Dilemmas in fetal medicine: premature application of technology or responding to womens choice?

Copyright @ 2006 The Author.It is argued that innovative health technologies (IHTs) may be changing the roles of both patients and health practitioners, and raising new issues, including ethical, legal and social dilemmas. This paper focuses on the innovative area of fetal medicine. All fetal treatment necessitates accessing the fetus through the pregnant woman's body, and non-surgical treatments have long been a part of pregnancy care. However, recent developments in this area, including the increasing routinisation of sophisticated antenatal ultrasound screening and the introduction of treatments including fetal surgery, may mark a shift in this specialty. The paper explores such shifts from the perspectives of medical and midwifery practitioners working in two Fetal Medicine Units. It examines the apparent effects of the orientation of fetal medicine on prevalent conceptualisations of the maternal-fetal relationship, and some of the consequences of this. It is argued that new forms of uncertainty, including complex risk and diagnostic information, and uncertain prognostic predictions set within the rhetoric of non-directive counselling and women's choice, are leading to unprecedented ethical dilemmas within this area. More widespread debate about such potential dilemmas needs to take place before, rather than following their introduction.This study is supported by the Wellcome Trust Biomedical Ethics programme and the ESRC Innovative Health Technologies Programme (grant number L218252042)

Radar And Visual Observations Of Autumnal (Southward) Shorebird Migration On Guam

Several species of shorebirds migrate between eastern Asia and the southern Pacific islands, Australia, and New Zealand. Observations made from Guam (13°25′N, 144°45′E) during autumn 1983 indicate that a significant number of birds take a direct route over the western Pacific Ocean. Radar observations and ground counts of migrants on Guam showed two periods of autumnal migratory activity. The first, largely adult birds, was in August and September. The second, largely juveniles, was in late September and October. Radar indicated that large numbers of birds passed over the island to the south with no evidence of compensation for drift by the easterly winds. Comparison of radar and ground observations on Guam showed that only a small subset of migrants stop on the island, suggesting that some species may make nonstop flights between eastern Asia and the South Pacific

The Design and Implementation of a PCIe-based LESS Label Switch

With the explosion of the Internet of Things, the number of smart, embedded devices has grown exponentially in the last decade, with growth projected at a commiserate rate. These devices create strain on the existing infrastructure of the Internet, creating challenges with scalability of routing tables and reliability of packet delivery. Various schemes based on Location-Based Forwarding and ID-based routing have been proposed to solve the aforementioned problems, but thus far, no solution has completely been achieved. This thesis seeks to improve current proposed LORIF routers by designing, implementing, and testing and a PCIe-based LESS switch to process unrouteable packets under the current LESS forwarding engine

Nutritional quality and calorific value of Amazonian forest litter

A study on the nutritional quality of litter from an Amazon terra firme forest was carried out to supplement quantitative data on litter production previously published by KLINGE and RODRIGUES (1968). Analyses for the following constituents were carried out: cell-wall and non cell-wall fractions, crude protein, total mineral ash, polyphenols, and caloric values. Reasons are given for choosing these variables. Mineral ash and protein values were very low, whilst cell-wall fractions, which are a measure of the amount of undigestible material, were high, as were caloric values. Polyphenols were also relatively high. These factors together indicate that the litter is a very low grade forage. Amazon leaf litter has high caloric values compared with published figures from other tropical forests. The following hypothesis was offered to explain these high values: as mineral nutrients are severely limiting in this ecosystem, not all the products of photosynthesis can be channeled into plant growth. Large proportions of these photosynthetic products are therefore probably accumulated in the leaves as reduced high energy compounds such as waxes, resins etc. Available data do in fact indicate that primary production is relatively low. The low quality forage which the leaf litter offers may be a contributing factor to the low animal biomass of the Amazon forests

Explaining Cross-National Variations in the Prevalence and Character of Undeclared Employment in the European Union

The aim of this article is to evaluate the competing theories that variously explain the greater prevalence of undeclared employment in some countries either as: a legacy of under-development; a result of the voluntary exit from declared employment due to the high taxes, state corruption and burdensome regulations and controls, or a product of a lack of state intervention in work and welfare which leads to the exclusion of workers from the declared economy and state welfare provision. Analyzing the cross-national variations in the prevalence of, and reasons for, undeclared employment across the European Union using evidence from a 2007 Eurobarometer survey, the finding is that undeclared employment is less prevalent and more of the voluntary variety in wealthier, less corrupt and more equal societies possessing higher levels of social protection and redistribution via social transfers. The theoretical and policy implications are then discussed