An assessment for attitudes consistent with sexual offending for use with offenders with intellectual disabilities

Background . Over the past 10 years, the focus of assessment and treatment for sex offenders has changed from the assessment of skills and deviant sexual preferences to the assessment and treatment of cognitions that might be considered to encourage or justify inappropriate sexual behaviour. There have been a few assessment measures of deviant sexual cognitions developed for adults in mainstream sex offender populations but none in less able populations. The present study describes an assessment questionnaire consisting of 7 scales for cognitions associated with rape, voyeurism, exhibitionism, dating abuse, stalking, homosexual assault and offences against children, designed to be used by sex offenders with intellectual disabilities. Method . Four groups of subjects were employed in this study – sex offenders, non‐sexual offenders, non‐offenders all with mild intellectual disabilities or borderline intelligence and a further group of normal men. All subjects completed the questionnaire and 86 subjects provided reliability data. Results . Each item was subjected to 3 tests of reliability. Retained items were required to achieve an item‐to‐total correlation of at least 0.4. Of the 7 scales, 5 achieved an internal consistency coefficient of 0.8 or greater. All scales successfully discriminated between groups even when the normal controls were eliminated because their scores were so low. Conclusions . It is possible to develop scales to assess cognitions related to types of offences which discriminate between sex offenders and other groups with intellectual disabilities. The final scales have robust statistical properties and can be used for clinical and research purposes. Some caution was noted in the use of attitudinal assessments for sex offenders.     

Conflict of laws issues associated with an action for interference with privacy

Recent developments indicate that Australia may be ready to recognise an action for interference with privacy. Similar progress can be seen in some other countries. When such a action is recognised, whether in the form of a new tort or in the form of a statutory action, it will doubtlessly give rise to conflict of laws questions. A person in one state will perceive that her/his right to privacy has been violated by a person or organisation in another state, and questions as to where she/he can sue the other party, and which law will be applicable, will become relevant. Such scenarios are particularly likely to occur in the Internet context. This article examines those, and related, questions. In doing so, focus is placed on Australian law and particular emphasis is placed on the action's application in relation to Internet conduct.     

美国自然资源损害赔偿制度及对我国的启示

美国自然资源损害赔偿制度与我国的生态环境损害赔偿制度相对应,其脱胎于普通法中的侵权法,在实践中逐步走向成文法体系。美国《清洁水法》《综合环境反应、补偿和责任法》和《油污法》等法律克服了侵权法的局限性,建立了完备有效的自然资源损害的评估和救济机制。借鉴美国相关立法中关于自然资源损害赔偿的权利主体、赔偿范围、损害评估规则等规定,有助于突破我国传统侵权法对生态环境损害赔偿的拘束,在索赔主体、赔偿范围、损害行为认定、损害后果评估、修复责任承担等各方面建立特殊的规则,完善我国生态环境损害赔偿诉讼制度。     

Requirements for accrediting bodies of mammography facilities--FDA. Interim rule with request for comments

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is issuing regulations to implement the Mammography Quality Standards Act of 1992 (MQSA), which requires the establishment of a Federal certification and inspection program for mammography facilities; regulations and standards for accrediting bodies for mammography facilities; and standards for mammography equipment, personnel, and practices, including quality assurance. This rule establishes procedures for application to FDA for approval as an accrediting body and requirements and responsibilities of such bodies. This action is being taken to assure adequate and consistent evaluation of mammography facilities on a nationwide level and to help assure their compliance with quality standards. The agency requests comments on the contents of this document.     

