Reframing the debate around state responses to infertility: considering the harms of subfertility and involuntary childlessness

Many countries are experiencing increasing levels of demand for access to assisted reproductive technologies (ART). Policies regarding who can access ART and with what (if any) support from a collective purse are highly contested, raising questions about what state responses are justified. Whilst much of this debate has focused on the status of infertility as a disease, we argue that this is something of a distraction, since disease framing does not provide the far-reaching, robust justification for state support that proponents of ART seem to suppose. Instead, we propose that debates about appropriate state responses should consider the various implications for health and broader well-being that may be associated with difficulties starting a family. We argue that the harms and disruption to valued life projects of subfertility-related suffering may provide a stronger basis for justifying state support in this context. Further, we suggest that, whilst ART may alleviate some of the harm resulting from subfertility, population-level considerations can indicate a broader range of interventions aimed at tackling different sources of subfertility-related harm, consistent with broader public health aims

Formulation of Biologically-Inspired Silk-Based Drug Carriers for Pulmonary Delivery Targeted for Lung Cancer

The benefits of using silk fibroin, a major protein in silk, are widely established in many biomedical applications including tissue regeneration, bioactive coating and in vitro tissue models. The properties of silk such as biocompatibility and controlled degradation are utilized in this study to formulate for the first time as carriers for pulmonary drug delivery. Silk fibroin particles are spray dried or spray-freeze-dried to enable the delivery to the airways via dry powder inhalers. The addition of excipients such as mannitol is optimized for both the stabilization of protein during the spray-freezing process as well as for efficient dispersion using an in vitro aerosolisation impactor. Cisplatin is incorporated into the silk-based formulations with or without cross-linking, which show different release profiles. The particles show high aerosolisation performance through the measurement of in vitro lung deposition, which is at the level of commercially available dry powder inhalers. The silk-based particles are shown to be cytocompatible with A549 human lung epithelial cell line. The cytotoxicity of cisplatin is demonstrated to be enhanced when delivered using the cross-linked silk-based particles. These novel inhalable silk-based drug carriers have the potential to be used as anti-cancer drug delivery systems targeted for the lungs

Happiness economics

There is enough evidence to be confident that individuals are able and willing to provide a meaningful answer when asked to value on a finite scale their satisfaction with their own lives, a question that psychologists have long and often posed to respondents of large questionnaires. Without taking its limitations and criticisms too lightly, some economists have been using thismeasure of self-reported satisfaction as a proxy for utility so as to contribute to a better understanding of individuals' tastes and hopefully behavior. By means of satisfaction questions we can elicit information on individual likes and dislikes over a large set of relevant issues, such as income, working status and job amenities, the risk of becoming unemployed, inflation, and health status. This information can be used to evaluate existing ideas from a new perspective, understand individual behavior, evaluate and design public policies, study poverty and inequality, and develop a preference based valuation method. In this article I first critically assess the pros and cons of using satisfaction variables, and then discuss its main applications

Exploiting feature extraction techniques on users’ reviews for movies recommendation

Abstract Recommender systems help users to deal with the information overload problem by producing personalized content according to their interests. Beyond the traditional recommender strategies, there is a growing effort to incorporate users’ reviews into the recommendation process, since they provide a rich set of information regarding both items’ features and users’ preferences. This article proposes a recommender system that uses users’ reviews to produce items’ representations that are based on the overall sentiment toward the items’ features. We focus on exploiting the impact that different feature extraction techniques, allied with sentiment analysis, cause in an item attribute-aware neighborhood-based recommender algorithm. We compare four techniques of different granularities (terms and aspects) in two recommendation scenarios (rating prediction and item recommendation) and elect the most promising technique. We also compare our techniques with traditional structured metadata constructions, which are used as the baseline in our experimental evaluation. The results show that the techniques based on terms provide better results, since they produce a larger set of features, hence detailing better the items

COMBUSTION OFF-GAS CLEANING BY WET ELECTROSTATIC SCRUBBING: PRELIMINARY EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

This paper reports preliminary experimental results on wet electrostatic scrubbing of model submicron particles in controlled hydrodynamic conditions based on the use of an electrospray exerted in dripping mode. The experimental results were successfully compared with the predictions of classical particle scavenging