in the Regional Technical Section of Criminalistics (STRC) of Três Corações - Minas Gerais in Brazil. Real data from that Forensic Unity carried out in the past were implemented in an APS (Advanced Planning and Scheduling) software and new allocations, based on the software's internal algorithms, were carried out. The results of allocations from the software have been compared with the previous results. The comparisons show that scheduling from the software's algorithms can bring better results.

The dramatic increase in the sensitivity of DNA profiling systems that has occurred over recent years has led to the need to address a wider range of interpretational problems in forensic science. The issues surrounding questions of the kind "whose DNA is this?" have been the subject of considerable controversy but now it is clear that the emphasis is shifting to questions of the kind "how did this DNA get here?" Such issues are discussed in this paper and new insights are provided by two particular recent developments. First, the notion of the "hierarchy of propositions" that has arisen from a project called Case Assessment and Interpretation (CAI) that has been running in the British Forensic Science Service (FSS). Second, a technique for drawing inferences in the face of many interacting considerations, known as "Bayesian networks"--or "Bayes' nets" for short--that has been the subject of an earlier paper in this journal (1). The discussion is carried out by means of case studies, based on actual cases. It is clear that, whereas the inference in relation to the source of the DNA in a crime sample might be overwhelmingly strong, the inference in relation to the propositions that a jury must consider relating to the identity of the actual offender may be much more tentative.

Use of low copy number DNA in forensic inference

An Unusual Case of Identification of Transferred Fibres

SummaryThe fingerprint has, with considerable justification, come to be regarded as the acme of forensic identification. Over the last century, millions of cases have been resolved world wide because of marks left at crime scenes. The comparison methodology has not evolved greatly during its history and it is universal practice to present fingerprint evidence to a court as a categoric opinion of identification or exclusion, or to classify the evidence as inconclusive and not to report it. There has been a growing movement to supplement the fingerprint examination process by one that has a statistical model, supported by appropriate databases for calculating numerical measures of weight of evidence. The movement calls for the establishment of a logical framework for informing conclusions, based on explicit assumptions and data and open to revision and improvement. The aim is to enable the numerical evaluation of evidence that would currently be reported as a categorical identification and also of evidence that would currently be classified as inconclusive. The paper presents the results of a project carried out by the Forensic Science Service that aims to attain this goal. After a historical review, we describe a formal model for assigning numerical values to configurations of minutiae in fingerprints. We describe how the parameters of the model have been optimized to take account of interoperator variability and distortion of the finger pad, and we present the results of a substantial validation experiment that was based on searches that have been carried out on the US national fingerprint database of approximately 600 million fingerprints.

Contractor mistakes in the bidding of construction projects are not unusual occurrences and can delay the planned starting date of projects. It is important that mistakes be handled expeditiously and correctly. This paper analyzes several important court decisions related to bid mistakes to determine the inquiries an appellate court will ask and how it will react to the answers to its inquiries. The decision-making process is formulated in a flowchart format that models the judicial decision-making process. The flowchart can be used to analyze other disputes. Based on the analysis of court decisions, the judicial decision-making process was modeled and applied to a case study example. The outcome of the inquiry analysis was identical to that of the judicial decision.

The main objective of this paper is to summarize and present the results of extended reach casing installations in the Vaca Muerta basin in Argentina. The wellbores used as case studies in this paper had lateral lengths up to 4250m and includes the longest lateral cased in the Vaca Muerta region. A discussion of the operational parameters, placement philosophies and a risk assessment will be covered. A glass disc flotation collar was installed as part of the casing string. This device traps air between it and the float equipment, reducing the frictional forces acting on the casing through the buoyancy effect. At the target depth, a pre-determined pressure is applied to the glass disc, rupturing the disc and allowing circulation in preparation for the cementing operation to follow. Previous papers such as Rastegar et al. (2018), introduced the concept of placing the flotation collar at an "optimal" location. These previous attempts all assumed that the optimal position was the location that yielded the maximum hookload possible at target depth. While this is often the case, an alternative approach was taken in this case study whereby the flotation collar was placed to maximum the hookload at the build and curve section of the wellbore where frictional forces are often of highest concern. Operation decisions that impact flotation collar effectiveness are also discussed in this paper. The primary discussion point is centered around the mud filling strategy used and improvements implemented at the rig. A discussion of the early filling strategy used, and the improvements made for the case study will be covered in detail. The results of the case study project determined that there was a 28% reduction in the run-in-hole time when using the new deployment strategies. These strategies also reduced the need for string rotation, ultimately reducing casing wear and fatigue.

Defining assessment projects and scenarios for policy support: Use of ontology in Integrated Assessment and Modelling