时代呼唤统一的刑事责任能力鉴定标准

阐述了我国制定《精神障碍者刑事责任能力评定大纲》必要性、可行性和历史意义,对如何统一精神疾病刑事责任能力鉴定的评定标准,如何有利于同行专家和司法机关对司法精神病学鉴定结论可采信性的审查提出见解。     

时代呼唤统一的刑事责任能力鉴定标准

阐述了我国制定《精神障碍者刑事责任能力评定大纲》必要性、可行性和历史意义，对如何统一精神疾病刑事责任能力鉴定的评定标准，如何有利于同行专家和司法机关对司法精神病学鉴定结论可采信性的审查提出见解。     

Immunoassay for methamphetamine with a new antibody

p- and o-Aminomethamphetamine were synthesized as haptens to be coupled with carrier protein at the benzene ring of methamphetamine. Immunogens were prepared by the glutaraldehyde method or the MBS (N-(m-maleimidobenzoyloxy)succinimide) type cross-linking reagent method. In particular, immunization with p-aminomethamphetamine-bovine serum albumin (BSA) conjugate prepared by the glutaraldehyde method gave an anti-methamphetamine antiserum having a low cross-reactivity with methylephedrine. With the antiserum, three kinds of immunoassays for methamphetamine were established. An enzyme immunoassay (EIA) and an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) were developed with alkaline phosphatase (ALP) as a label enzyme. The amount of antibody bound ALP conjugate was determined by its activity in dephosphorylating p-nitrophenyl phosphate in EIA and nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADP+) in ELISA. The range of methamphetamine measurable by ELISA was 0.025-0.5 ng/well and its sensitivity was superior to that of EIA (0.3-300 ng/tube). A latex agglutination inhibition reaction test (LAIRT) was also developed for the mass screening method of urine samples. The sensitivity of this method for methamphetamine was 0.1 micrograms/ml urine.     

Likelihood ratios for complex mixtures with relatives

Likelihood ratios used for the analysis of complex DNA mixtures depend on a number of modeling assumptions and parameter estimates. In particular, the LR does not give information about the relative weight of the separate contributors for hypotheses conditioned on several contributors. An alternative is to evaluate the observed LR with respect to likelihood ratios expected under the defense hypothesis. Further, a p-value corresponding to the LR can be calculated. The p-value is the probability of observing a LR equally large or larger than the one observed, if the defense hypothesis is true. In this paper we investigate the distribution of likelihood ratios for mixtures with drop-in and drop-out and related contributors. Disregarding a plausible close relative of the suspect as an alternative contributor may overestimate the LR against a suspect.     

Atypical Accommodations for Employees with Psychiatric Disabilities

People with psychiatric disabilities often need atypical accommodations to participate in today's workforce. Some of these accommodations, including structural and social changes in the workplace, can address biases against people with psychiatric disabilities, while others ameliorate deficits that may affect performance or interaction with others. Many courts have denied requests for such accommodations based on employers' assumptions about performance or the direct threats purportedly posed by people with psychiatric disabilities. By challenging these assumptions, which can be influenced by stigma and stereotypes, and by enforcing an employer's duty to interact regarding potential accommodations, employees with psychiatric disabilities could benefit from structural and social accommodations. Courts should consider social science research in determining which nontraditional accommodations may be reasonable and whether the employer can establish that they impose any undue hardship. Such consideration will expand opportunities for people with psychiatric disabilities in the workplace without unduly interfering with employers' interests.     

Presentation of acoustic characteristics with network models for dialect identification

