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Introduction: Treatment of cervical carcinoma is affected by the stage of the disease, being most likely curable with early detection. High-risk human papillomavirus (HPV) infection and persistency are necessary to the development of precancerous and cancerous lesions leaving the possibility to detect in time cells progressing in at risk behaviour. Methods: This study documents the proportion of HPV DNA positivity in 906 samples with cytological result negative for intraepithelial lesion and malignancy (NILM), 220 atypical squamous cells of undetermined significance (ASC-US) samples and 211 low grade intraepithelial lesions (LSIL) samples collected from various pathological laboratories in Brussels, Belgium. Results: The proportion of samples harbouring one or more HPV types was 10.8% (95% confidence interval, 95% CI: 8.8-12.8) in NILM, 34.5% (95% CI: 27.6-40.3) in ASC-US, 54.3% (95% CI: 47.5- 61.1) in LSIL, with significant variability of HPV proportion in ASC-US and LSIL between laboratories. Conclusion: This study provides an on-site picture, confirming an added value of HPV DNA detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Gender affects household spending in two areas that have been widely studied in the literature. One strand documents that greater female bargaining power within households results in a variety of shifts in household production and consumption. One important source of bargaining power is ownership of assets, especially land. Another strand examines the gender bias in spending on children. This paper addresses both strands simultaneously. In this paper, differences in spending on education are examined empirically, both at the household and individual levels. Results are mixed, though the balance of evidence weighs toward pro-male bias in spending on education at the household level. Results also indicate that the relationship between asset ownership and female bargaining power within the household are contingent on the type of asset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimates from the U.S. Secret Service suggest that $40 million worth of counterfeit currency are confiscated each year in the United States. Despite measures to guard against the crime, modern technology has made reproducing fraudulent bills relatively easy. Over 90 percent of counterfeiting reported in the United States results from the use of readily available digital technology. Yet, little is known about the characteristics of the crime or those who engage in it. The current article presents a descriptive analysis of counterfeiting using data from closed case files from the Secret Service in a southern jurisdiction. Results suggest advances in consumer digital technologies have democratized the crime. That is, this form of offending is committed by a diverse group in terms of age, gender, race, and criminal history. The majority of counterfeiting cases involved multiple offenders, particularly among female counterfeiters. Sample limitations are discussed, as are recommendations for future research. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: We describe a procedure for reconstructing documents that have been shredded by hand, a problem that often arises in forensics. The proposed method first applies a polygonal approximation in order to reduce the complexity of the boundaries and then extracts relevant features of the polygon to carry out the local reconstruction. In this way, the overall complexity can be dramatically reduced because few features are used to perform the matching. The ambiguities resulting from the local reconstruction are resolved and the pieces are merged together as we search for a global solution. The preliminary results reported in this paper, which take into account a limited amount of shredded pieces (10–15) demonstrate that feature-matching-based procedure produces interesting results for the problem of document reconstruction. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]