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The Urologic Oncology Journal was founded 25 years ago and we reviewed the literature since that time in the area of urothelial cancer to see the progress and pitfalls we have made over this time period. A comprehensive literature search was conducted by the authors involved who are all actively involved in research, clinical trials, and treatment for urothelial cancer and the results were summarized over the past 25 years. The field of urothelial cancer has evolved tremendously in the last 25 years with the incorporation of molecular subtyping, novel imaging, immunotherapy, and robotic surgery. However, treatments such as BCG and radical cystectomy have remained steadfast over the last 25 years. Although we have a better understanding of the biology of bladder cancer, we still have a long way from being able to cure patients with bladder cancer and eliminate morbidity from treatments. Nevertheless, considerable progress has been made since the founding of the Urologic Oncology Journal 25 years ago.

We examine how gendered norms of professional speech affect the ability of female Supreme Court justices to exercise power in oral argument. In this unique dialogue setting, the justices vie for ch...

Medical segmentation is performed to determine the bounds of regions of interest (ROI) prior to surgery. By allowing the study of growth, structure, and behaviour of the ROI in the planning phase, critical information can be obtained, increasing the likelihood of a successful operation. Usually, segmentations are performed manually or via machine learning methods trained on manual annotations. In contrast, this paper proposes a fully automatic, unsupervised inpainting-based brain tumour segmentation system for T1-weighted MRI. First, a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) is trained to reconstruct missing healthy brain regions. Then, upon application, anomalous regions are determined by identifying areas of highest reconstruction loss. Finally, superpixel segmentation is performed to segment those regions. We show the proposed system is able to segment various sized and abstract tumours and achieves a mean and standard deviation Dice score of 0.771 and 0.176, respectively., Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures

What explains expansions to the federal judiciary? Whereas existing research focuses on unified government as an explanation, we argue ideological proximity between institutions involved in the expansion process more accurately predicts judicial expansions. We examine whether Congress chose to add seats to each federal district or circuit court annually from 1937 to 2012 and find expansions are more likely when (1) the ideological distance between chambers of Congress is smaller and (2) the ideological distance between Congress and individual district or circuit courts is greater. These findings suggest the administration of federal courts is influenced by the political concerns in another branch of government, raising important questions about judicial independence.

The UK government has set a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2030. This will create a shift to electric vehicles. which will present a substantial impact on the grid. Therefore, methods to reduce the charging station’s impact on the grid have to be developed. This paper’s objective is to evaluate how integrating solar and storage affects a charging station’s dependence on the grid. A photovoltaic electric vehicle charging station (PVEVCS) is first designed, and then four charging profiles are selected to assess the station through a simulation using MATLAB. The array produces 3257 MWh/yr which, on average, offsets 40% of the electric vehicle (EV) load experienced by the station. Furthermore, with the integration of storage, the dependence is further reduced by 10% on average. The system also exported energy to the grid, offsetting close to all the energy imported.

The Supreme Court's main output is the decision on the merits. Little is known, however, about how such decisions are constructed. This article is one of the first to look at the way Supreme Court opinions are constructed by examining the impact of the core linguistic resources at the Court's disposal. It does so in a novel manner by measuring the Court's reliance on wording from parties' merits filings, amicus briefs, and lower court opinions between the 2005 and 2014 terms. To accomplish this goal, the article compares language in over 13,000 documents in the Court's docket during this period with their respective majority opinions. The article then looks at the relative impact of parties' briefs and filings, amicus curiae briefs, and lower court opinions on the Court's majority opinion language. This article provides both macro and microlevel analyses by locating the relative effects of these linguistic resources on the Court's overall opinion language as well as by breaking these findings down by individual justice. In the aggregate, this article finds that of the three resources analyzed, the Court tends to use language from parties' merits briefs most frequently, then wording from lower court opinions, and the least from amicus briefs, but that differences in case level factors shift the relative utility of each of these three resources. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Parties make hundreds of campaign promises but not all are seen by voters as central to a party’s offering. Studies of government promise fulfillment accept that not all promises are equivalent but in practice treat all promises equally because they lack an appropriate means of measuring promise centrality. To demonstrate the importance of accounting for pledge fulfillment, we develop a conjoint experiment method to measure public opinion about promise centrality which can be used to construct centrality weights. We demonstrate this approach’s utility by examining the 2017 UK Conservative manifesto. Centrality weighting reduces our assessment of Conservative promise keeping by 21 percentage points (1.3 standard deviations of typical promise-completion rates found in comparative studies). Weighting increases the centrality of EU promises sevenfold and immigration promises sixfold, and reduces the centrality of miscellaneous administrative promises by more than half. These results illustrate that pledge centrality cannot be ignored when assessing pledge fulfillment.

