1,922 research outputs found
Chimpanzee Rights: The Philosophers' Brief
In December 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) filed a petition for a common law writ of habeas corpus in the New York State Supreme Court on behalf of Tommy, a chimpanzee living alone in a cage in a shed in rural New York (Barlow, 2017). Under animal welfare laws, Tommyâs owners, the Laverys, were doing nothing illegal by keeping him in those conditions. Nonetheless, the NhRP argued that given the cognitive, social, and emotional capacities of chimpanzees, Tommyâs confinement constituted a profound wrong that demanded remedy by the courts. Soon thereafter, the NhRP filed habeas corpus petitions on behalf of Kiko, another chimpanzee housed alone in Niagara Falls, and Hercules and Leo, two chimpanzees held in
research facilities at Stony Brook University. Thus began the legal struggle to move these chimpanzees from captivity to a sanctuary, an effort that has led the NhRP to argue in multiple courts before multiple judges. The central point of contention has been whether Tommy, Kiko, Hercules, and Leo have legal rights. To date, no judge has been willing to issue a writ of habeas corpus on their behalf. Such a ruling would mean that these chimpanzees have rights that confinement might violate. Instead, the judges have argued that chimpanzees cannot be bearers of legal rights because they are not, and cannot be persons. In this book we argue that chimpanzees are persons because they are autonomous
Approach for the Improvement of Energy Performance of a Stock of Buildings
This paper summarizes the work performed by
CSTB, ADEME and the Ministry of equipment in
France to improve the energy performance of the
ministry stock of buildings: 7 millions square meters,
10 000 buildings, wide range of different buildings
of different sizes and uses. The project has four
major phases: analysis of existing tools for energy
performance evaluation, identification of the endusers
of the tools and definition of a building
typology, development of tools adapted to the endusers,
validation and improvement of the tools. Since
the building managers' motivation is an important
factor to improve the energy performance of the
buildings, the study has tried to incorporate the endusers
needs and constraints in the different phases of
tools development
Preoperative systemic inflammation predicts postoperative infectious complications in patients undergoing curative resection for colorectal cancer
The presence of systemic inflammation before surgery, as evidenced by the glasgow prognostic score (mGPS), predicts poor long-term survival in colorectal cancer. The aim was to examine the relationship between the preoperative mGPS and the development of postoperative complications in patients undergoing potentially curative resection for colorectal cancer. Patients (n=455) who underwent potentially curative resections between 2003 and 2007 were assessed consecutively, and details were recorded in a database. The majority of patients presented for elective surgery (85%) were over the age of 65 years (70%), were male (58%), were deprived (53%), and had TNM stage I/II disease (61%), had preoperative haemoglobin (56%), white cell count (87%) and mGPS 0 (58%) in the normal range. After surgery, 86 (19%) patients developed a postoperative complication; 70 (81%) of which were infectious complications. On multivariate analysis, peritoneal soiling (P<0.01), elevated preoperative white cell count (P<0.05) and mGPS (P<0.01) were independently associated with increased risk of developing a postoperative infection. In elective patients, only the mGPS (OR=1.75, 95% CI=1.17-2.63, P=0.007) was significantly associated with increased risk of developing a postoperative infection. Preoperative elevated mGPS predicts increased postoperative infectious complications in patients undergoing potentially curative resection for colorectal cancer
Functional food science and defence against reactive oxidative species
This paper assesses critically the science base that underpins the argument that oxidative damage is a significant causative factor in the development of human diseases and that antioxidants are capable of preventing or ameliorating these disease processes. The assessment has been carried out under a number of headings, and some recommendations for future research are made based on the present day knowledge bas
Minimax Current Density Coil Design
'Coil design' is an inverse problem in which arrangements of wire are
designed to generate a prescribed magnetic field when energized with electric
current. The design of gradient and shim coils for magnetic resonance imaging
(MRI) are important examples of coil design. The magnetic fields that these
coils generate are usually required to be both strong and accurate. Other
electromagnetic properties of the coils, such as inductance, may be considered
in the design process, which becomes an optimization problem. The maximum
current density is additionally optimized in this work and the resultant coils
are investigated for performance and practicality. Coils with minimax current
density were found to exhibit maximally spread wires and may help disperse
localized regions of Joule heating. They also produce the highest possible
magnetic field strength per unit current for any given surface and wire size.
