A Statistical Method for Reassociating Human Tali and Calcanei from a Commingled Context

In a commingled context, assessing that a talus and a calcaneus correspond to the same individual could become a primary step for accurately sorting human remains. For this purpose, the lengths and widths of the trochlea, posterior calcaneal articular surface, and posterior talar articular surface were measured in 197 individuals (105 males, 92 females) from the Athens Collection. A total of 12 highly accurate equations for reassociating tali and calcanei were developed, using simple and multiple linear regression analysis and they were found to be suitable for sorting commingled human remains. Bilateral asymmetry and sex did not have an effect on the accuracy of the method.     

Fatal Acute Hemorrhagic Bowel Infarction Caused by Mesenteric Venous Thrombosis

Acute mesenteric venous thrombosis (MVT) is a rare, but life‐threatening medical phenomenon. MVT is normally characterized by insidious onset, with nonspecific signs and symptoms. A high index of clinical suspicion is required for diagnosis, and emergency surgery is necessary to optimize the chances of patient survival, especially in the people aged more than 70 years. Surprisingly, based on my review of the literature, no fatal acute MVT case has been reported in the forensic literature. All reported such cases have been documented in medical literature, and most of them have been associated with underlying risk factors for venous thrombosis, such as hypercoagulable state, certain cancers, and stasis of the blood flow. Here, I report the case of a sudden unexpected death due to extensive intestinal ischemia and infarction with massive abdominal hemorrhage caused by acute MVT in a 72‐year‐old man without known underlying risk factors.     

Written in Their Own Voice: First-Year and Older Students' Perceptions on Their University's Identity

Undergraduate students (218 women, 57 men) attending a Roman Catholic, suburban university with a Franciscan charism tradition completed open-ended items assessing their perception on the mission, vision, and values of their university. However, only 41 lower division, first-year students (33 women, 8 men) and 29 upper division students (22 women, 7 men) actually wrote about different aspects of their school's identity. Qualitative themes emerged in regard to students' assessment of their school identity, such as university mission activities are perceived important, and overall support for different institutional values within the university community.     

Better that ten guilty persons escape: punishment costs explain the standard of evidence

It is generally agreed that the conviction of an innocent person (type-I error) should be avoided even at the cost of allowing a certain number of acquittals of criminals (type-II error). The high standard of evidence that is usually required in criminal procedure reflects this principle. Conversely, the established model of optimal deterrence that follows the seminal work of Becker (1968) shows that the two types of error are equally detrimental in terms of deterrence and thus it prescribes the minimization of the sum of errors with no primacy given to type-I errors over type-II errors. This paper explains that when the costs of punishment are positive, and guilty individuals are, on average, more likely to be found guilty than innocent ones, wrongful convictions are more socially costly than wrongful acquittals. This justifies the bias against wrongful convictions without resorting to any ad hoc assumption about the relative weight of the two errors.     

Synthetic Performance Indicators for Residential Housing Agencies

Many public administrations produce and distribute public services through a number of similar local autonomous organizations, or institutions, operating in different parts of the territory assigned to them under a centralized authority. Examples of this are the public residential housing institutions, the institutions for waste disposal, health care institutions, and education institutions. The problem arises regarding the evaluation of the performance of these local organizations and institutions not in absolute but in relative terms, in order to determine what incentives or sanctions should be meted out to them. This study presents the methodological problems, the data analysis, and the initial results of the method adopted by the Lombardy Region to create a system of performance indicators that will permit an automatic ranking of the Residential Housing Agencies in Lombardy （ALER） according to their performance, based on information from their balance sheets. A performance index was devised by rationally combining the results of three different analyses： position analysis, ranking analysis, and scoring analysis. The results allowed the central administration to： （1） motivate the managers of the local units through a system of performance-based incentives; （2） aggregate poorly performing local units or outsource inefficient functions; and （3） create competition among local units and raise overall performance levels.     

Firearm examination: Examiner judgments and computer‐based comparisons

Forensic firearm examination provides the court of law with information about the source of fired cartridge cases. We assessed the validity of source decisions of a computer‐based method and of 73 firearm examiners who compared breechface and firing pin impressions of 48 comparison sets. We also compared the computer‐based method's comparison scores with the examiners' degree‐of‐support judgments and assessed the validity of the latter. The true‐positive rate (sensitivity) and true‐negative rate (specificity) of the computer‐based method (for the comparison of both the breechface and firing pin impressions) were 94.4% and at least 91.7%, respectively. For the examiners, the true‐positive rate was at least 95.3% and the true‐negative rate was at least 86.2%. The validity of the source decisions improved when the evaluations of breechface and firing pin impressions were combined and for the examiners also when the perceived difficulty of the comparison decreased. The examiners were reluctant to provide source decisions for "difficult" comparisons even though their source decisions were mostly correct. The correlation between the computer‐based method's comparison scores and the examiners' degree‐of‐support judgments was low for the same‐source comparisons to negligible for the different‐source comparisons. Combining the outcomes of computer‐based methods with the judgments of examiners could increase the validity of firearm examinations. The examiners' numerical degree‐of‐support judgments for their source decisions were not well‐calibrated and showed clear signs of overconfidence. We suggest studying the merits of performance feedback to calibrate these judgments.     

Decapitation due to car accident

The occurrence of complete decapitation as a consequence of car accident is an extremely rare event. This fatality is generally seen in pedestrians run over by trains and also in motorcyclists who impact against the tailboard of trucks. Moreover, complete transection of pedestrians and occupants of cars has been described in road accidents especially in case of vehicles traveling at a high speed. We present a case of decapitation with complete degloving injury of the neck in a patient involved in a traffic accident, and we briefly discuss the possible mechanisms producing this injury.     

Reshaping informed consent in the biobanking context

In my article, I discuss the role of informed consent in the context of biobanking. I argue that the basic issue in understanding the role of the consent is one of identifying the interests at stake and determining which of these interests we intend to promote. The definition of the informational content represents only a consequential step. For this purpose, I analyse the legal status of human biological materials from three different perspectives: "material", "informational" and "relational". Informed consent produces different effects on each of these perspectives. From the material perspective, consent can influence the allocation of property rights over human tissue; from the informational point of view, consent is the legal instrument that permits control over personal data; while from the "relational" perspective, it is possible through consent to ensure that the person's personal beliefs are respected. The crucial point is that the legal effects that informed consent has on the three perspectives overlap. Therefore, in order to understand the role of informed consent holistically, in this article I analyse how these perspectives relate to each other. This analysis shows that the relationship between the perspectives can vary depending on the interests that we intend to promote. If we intend to promote the freedom of research, then the material dimension can prevail, whilst if we focus our attention on the interests of individuals then the informational and the relational dimensions will prevail. The challenge is to find a good balance between these two extremes.