The European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights apply their respective regional treaties. But they also view the regional rights systems as embedded in a global human rights regime and interpret regional rights in light of broader international human rights norms. In doing so, they sometimes cite each other, importing and exporting human rights ideas and principles. Though the decisions of one court do not constitute formal precedent in another, we argue that cross-citations among them play a coordinating role. The regional human rights courts are thus constructing a nascent trans-regional human rights jurisprudence, an emerging frontier in international human rights.

Parties make hundreds of campaign promises but not all are equally important to voters. Studies of government promise fulfilment accept that some promises matter more than others, but treat all promises equally because they lack an appropriate means of assigning promise centrality. To address this limitation, we propose a method that uses a conjoint experiment design to measure public option about promise importance which can be used to construct centrality weights. We demonstrate the utility of this approach by examining the 2017 UK conservative manifesto. Centrality weighting reduces our assessment of Conservative promise-keeping by 21 percentage points (2 SD of typical promise completion rates). Weighting increases the importance of EU promises sevenfold, immigration promises fivefold, and reduces the centrality of miscellaneous administrative promises more than half. These results illustrate that pledge centrality cannot be ignored when assessing pledge fulfillment.

Do you want to teach at a top 25 law school? If so, you had better excel at something you will encounter years before you will even consider applying to be a law professor. Something that has no relationship at all to the skills academics need. You better score extremely high on the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) (or now at some schools the GRE). If you don’t score towards the very top, you will likely not be admitted to a top 10 ranked law school. And if you do not attend a top 10 ranked law school, no matter what you accomplish during the school you do attend (even a top 20 school) or afterwards, your chances of teaching at a top law school are virtually non-existent. The reality is that by far the most important credential one needs to teach at a top law school is to attend a top law school. The elite, teaching the elite, who will then teach more elites.

Supreme Court oral arguments are the only publicly scheduled opportunities for the Justices and advocates to directly engage in discussions about a case. There are few rules to regulate these conversations. Within this unique setting and due to the lack of argument structure combined with the limited time allotted to each argument, the Justices vie for chances to speak, sometimes at the expense of utterances from other Justices. In this Article we examine how the Justices’ genders dictate much of the Justices’ interactions and ultimately the power structure of oral argument.This Article shows how gender is an embedded characteristic of the oral arguments and how the Justices’ appropriations and perceptions of gender roles create disparities in the balance of authority on the Court. The Article’s analysis shows a major gap between male Justices’ interruptions of female Justices and female Justices interruptions’ of male Justices during oral arguments. After discussing why this is problematic, the Article offers suggestions for how the Court can reduce these interruptions through institutional reforms. The Article’s analyses corroborate conversational and power dynamics previously elucidated by sociolinguists, but also extend those findings to the insular environment of the United States Supreme Court.

