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Arrest warrants are an important and pervasive aspect of crime and justice in the United States. There are nearly three million arrest warrants active on any given day, of which several hundred thousand were issued for serious violent crimes (SVCs) such as aggravated assault, robbery, forcible sexual assault, and homicide. In more than a third of those SVC warrants, however, extradition is conditionally waived such that an offender can avoid arrest by leaving town; they can elect banishment over prosecution. Studying extradition limits among these serious offenses presents an opportunity to illuminate both a challenge to public safety and justice, as well as forces underlying discretionary decision making by police. To that end, we study all arrest warrants issued in the United States for SVCs between 2017 and 2019. We model banishment rates at the county‐level within a multivariate negative binomial framework. Analyses showed banishment varied as a function of policing capacity, firearm use in crimes, racial composition, and voting behavior during the 2016 presidential election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM) is the most common type of brain tumor and it is uniformly fatal. The community standard of treatment for this disease is gross or subtotal resection of the tumor, followed by radiation and temozolomide. At recurrence bevacizumab can be added for increased progression free survival. Many challenges are encountered while trying to devise new drugs to treat GBM, such as the presence of the blood brain barrier which is impermeable to most drugs. Therefore in the past few years attention was turned to immunological means for the treatment of this devastating disease. EGFRvIII targeting has proven a good way to attack glioblastoma cells by using the immune system. Although in still in development, this approach holds the promise as a great first step toward immune-tailored drugs for the treatment of brain cancers.

Currently in the United States, the remains of thousands of unidentified human decedents are housed in medical, law enforcement, and forensic facilities throughout the country. A number of digital data repositories have been established to curate and disseminate the details of these unidentified decedent cases; some repositories also maintain records of missing persons. Although a cross-reference for textual data similarity occurs between the missing persons and unidentified decedent records in some repositories, no repository is currently known to employ an image analysis technology for cross-referencing image data. Results suggest that the computer-generated facial approximations used in this research were consistently included in prioritized candidate lists when used in an automated facial recognition context. Two concurrent studies exploring the specific use-case discussed here were executed. The first employed an optimally-conditioned facial image gallery (g=6159) (i.e., a gallery comprised of highly consistent facial images), a research design intended to establish the ceiling performance of the combined use of the two software programs employed. The second employed a gallery (g=1816) compiled from a real-world dataset of missing persons' facial images, a research design intended to inform potential operational performance when using the highly varied facial images typically comprising public databases. Multiple types of facial approximations (reconstructions) with varying degrees of weight adjustments, age adjustments, or the presence (or absence) of visible eyes, and combinations of these variables, were evaluated. Overall, in the larger, optimally modeled study, 53% of the facial approximations for the t=159 test subjects examined were matched to his or her corresponding life photo within the top 50 images of a candidate list generated from a blind (unrestricted) search of the highly consistent gallery (g=6159). In the operationally modeled study, 31% of the test subjects' (t=16) facial approximations were matched to their corresponding life photos within the top 50 images of a candidate list generated from a blind search of the gallery populated with images from an operational dataset (g=1816). As anticipated, candidate list inclusion rates improved with the use of demographic filters. No significantly different inclusion rates were observed between the sex or age cohorts examined. Significant differences were, however, observed across population cohorts. Entities curating missing and unidentified decedent records may benefit from a paired implementation of facial recognition technology and computer-generated approximations as part of a comprehensive investigative strategy for the specific envisioned use-case discussed in this research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand how offenders are caught, past research has focused on case closures, which combines the identification and apprehension of a fugitive. However, there is a gap in applied research concerning duration to apprehension and variation in time to capture by crime. This study examined the days to close arrest warrants using administrative data containing 1.3 million cases. A Cox proportional hazards model demonstrated that sex crimes involving contact or encompassing child pornography/exploitation, kidnapping, sex offender registration violations, and warrants involving assaults or an armed/dangerous notation had the strongest relationships to warrant closure. The results illustrate the prioritizing of cases involving sex offenders and violent offenders, as well as underscoring a need for future research on time to warrant closure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the research in genitourinary oncology conducted by the Canadian Uro-Oncology Group (CUOG) Multidisciplinary Model. CUOG has led a surgical wait times initiative, which led to recommendations in maximum wait times for patients with urological cancers. The CUOG model is being used as an example of success in clinical research, as Canadian investigators consistently perform extremely well in the quality and quantity of patients put on trials.