BackgroundDespite policy prominence and frameworks focusing on health inequalities, healthcare leaders do not feel they have the skills and knowledge to reduce health inequalities. This comparative case study explored four areas in England to understand the challenges, opportunities, and drivers of local health systems addressing health inequalities and what ‘good’ practice might look like.MethodsInterviews were held with 46 people working in health care services across the NHS, local authority or voluntary, community, social enterprise sectors. Key documents (n = ~ 10) in each of the four areas relating to reducing health inequalities were analysed using documentary analysis methods. Interviews and documents were coded and analysed independently before being integrated to synthesise findings. Analysis was conducted using a two-stage approach - firstly, an inductive analysis of emergent themes; secondly, to build knowledge on each case studys’ system approach of reduction of health inequalities, principles of the Action Scales Model were used.ResultsNineteen themes were identified across the four case studies; some themes were not apparent in all the case studies, nor in either the documentary analysis or interviews. These themes allowed us to compare between cases to explore what might be contributing to good practice. Themes identified included: understanding the local context; facilitators of how to tackle health inequalities and improve health and wellbeing; and future concerns. The secondary analysis highlighted potential levers for action from each case study; these included optimising retention and recruitment of workforce and allowing time and resources for longer-term planning. Two case study areas which appeared to have system resilience, demonstrated having a shared vision, strong partnerships, understanding of the system, and putting people and communities at the heart of decision making.ConclusionThis comparative case study makes a crucial contribution in the understanding of health systems addressing health inequalities in their local areas. The combined interview and documentary analysis findings provide rich insights of local systems’ documented strategies, plans and what is happening ‘on the ground’.

In this paper we gauge the utility of general-purpose, open-domain semantic parsing for textual entailment recognition by combining graph-structured meaning representations with semantic technologies and formal reasoning tools. Our approach achieves high precision, and in two case studies we show that when reasoning over n-best analyses from the parser the performance of our system reaches stateof-the-art for rule-based textual entailment systems. 1 Background and Motivation There is a growing interest in recent years in general-purpose semantic parsing into graphbased meaning representations, which provide greater expressive power than tree-based structures. Recent efforts in this spirit include, for example, Abstract Meaning Representation (Banarescu et al., 2013), and Semantic Dependency Parsing (SDP) (Oepen et al., 2014; Oepen et al., 2015). Simultaneously, in the Semantic Web community, a range of generic semantic technologies for storing and processing graph-structured data has been made available, but these have not been much used for natural language processing tasks. We propose a flexible, generic framework for precision-oriented Textual Entailment (TE) recognition that combines semantic parsing, graph-based representations of sentence meaning, and semantic technologies. During the decade since the TE task was defined, (logical) inference-based approaches have made some important contributions to the field. Systems such as Bos and Markert (2006) and Tatu and Moldovan (2006) employ automated proof search over logical representations of the input sentences. Other systems, such as Bar-Haim et al. (2007), apply transformational rules to linguistic representations of the sentence pairs, and determine entailment through graph subsumption. Because inference-based systems are vulnerable to incomplete knowledge in the rule set and errors in the mapping from natural language sentences to logical forms or linguistics representations, and because the definition of the TE task encourages a more relaxed, non-logical notion of entailment, the majority of TE systems have used more robust approaches, however. Our work supports a notion of logical inference for TE by reasoning with formal rules over graph-structured meaning representations, while achieving results that are comparable with robust approaches. We use a freely available, grammar-driven semantic parser and a well-defined reduction of underspecified logical-form meaning representations into variable-free semantic graphs called Elementary Dependency Structures (EDS) (Oepen and Lonning, 2006). We capitalize on a pre-existing storage and search infrastructure for EDSs using generic semantic technologies. For entailment classification, we create inference rules that enrich the EDS graphs, apply the rules with a generic reasoner, and use graph alignment as a decision tool. To test our generic setup, we perform two case studies where we replicate well-performing TE systems, one from the Parser Evaluation using Textual Entailments (PETE) task (Yuret et al., 2010), and one from SemEval 2014 Task 1 (Marelli et al., 2014). The best published results for the PETE task, Lien (2014), were obtained through heuristic rules that align meaning representations based on structural similarity. Lien and Kouylekov (2014) extend the same basic approach for SemEval 2014 by including lexical relations and negation handling. We recast the handwritten heuristic rules from these systems as formal Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) rules, and run them with a generic reasoning tool over EDS

Financial aspects of company planning

Case studies are presented that illustrate the principles of physics-based distributed hydrologic modeling. This chapter is organized by case study with a general description of the model, parameterization, and simulation used in each case. Within the context of three case studies, there is a common theme, namely each case study relies on high-resolution rainfall derived from radar and rain gauge; model parameters developed using geospatial data; and hydrologic predictions generated for analyzes spanning a range of space-time scales.

All previous papers that dealt with U-ferroelectricity and U-ferroelasticity assumed that the declension parameters belong to the identity representation each. In contrast the present paper assumes that the declension parameters belong to a nonidentity representation each. Unlike the identity case, the nonidentity case can give a great polymorphism. A case study is made, assuming that the declension parameters are two real variables, δ and ε, which are undulated as \(\delta=U^{\delta}\cos(\hat{h}z+\hat{\theta}^{\delta})\) and \(\epsilon=U^{\epsilon}\cos(\hat{h}z+\hat{\theta}^{\epsilon})\) (and assuming some others besides). The main conclusions of the theory are as follows. Let U δ and U ε be both nonzero. Set \(\hat{\theta}^{\delta}-\hat{\theta}^{\epsilon} \equiv \hat{\theta}_{d}\). At \(\hat{\theta}_{d}=n\pi\) ( n is any integer), the ferroic phase is U-ferroelectric and nonferroelastic. At \(\hat{\theta}_d=\pi/2+n\pi\), U-ferroelastic and nonferroelectric. At \(\hat{\theta}_d={\rm a}\) general value, U-ferroelectric and U-ferroelastic. If U δ and U ε are not both nonzero, the ferroic phase is nonferroelectric and nonferroelastic.