We describe and evaluate a greedy detection-based algorithm for tracking a variable number of dynamic targets online. The algorithm leverages the well-known iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm for aligning target models with target detections. The approach differs from trackers that seek globally optimal solutions because it treats the problem as a set of individual tracking problems. The method works for multiple targets by sequentially matching models to detections, and then removing detections from further consideration once models have been matched to them. This allows targets to pass close to one another with reduced risks of tracking failure due to “hijacking,'' or track merging. There has been significant previous work in this area, but we believe our approach addresses a number of tracking problems simultaneously that have only been addressed separately before. The algorithm is evaluated using four to eight laser range finders in three settings: quantitatively for a basketball game with 10 people and a 25-person social behavior experiment, and qualitatively for a full-scale soccer game. We also provide qualitative results using video to track ants in a captive habitat. During all the experiments, agents enter and leave the scene, so the number of targets to track varies with time. With eight laser range finders running, the system can locate and track targets at sensor frame rate 37.5 Hz on commodity computing hardware. Our evaluation shows that the tracking system correctly detects each track over 98% of the time. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The legal profession and the legal academy stress the importance of clear writing as a substantial component of effective law practice. But does clear writing translate into effective lawyering? This study takes a novel approach by using lawyers’ writing to measure the quality of legal advocacy. It is the only study to do so at the trial court level, where most lawyers practice, and is the first to track the difference in the readability of opposing parties’ briefs in the same case. After earlier studies of appellate brief quality and success on appeal yielded conflicting results, our study provides a clear association between brief readability and favorable outcomes on summary judgment motions. The study focuses on summary judgment motions because they offer a clear dichotomous outcome: the motions are either granted or denied. After controlling for attorney experience, law firm size, and a lawyer’s status as a repeat player before the motion judge, we find a statistically significant correlation between brief readability and summary judgment decisions.

The Supreme Court annually grants approximately 5% of the petitions to hear cases it receives. It denies petitions from the federal government, from large corporations, and from high-profile attorneys. The decisions of which petitions for writ of certiorari the Court grants sets the Court's agenda each term and defines the issues which the Court will engage. With such a low likelihood that the Court hears any particular case, what makes a petition more or less likely to be granted? The focus of much of the existing scholarship on certiorari deals with the theoretical underpinnings of these judicial decisions. In this paper we set out to add to the empirical study of certiorari by examining an expansive, original dataset of the 93,000 petitions for certiorari between the 2001 and the start of the 2015 Supreme Court Terms. This allows us to investigate decisions made during and directly preceding the Roberts Court. The empirical examination focuses on several factors that are thought to affect certiorari decisions, mainly focusing on the individuals and entities involved in the certiorari petitions. These include the lower court that most recently heard the case, the parties, the attorneys, law firms, and the participation of amicus curiae. We look at success from both sides of the litigation: both in respect to petitioners and respondents. The findings in this paper are designed to add to our understanding of the extent that these individuals and entities factor into the likelihood of certiorari grants and denials. They are also designed to locate the specific individuals and entities that made the largest impact on certiorari decisions for the 2001 through 2015 Supreme Court Terms.

The Supreme Court’s main output is the decision on the merits. Little is known, however, about how such decisions are constructed. This article is one of the first to look at the way Supreme Court opinions are constructed by examining the impact of the core linguistic resources at the Court’s disposal. It does so in a novel manner by measuring the Court's reliance on wording from parties' merits filings, amicus briefs, and from lower court opinions between the 2005 and 2014 Terms. To accomplish this goal, the article compares language in over 13,000 documents in the Court's docket during this period with their respective majority opinions. The article then looks at the relative impact of parties' briefs and filings, amicus curiae briefs, and lower court opinions on the Court's majority opinion language. This article provides both macro and micro level analyses by locating the relative effects of these linguistic resources on the Court's overall opinion language as well as by breaking these findings down by individual Justice. In the aggregate this article finds that of the three resources analyzed, the Court tends to use language from parties’ merits briefs most frequently, then wording from lower court’s opinions, and the least from amicus briefs, but that differences in case level factors shift the relative utility of each of these three resources.

Who are the most successful attorneys in the Supreme Court? A novel way to answer this question is by looking at attorneys' relative influence on the course of the law. This article performs macro and micro-level analyses of the most successful Supreme Court litigators by examining the amount of language shared between nearly 9,500 Supreme Court merits briefs and their respective Supreme Court opinions from 1946 through 2013. The article also includes analyses of the most successful law firms according to the same metric.

Identifying and recording subject movements is a critical, but time-consuming step in animal behavior research. The task is especially onerous in studies involving social insects because of the number of animals that must be observed simultaneously. To address this, we present a system that can automatically analyze animal movements, and label them, by creating a behavioral model from examples provided by a human expert. Further, in conjunction with identifying movements, our system also recognizes the behaviors made up of these movements. Thus, with only a small training set of hand labeled data, the system automatically completes the entire behavioral modeling and labeling process. For our experiments, activity in an observation hive is recorded on video, that video is converted into location information for each animal by a vision-based tracker, and then numerical features such as velocity and heading change are extracted. The features are used in turn to label the sequence of movements for each observed animal, according to the model. Our approach uses a combination of kernel regression classification and hidden Markov model (HMM) techniques. The system was evaluated on several hundred honey bee trajectories extracted from a 15 minute video of activity in an observation hive.