Three different flavours of boundary element method that employ different basis
functions (triangular elements with uniform current, cylindrical elements with
sinusoidal current and conic section elements with sinusoidal-uniform current)
were used with this approach to illustrate its generality.Comment: 24 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables. To appear in Journal of Physics D:
Applied Physic
âNot everybody walks around and thinks âThatâs an example of othering or stigmatisationââ: identity, pedagogic rights and the acquisition of undergraduate sociology-based social science knowledge
This article places itself in conversation with literature about how the experience and outcomes of university education are structured by intersections between social class, ethnicity, gender, age and type of university attended. It addresses undergraduate studentsâ acquisition of sociological knowledge in four diverse university settings. Basil Bernsteinâs concepts of pedagogic identity, pedagogic rights, classification and framing are employed to analyse curriculum and interviews with 31 students over the period of their undergraduate degree. The nature of a sociology-based disciplinary identity is described and illustrated, and it is shown how the formation of this identity gives access to pedagogic rights and the acquisition of valuable capabilities. Addressing the question of whether pedagogic rights are distributed unequally in a stratified university system, it was found that they were not distributed, as might be expected, according to institutional hierarchy. It is argued that the acquisition of university sociological knowledge can disrupt social inequality
Anarchy in the UK: Detailed genetic analysis of worker reproduction in a naturally occurring British anarchistic honeybee, Apis mellifera, colony using DNA microsatellites
Anarchistic behaviour is a very rare phenotype of honeybee colonies. In an anarchistic colony,
many workersâ sons are reared in the presence of the queen. Anarchy has previously
been described in only two Australian colonies. Here we report on a first detailed genetic
analysis of a British anarchistic colony. Male pupae were present in great abundance above
the queen excluder, which was clearly indicative of extensive worker reproduction and is the
hallmark of anarchy. Seventeen microsatellite loci were used to analyse these male pupae,
allowing us to address whether all the males were indeed workersâ sons, and how many
worker patrilines and individual workers produced them. In the sample, 95 of 96 of the
males were definitely workersâ sons. Given that
â
1% of workersâ sons were genetically
indistinguishable from queenâs sons, this suggests that workers do not move any
queen-laid eggs between the part of the colony where the queen is present to the area above
the queen excluder which the queen cannot enter. The colony had 16 patrilines, with an
effective number of patrilines of 9.85. The 75 males that could be assigned with certainty to
a patriline came from 7 patrilines, with an effective number of 4.21. They were the offspring of at least 19 workers. This is in contrast to the two previously studied Australian naturally occurring anarchist colonies, in which most of the workersâ sons were offspring of one patriline. The high number of patrilines producing males leads to a low mean relatedness between laying workers and males of the colony. We discuss the importance of studying such colonies in the understanding of worker policing and its evolution
Slow crossover in YbXCu4 intermediate valence compounds
We compare the results of measurements of the magnetic susceptibility Chi(T),
the linear coefficient of specific heat Gamma(T)=C(T)/T and 4f occupation
number nf(T) for the intermediate valence compounds YbXCu4 (X = Ag, Cd, In, Mg,
Tl, Zn) to the predictions of the Anderson impurity model, calculated in the
non-crossing approximation (NCA). The crossover from the low temperature Fermi
liquid state to the high temperature local moment state is substantially slower
in the compounds than predicted by the NCA; this corresponds to the
''protracted screening'' recently predicted for the Anderson Lattice. We
present results for the dynamic susceptibility, measured through neutron
scattering experiments, to show that the deviations between theory and
experiment are not due to crystal field effects, and we present
x-ray-absorption fine-structure (XAFS) results that show the local crystal
structure around the X atoms is well ordered, so that the deviations probably
do not arise from Kondo Disorder. The deviations may correlate with the
background conduction electron density, as predicted for protracted screening.Comment: Submitted to Physical Review B on June 7, 2000, accepted for
publication November 2, 2000. Changes to the original manuscript include: 1)
a discussion of the relation of the slow crossover to the conduction electron
density; 2) a discussion of the relation of the reported results to earlier
photoemission results; and, 3) minor editorial change
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