Sudden death associated with a cardiac diverticulum.

We describe the unusual case of a 20-year-old Aboriginal man who was admitted to hospital with chest pain. He died 1 day later. Necropsy showed extensive anterior myocardial infarction in the left ventricle. An isolated diverticulum arising from the subaortic valve region of the left ventricle had compressed the left main coronary artery.     

A response to “what happened to patrol operations in Kansas City?”

Larson's review raises several points concerning the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment. The authors of the evaluation of that experiment respond to each of Larson's criticisms. With reference to Larson's two major points, this response demonstrates that (1) neither Larson's models nor his data are adequate to make statements about “typical patrol intensities” in major American cities and (2) patrol visibility in the reactive areas was markedly decreased over the one-year period of the experiment.The authors agree with Larson and have consistently urged that great caution should be used in generalizing the results of the experiment. The Technical Report itself presents results cautiously and conservatively. Also, large amounts of data comparing Kansas City with other cities are presented in the Report to enable readers to place the kansas City experience in perspective.The authors also agree with Larson that the results of the experiment indicate that police administrators can be more flexible in the allocation of officers than they have been previously. That Larson reaches this conclusion indicates that, despite his minor criticisms of the study which are responded to herein, he basically accepts the results of the experiment.     

POLITICS, INSTITUTIONS, CONSTRUCTIVISM and the EMERGING INTERNATIONAL REGIME for FINANCIAL REGULATION

This article examines the growing number of interconnected international groupings that have been built to regulate global finance over the past quarter century. It suggests that the rationalistic approaches focusing on egoistic actors that have dominated scholarly study of this issue area have contributed to the understimation of the strenght of the regime for regulating global finance. It examines, as an alternative, constructivist approaches that stress the importance of institution.     

Sophocles'Antigone and the History of the Concept of Natural Law

This paper focuses on two related questions. The first of these is a general question. Where are the origins of the concept of natural law to be located in the history of political thought? The second is more specific. Sophocles puts into the mouth of the eponymous heroine of his Antigone an argument justifying her disobedience to an edict of her uncle Creon, who forbade her to bury her brother Polyneices. Does this argument involve an appeal to the concept of natural law? The paper takes issue with the claim, first made by Aristotle in his Rhetoric , that Sophocles' Antigone is indeed an early example of the application of the concept of natural law in political argument and debate. This interpretation of the political message of the Antigone is inconsistent with what we know about Sophocles' attitude towards the fundamental questions of Athenian politics in the classical era of Periclean democracy during the fifth century BC.     

A classifier for the SNP-based inference of ancestry

Ancestral inference from DNA could serve as an important adjunct for both standard and future human identity testing procedures. However, current STR methods for the inference of ancestral affiliation have inherent statistical and technical limitations. In an effort to identify bi-allelic markers that can be used to infer ancestral affiliation from DNA, we screened 211 SNPs in the human pigmentation and xenobiotic metabolism genes. Allele frequencies of 56 SNPs (most from pigmentation genes) were dramatically different between groups of unrelated individuals of Asian, African, and European descent, and both observed and simulated log likelihood ratios revealed that the markers were of exceptional value for ancestral inference. Log likelihood ratios of the multilocus estimates of biological ancestry (EAE/EBA) ranged from 7 to 10, which are on par with the best of the STR batteries yet described. A linear classification method was developed for incorporating these SNPs into a classifier model that was 99, 98, and 100% accurate for identifying individuals of European, African, and Asian descent, respectively. The methods and markers we describe are therefore an important first step for the development of a practical multiplex test for the inference of ancestry in a forensics setting.