Works examining Supreme Court judicial behavior take the justices' votes on the merits as the typical outcome variable. In this paper we develop and test a new method of automated text classification that makes use of multiple features to generate more accurate predictions. We use a support vector machine (SVM) learning algorithm to create preference models for individual justices. With a dataset covering five justices over seventeen terms, we show that with text classification, we can focus on inputs to judicial decision-making such as litigants' briefs which allow for a new means of assessing judicial attitudes. In particular, we show that text classification's ability to locate salient language allows us to better understand the justices' preferences than through traditional ideological explanations. The models in this paper achieve near 80% predictive accuracy of the justices' votes.

Many legal scholars, academics, and practitioners contend that the quality of merits briefs matters little in the United States Supreme Court. According to this logic by the time a case has reached the Supreme Court, the facts are already clear from the record and experts have meticulously prepared briefs particularly tailored to meet the Justices’ informational needs. This article sets forth a different thesis; specifically that merits brief quality matters even at the upper-echelon of the U.S. Courts. The results of this article show that merits brief quality affects both case outcomes and the amount of language Supreme Court’s opinions share with merits briefs even after controlling for Supreme Court litigation expertise. Due to the lack of existing empirical scholarship on the effects of brief quality, this article has two objectives. First, it develops a conceptualization of brief quality that can be reliably measured. Second, it tests whether the quality of briefs matters by looking both at how this affects case outcomes and the Justices and clerks’ likelihood of adopting language from merits briefs in the Court’s opinions. To do this, the article develops a new measure to gauge brief quality and to make comparisons between briefs. The dataset created for this article consists of 9,498 Supreme Court merits briefs from the 1946 through the 2013 terms.

Supreme Court merits briefs are often the Justices’ and clerks’ primary resources for constructing opinions and they are designed for this purpose. The language, citations, arguments, and discussion contained within the briefs are oriented to provide the Court with a complete picture of each case. But how does the Court utilize this resource? The Court only occasionally cites briefs in its opinions, yet the effects of briefs far supersede this minimal but obvious relationship outcome. Another way to view the effect of briefs is through the trajectory of the Supreme Court’s language. Merits briefs provide the Court with access to case specific information and templates on which it can base opinions. This article examines the extent that the Court uses merits brief language in its opinions. Using linguistic analysis software, this article compares nearly 9,500 merits briefs between 1946 and 2013 with their respective opinions to examine the language that each opinion shares with merits briefs filed in the case. The article then locates the factors that lead the Court to incorporate varying amounts of language from the briefs in its majority opinions. The main findings are that the factors are relatively stable across time and that the most meaningful components are the receptivity or ideology of the justice, the influence of the brief-writer, and attributes specific to each case.

Electron beam tomography (EBT) permits the noninvasive quantification of coronary and aortic calcium as a marker of atherosclerosis. Coronary and aortic calcium are strongly related to premenopausal cardiovascular risk factors in middle-aged women. This report evaluates changes in coronary and aortic calcium over an average of 18 months in 80 women. Measurement variation over time and between readings is also evaluated in these women who were followed through the menopausal transition. Eight years after menopause, 80 women (average age 63 years) underwent serial EBT of the coronary arteries and aorta separated by 18 months. Calcium scores were based on the number and density of calcific deposits. Duplicate readings were obtained to evaluate the effect of reading variation on calcium scores. At baseline, the median calcium score was 0 in the coronary arteries and 58 in the aorta. Average change in coronary (+11) and aortic (+112) calcium were significantly different from zero (p0.001). Reading variability did not contribute significantly to the variation in calcium scores. Extent of calcium in the coronary arteries was associated with progression of calcium in the aorta (p = 0.013). Both coronary and aortic calcium were significantly associated with premenopausal cardiovascular risk factors. Thus, progression of coronary and aortic calcium using EBT can be observed over a short time in healthy middle- aged women.

