The path to cheaper and safer drugs: revamping the pharmaceutical industry in light of GlaxosmithKline's settlement.

The State of New York's ability to secure a settlement from GlaxoSmithKline in which they agreed to publish summaries of completed trials is a step in the right direction. It is likely that other pharmaceutical companies will follow suit and establish Clinical Trial Registers for their own drugs. In order to make such a transition positive, however, the government could consider further remedies, including mandating that pharmaceutical companies publicly disclose all premature terminations of clinical trials. If such a policy is not adopted, firms may have an incentive to withdraw funding for projects that are likely to produce negative results. In order to reduce pharmaceutical companies' ability to misrepresent the results of clinical trials, the FDA could begin rating drugs on the basis of their cost-effectiveness, efficacy and safety. Such a policy would have the effect of both improving patient outcomes and reducing the cost of pharmaceuticals.     

Exploring a Process‐Oriented Forensic Family Observation Protocol

This article recommends a modification of the child interview and observational components of the conventional child custody evaluation. By scheduling these events in back‐to‐back sequence, the evaluator adds critical process‐oriented data to familiar content‐oriented data. These additional data include at least eight landmark separation, reunion, and transition events valuable to understanding the dynamic family system. The benefits of this protocol are discussed in terms of the ecological validity of available data, reduced evaluation time and costs, and research. Limitations are discussed relevant to questions of sampling bias, fatigue and sequence effects, and practical dilemmas that arise when evaluating families with many children.     

Managerial Induced Guilty Pleas in England and Israel – Legitimacy and the Role of the Judiciary: Reclaiming Judicial Responsibility through Managerial Means

Criminal Law Forum - The practice of induced guilty pleas, in which a defendant is induced to plead guilty due to an offered concession, has long been criticised in legal studies. It offers an...     

Geoforensic search to crime scene: Remote sensing,geophysics, and dogs

In the absence of surface indications of burial sites, law enforcement or humanitarian organizations are faced with the difficult task of focusing large-scale ground searches to a manageable excavation area. A geoforensic-based survey may exclude parts of the landscape for reasons such as diggability or viewshed analysis but leave areas still too large for invasive exploration. This work examines how drone-based remote sensing, geophysics, and search dogs may be combined to narrow such searches. Here, we ask the reader to consider two examples where forensic geomorphology and land use provided a range of possible burial locations. Following this is a multi-proxy approach to similar dilemma, with a search-to-scene case study using remote sensing (drone photography), geophysics, ground probes, and search dogs. This approach is not presented as a definitive guide, but serves as an example of the conjunctive use of well-studied methods to approach a common problem in geoforensics.     

The emperor has no clothes: A systemic view of the status and future of child custody evaluation (CCE)

For all of the time, effort, and money invested in child custody evaluation (CCE) and for all of evaluators' emphases on collecting empirically sound data, CCE is not itself an empirically robust process. The reliability, validity, efficacy, and efficiency of CCE has never yet been adequately demonstrated. The science has yet even to define and measure the variables that constitute a healthy family, much less how one is to measure and recommend changes for conflicted systems in the midst of tectonic transitions. This article proposes five ways in which family law professionals and the culture at large should work to better serve the needs of our children: (1) the establishment of proactive parenting and co-parenting education intended to diminish the frequency and magnitude of family conflict and improve the quality of child and family functioning; (2) the introduction of organized incentives that motivate healthy parenting and co-parenting practices as opposed to negative consequences that do too-little, too-late; (3) a greater emphasis on social equity, cultural humility, and universal professional training; (4) the creation of ethical guidelines that disconnect continuing conflict from professional income; and (5) outcome research that feeds back into the evolution of these and related processes.     

Droplet-based optical trapping for cell separation in mock forensic samples

Optical tweezers have a wide range of uses for mechanical manipulation of objects in the microscopic range. This includes both living and static cells in a variety of biomedical and research applications. Single-focus optical tweezers, formed by focusing a laser beam through a high numerical aperture immersion objective, create a significant force, which enables controlled transport of a variety of different cell types and morphologies in three dimensions. Optical tweezers have been previously reported to capture and separate spermatozoa from a reconstituted simulated postcoital sample. We report herein the development of a simplified, more efficient cell transfer protocol that can separate and isolate both spermatozoa as well as leukocytes, with similar efficiencies as those previously reported. The new cell transfer method was used to separate sperm cells from a reconstituted mixture of spermatozoa and vaginal epithelial cells, with complete STR profiles developed from 50 cells with little evidence of contribution from the female contributor to the mixture. This modified protocol was then used to separate 21 samples of enriched leukocytes, with trapped cells ranging from 5 to 22 cells. Complete STR profiles were developed from as few as 10 leukocytes. Thus, with minimal sample preparation and a short trapping time, this method has the potential to provide an alternative to traditional differential extraction methods for separation of sperm:nonsperm mixtures while also providing versatility for separation of cells with differing morphologies.