Objective To explore the presentation of acoustic characteristics with network models for dialect identification so as to screen out the optimal singular model for automatic dialect classifier. Methods Four selected typical neural network models for acoustic feature extraction, SOM (self-organizing feature Map), RNN (recurrent neural network), LSTM (long short-term memory network) and CNN (convolutional neural network), were individually simulated through python. With the dataset containing typical dialects (6036 samples of 105 persons’ spoken voices) from 13 cities in Jiangsu province, three aggregates were respectively built up for purpose of training, verification and test at the division ratio of 6:2:2. The test aggregate was then edited into sub-aggregates of 3 and 10 seconds, having each further added of white noise to form the sub-aggregates owning signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 3 and 10 dB. Thus, 4 test aggregates were thereby produced, with each containing 1207 samples. The appropriate classifiers were chosen to evaluate the performance of four above-selected models into their operations of training, verification and test. For the dialect identification, every selected network model was verified of its ability to extract features from the test aggregates owning different SNR and duration. Results With the previously-normalized data and network parameters, the confusion matrices of models were obtained from the output data of 4 neural network models processing into 4 test aggregates, having resulted in the Macro-F1 and Micro-F1 scores that are useful and eligible for evaluation of multi-classification problem. The results showed that LSTM and CNN are significantly better of performance than SOM and RNN. SOM is obviously more sensitive to the SNR of test samples, though having poor identification accuracy with the 3dB test aggregate. RNN has the improved accuracy for dialect identification, yet having the insufficient representation ability to key information of long-term samples. LSTM achieves the optimal evaluation scores of 93.1% (Macro-F1)/92.7% (Micro-F1) with 10dB/10s test aggregate, excelling in overcoming the bug of RNN with its characteristic structural unit. CNN is stable of identification accuracy, not easily affected with the length of speech fragments, thereby having better performance in noise-resistibility for substandard recordings. Owning the nonlinear transformation operations of convolution and pooling, CNN model is of good nonlinear expression ability to demonstrate nice fitting performance for information representation in dialect classification although it is incompetent in real-time presentation with the identified material. Conclusions LSTM+CNN framework is of better acoustic characteristics performance and robustness, capable of meeting the further updating development and application of automatic dialect identification. Besides, the audio sample duration and SNR are still the key for a model (singular or coalesced from two or more) to improve its identification accuracy. © 2021, Editorial Office of Forensic Science and Technology. All rights reserved.     

Test for contamination in connection with renovation of post-PCR laboratories

The Teilum building housing the Department of Forensic Medicine at the University of Copenhagen was renovated in 2021/22. All windows were replaced, and the heating system was upgraded. During the renovation, the usual measures to prevent PCR products from escaping the post-PCR laboratories could not be maintained, since construction workers had to move in and out of the rooms carrying tools and debris. Instead, new measures were introduced, that included 1) the construction of a changing room for the workers with immediate access to the post-PCR laboratories, 2) clothing and shoes for the workers, that should only be worn inside the post-PCR laboratories, and 3) strict limitations on the areas the workers could enter, while renovating the post-PCR laboratories. Samples were taken before, during and after the renovation to monitor the possible spread of PCR products from the post-PCR areas. Mixtures of gDNA and PCR products were detected in only three of the 303 samples. All three samples were collected from the post-PCR areas prior to the renovation began, which indicated that the renovation did not cause wide-spread contamination of PCR products.     

A method for group identification of hair infected with Microsporum

A method for identifying the group appurtenance of biological objects from subjects suffering from various diseases is developed. The method can be used in examination of putrefactive objects (blood, secretions, hair, etc.) and in cases when the group appurtenance cannot be identified by other methods.     

Adapting measures of social climate for use with individuals with intellectual developmental disability in forensic settings

The social climate of forensic settings is thought to impact on a number of important clinical and organisational outcomes and is, therefore, an important construct in relation to the successful functioning of forensic units. A variety of self-report questionnaires have been developed to objectively measure the social climate of forensic settings (e.g. the Correctional Institutions Environment Scale and the Essen Climate Evaluation Schema), however these questionnaires have not been validated for individuals with intellectual developmental disabilities (IDD). Given the prevalence of IDD in prison and forensic psychiatric settings and the potential impact of such cognitive deficits on the ability to complete a range of self-report questionnaires, it is important to consider the potential reliability and validity of existing social climate measures in IDD populations. This article will, therefore: (1) examine the cognitive, linguistic and response format difficulties that may arise when administering self-report measures of social climate in IDD populations; (2) consider potential adaptations to existing measures of social climate that might make them more suitable for use with IDD populations; and (3) identify important directions for future research in the area.     

Puncture wounds caused by glass mistaken for with stab wounds with a knife

Three cases are presented where fatal puncture wounds caused by broken glass were very similar to stab wounds inflicted by a knife with a single-edged blade. Thus, all three cases caused a murder investigation to be initiated. It could only be determined that these wounds had been caused by glass after a detailed forensic autopsy. In two of the three cases, the only evidence for this was the identification of glass fragments in the wounds. The importance of X-ray examinations is underlined because modern glass in common use is radiopaque. Glass fragments lodged in the wounds can reduce the loss of blood and thus, prolong the capacity to act despite severe injuries.