Audience response systems (ARS) have not been used to gauge knowledge transfer and retention in the setting of large medical conferences. In this study, we explore the utility of an ARS as an educational tool in the setting of a large urology conference.At the 2011 joint meeting of the Mid-Atlantic and New England sections of the American Urological Association, conference attendees were able to use a web-based and cell-phone accessed ARS. At the meeting, six ARS questions were asked during five point-counterpoint debate topics covering areas of prostate cancer, incontinence, pediatrics, stone disease, and renal cancer. Questions were presented by expert representatives from each of the sections; questions were structured as management options for predefined cases. At the beginning and end of each 15-minute session, attendees were asked to use the ARS to select the best management option.In five out of the six questions (83%) more than 10% of responses were changed following the presentation of the point-counterpoint session and a25% change in response was noted in two out of the six questions (33%). A statistically significant change was noted for one question relating to management of urolithiasis in pregnancy (p = 0.037).This is the first study which demonstrates the potential utility of an ARS in a large urology conference. With further research it may be possible to use this technology to identify high-yield topics for medical education and improve outcomes during lecture-based educational activities.

We describe a clustering-based algorithm for tracking a dynamically varying number of targets observed by multiple sensors. The algorithm relies on discrete target detections (e.g., laser "hits") and a simple model of the targets to be tracked (e.g. a human is modeled in 2-D as a circle). The algorithm is evaluated in the context of a 4 versus 4 basketball game (8 targets) using 4 SICK LMS291 laser scanners as input. Our evaluations show that the sensor system correctly reports the number of targets roughly 99% of the time. We also demonstrate use of the tracker with two video datasets of multiple changing numbers of ants and fish, respectively

This paper describes an architecture for dynamically handling spatial relations in an incremental, nonmonotonic diagrammatic reasoning system. The architecture represents jointly exhaustive and pairwise disjoint (JEPD) spatial relation sets as nodes in a dependency network. These spatial relation sets include interval relations, relative orientation relations, and connectivity relations, but in theory could include any JEPD spatial relation sets. This network then caches dependencies between low-level spatial relations, allowing those relations to be easily assumed or retracted as visual elements are added or removed from a diagram. For example, in the architecture’s Undo mechanism, the dependency network can quickly reactivate cached spatial relations when a previously-deleted element is restored. As part of this work, we describe how the system supports higher-level reasoning, including support for creating default assumptions. We also describe how this system was integrated with an existing drawing program and discuss its possible use in diagrammatic and geographic reasoning.

Pheochromocytoma is a rare neuroendocrine tumor. We report a case of pheochromocytoma-induced cardio-myopathy in an 18-year-old white female. A review of the literature indicated that this is the most dramatic reversal of pheochromocytoma cardiomyopathy reported. With aggressive medical management, there was complete recovery of the hemodynamic, echocardiographic, and electrocardiographic abnormalities within 14 days. This case emphasizes the importance of aggressive and appropriate medical therapy in pheochromocytoma heart disease.

The alternate stride or V1 skate technique was the predominant skiing method used in the free technique races of the 1988 Calgary Games. High-speed films were recorded of two free technique races: the Men’s 50 K and the Ladies' 20 K. A moderate and a steep uphill were sites of the filming, and both temporal and kinematic analyses were made. Times for a complete skating cycle tended to decrease on the steep hill (cycle rate increased). Cycle temporal proportions shifted to longer poling and recovery phases while the skating phases shortened on the steeper terrain. Mean cycle velocities (CV), cycle lengths (CL), and cycle rates (CR) were determined. Differences in kinematic relationships were noted: Male skiers included both those who emphasized CL to maximize CV and those who emphasized CR; females were relatively more consistent in emphasis on CR. In either case, center of mass (CM) motions were related to CR and CL. Increased lateral motion of CM tended to increase CL while decreasing CR. Ski edging angles were negatively correlated; a sharply edged ski on one side was usually associated with the other ski being relatively flat. The relationship of glide to ski flatness suggests that many skiers might benefit from skating with both skis relatively flat.