Interveners or Interferers: Intervention in Decisions to Withhold and Withdraw Life-Sustaining Medical Treatment

This article considers intervention in proceedings about withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining medical treatment. Since the early 1990s, there have been a number of important decisions, both in Australia and overseas, about whether life-sustaining treatment should be withheld or withdrawn from an adult who no longer has capacity to make the decision for himself or herself. In almost all of these decisions, intervention by a non-party to the matter has been an issue. This article explores the rules of intervention in applications to appear as a party and as amicus curiae, and considers those rules in the context of decisions to withhold and withdraw life-sustaining medical treatment. The relevant cases are examined as are the advantages and disadvantages of intervention in these circumstances. The article concludes by suggesting a model for intervention that strikes the appropriate balance between ensuring all relevant issues are placed before the court while still respecting the intensely private nature of a decision to withhold or withdraw a life-sustaining measure in any given case

The "Other" Within: Multiple Selves Making a World of Difference

Diversity challenges us by forcing us into encounters with the Other, the not-like-me/not-like-us. Educating leaders for effective collaboration in diverse settings means leading them through a process of de-centering from their "comfort zones" and helping them stretch to embrace difference. Such education mustconsider not only difference, but also inequality of power - particularly in terms of entrenched social structures that silently reinforce unearned privilege

Tributes to Professor Robert Berkley Harper

In 1977, I began teaching at The University of Pittsburgh Law School and in short order one of my closest friends during my tenure there was Professor Robert “Bob” Harper. I wondered when I was hired whether I was selected because I looked strikingly similar to Bob, and perhaps the faculty thought my favoring Professor Harper would make my assimilation into the law school faculty that much easier. Students constantly called me Professor Harper and, indeed, many on the faculty called me Bob for several years; I never bothered to correct them. I thought if they paid that little attention to detail in law school, I would just let them go through life missing some of the finer points their education, and life for that matter, has to offer

Tissue, cell type and stage-specific ectopic gene expression and RNAi induction in the Drosophila testis

The Drosophila testis has numerous advantages for the study of basic cellular processes, as production of sperm requires a highly orchestrated and complex combination of morphological changes and developmentally regulated transitions. Experimental genetics using Drosophila melanogaster has advanced dramatically with the advent of systems for ectopic expression of genetic elements in specific cells. However the genetic tools used in Drosophila research have rarely been generated with the testes in mind, and the utility of relatively few systems has been documented for this tissue. Here I will summarize ectopic expression systems that are known to work for the testis, and provide advice for selection of the most appropriate expression system in specific experimental situations

DMRG Study of the Ground State at Higher Landau Levels - Stripes, Bubbles and the Wigner Crystal

Hartree-Fock theory predicted stripe or bubble phase in the third and higher Landau levels for two-dimensional electrons, and experimental evidences has been accumulated. In this paper theoretical confirmation of the stripe phase and bubble phase in higher Landau level is given by means of the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) method, which can give essentially exact ground state for electron systems with up to 18 electrons. From the study of the pair correlation function, the stripe phase, bubble phase, and the Wigner crystal phase are identified, and phase diagram is obtained. The reentrant integer quantum Hall state is identified as the bubble state. The phase diagram of the fourth Landau level shows more diversity than the third level.Comment: submitted to EP2DS-14, 3 pages, RevTex, two figures included in the tex

The Wnt receptor Ryk is a negative regulator of mammalian dendrite morphogenesis

This work was supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) of Australia (Grants 1061512, 1063080). ML and KS were supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award or a University of Queensland International Scholarship, respectively. Imaging work was performed in the Queensland Brain Institute’s Advanced Microscopy Facility and generously supported by an ARC LIEF grant (LE130100078). We thank Assoc. Prof. Julian Heng (Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research, Perth, Australia) for providing the pCA-ß-EGFPm5-Silencer 3 vector, Prof. Joseph LoTurco (University of Connecticut, USA) for the piggyBAC vector, and Prof. Steven Stacker (Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Melbourne, Australia) for providing the Ryk knockout mice and the full-length Ryk plasmid. We are also grateful to Mr Luke Hammond for expert advice on microscopy and Ms Rowan Tweedale for critical reading of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The mean curvature at the first singular time of the mean curvature flow

Consider a family of smooth immersions $F(\cdot,t): M^n\to \mathbb{R}^{n+1}$ of closed hypersurfaces in $\mathbb{R}^{n+1}$ moving by the mean curvature flow $\frac{\partial F(p,t)}{\partial t} = -H(p,t)\cdot \nu(p,t)$, for $t\in [0,T)$. We prove that the mean curvature blows up at the first singular time $T$ if all singularities are of type I. In the case $n = 2$, regardless of the type of a possibly forming singularity, we show that at the first singular time the mean curvature necessarily blows up provided that either the Multiplicity One Conjecture holds or the Gaussian density is less than two. We also establish and give several applications of a local regularity theorem which is a parabolic analogue of Choi-Schoen estimate for minimal submanifolds

Local energy, the pre-envelope, and filter resolution

We examine the construction of new filters for computing local energy, and compare these filters with the Gabor filters and the three-point-filter of Venkatesh [l]. Further, we demonstrate that the effect of convolution with complex Gabor filters is to band-pass (with some differentiating effect) and compute the local energy of the result. The magnitude of the resulting local energy is then used to detect features [2], [3] (step features, texture etc.), and the phase is used to classify the detected features [l], [4] or provide disparity information for stereo [5] and motion work [6], [7]. Each of these types of information can be obtained at multiple resolutions, enabling the use of course to fine strategies for computing disparity, and allowing the discrimination of image textures on the basis of which parts of the Fourier domain they dominate [8], [9].<br /