LESSONS FROM GERMANY: SHOULD UK LEGISLATION CIRCUMNAVIGATE OR CIRCUMVENT THE ISSUE OF MALE CIRCUMCISION?

Recent Court Action in Cologne Germany has seen rapid response from the German Government, with the German Parliament passing new legislation confirming the lawfulness of ritual circumcision. However there are questions as to whether German Parliament has done enough  This case note looks at the background to the case and considers the ethical implications of this case in parallel to current activity in the UK.The author makes recommendations to minimum legal requirements to current English law in this respect

Habitat Use And Seasonal Activity Of Selected Snakes On John F. Kenned

An intensive, replicated monthly sampling of snake communities inhabiting four habitat types was conducted at John F. Kennedy Space Center, Brevard County, Florida from November 2002 through October 2003. Thirteen species (580 individuals plus 74 recaptures) plus one hybrid were captured. The three most commonly captured species, Coluber constrictor, Thamnophis sirtalis, and Thamnophis sauritus, combined made up 85% of the sample. These three species were active during every month of the year, but showed modal activity patterns typical of Temperate Zone snakes. Monthly snake captures were correlated with monthly captures of potential prey species and with mean monthly temperature. Species richness in the four habitat types varied from nine to 12. Drift fences in ruderal habitats had the highest species richness, while fences in swales captured the greatest number of individuals. The most dissimilar habitat pair was scrub and swale, while the most similar pair was ruderal and hammock. Box traps proved more effective for targeting the largest snake species, while funnel and box traps were equally effective for targeting other species

RAISING OUR HEADS ABOVE THE PARAPET? SOCIETAL ATTITUDES TO ASSISTED SUICIDE AND CONSIDERATION OF THE NEED FOR LAW REFORM IN ENGLAND AND WALES

Death has been described as the last taboo. It is unsurprising therefore that those individuals who openly proclaim to desire death find themselves headline news. In October 2008, Debbie Purdy, who suffers with multiple sclerosis, challenged the legality of the failure of the Director of Public Prosecutions to issue guidance as to the circumstances in which individuals will or will not be prosecuted for assisting another person to commit suicide.  The judgment was pronounced barely two weeks after injured rugby player Dan James travelled with his parents to Switzerland, to secure his death with the help of the local group, Diginitas. James was reportedly the youngest of the 100 Britons who have travelled to Dignitas to find the ‘sanctuary of death.’ However, Sky TV’s screening of the assisted death of Craig Ewert in December was no doubt the most controversial event of the year in this respect.

Ssh...don’t tell the children! (no duty to warn descendants that they may have inherited a serious medical condition)

In this edition of the Denning Law Journal we are celebrating the 800 years of the Magna Carta, but compared to some  declarations  the Magna Carta is a mere fledgling.  Those with knowledge of the medical profession will be well versed in the Hippocratic Oath, which garnered a fundamental role in medical training during the Hellenic period. In more recent years, the Hippocratic Oath has been revitalised in the form of the Declaration of Geneva, and is still used as part of medical training today. Over time the Oath has been modified to adopt a more progressive stance, nevertheless in one key ethical principle remains untouched, that of confidentiality.

Exposure and Exposure Modeling

Exposure to contaminants in the environment is quantified through the ecological risk assessment (ERA) process which provides a framework for the development and implementation of environmental management decisions. The ERA uses available toxicological and ecological information to estimate the probability of occurrence for a specified undesired ecological event or endpoint. The level for these endpoints depends on the objectives and the constraints imposed upon the risk assessment process; therefore, multiple endpoints at different scales may be necessary. ERAs Ecotoxicology | Exposure and Exposure Assessment 1527Author\u27s personal copy often rely on the link between these undesired endpoints to a threshold of exposure to specific toxicants and toxicant mixtures. Oral reference doses (RfD), inhalation reference concentrations (RfC), and carcinogenicity assessments are the usual way these links are expressed in the ERA, and unfortunately most of these thresholds have been developed for human health assessments and not ecosystem integrity. However, since these studies often use animal models, in many cases the original empirical data can be used when trying to apply these findings to ecological consequences or to establish ecological screening values (ESVs). The ecological exposure assessment often begins by comparing constituent concentrations in media (surface water, sediment, soil) to ESVs. The ESVs are derived from ecologically relevant criteria and standards. For example, in the United States the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) Screening Values and National Ambient Water Quality Criteria (NAWQC) are often used based on ‘no observed adverse effect levels’ (NOAELs) or ‘lowest observed adverse effect levels’ (LOAELs) derived from literature to assess exposure. Radionuclide comparisons for ecological screening are typically dose-based for population level effects. In addition to the ecological threshold comparison, constituents that may bioaccumulate/bioconcentrate are identified during initial screening processes. This is done to account for toxicants that may not be present at levels exceeding ESVs, but must be considered due to trophic transfer of toxicants that may concentrate in higher-trophic-level organisms. Constituents that exceed ESV comparisons (present with means, maximums, or 95% upper confidence levels (UCLs)) are evaluated using a lines-of-evidence approach based on (1) a background evaluation, (2) a bioaccumulation/ bioconcentration potential and ecotoxicity evaluation, (3) a frequency and pattern-of-exceedances evaluation based on review of exceedances to the ESVs, and (4) an evaluation of existing biological data. From this information, ecosystems can be prioritized in terms of risk and focused for proper exposure assessments. This article presents a scientific overview and review of how toxicant exposure is estimated and applied to assess ecosystem integrity

Collisional Removal of OH (X (sup 2)Pi, nu=7) by O2, N2, CO2, and N2O

Collisional removal rate constants for the OH (X 2PI, nu = 7) radical are measured for the colliders O2, CO2, and N2O, and an upper limit is established for N2. OH(nu = 4) molecules, generated in a microwave discharge flow cell by the reaction of hydrogen atoms with ozone, are excited to v = 7 by the output of a pulsed infrared laser via direct vibrational overtone excitation. The temporal evolution of the P = 7 population is probed as a function of the collider gas partial pressure by a time-delayed pulsed ultraviolet laser. Fluorescence from the B 21 + state is detected in the visible spectral region

Expenditure and resource utilisation for cervical screening in Australia

BACKGROUND The National Cervical Screening Program in Australia currently recommends that women aged 18-69 years are screened with conventional cytology every 2 years. Publicly funded HPV vaccination was introduced in 2007, and partly as a consequence, a renewal of the screening program that includes a review of screening recommendations has recently been announced. This study aimed to provide a baseline for such a review by quantifying screening program resource utilisation and costs in 2010. METHODS A detailed model of current cervical screening practice in Australia was constructed and we used data from the Victorian Cervical Cytology Registry to model age-specific compliance with screening and follow-up. We applied model-derived rate estimates to the 2010 Australian female population to calculate costs and numbers of colposcopies, biopsies, treatments for precancer and cervical cancers in that year, assuming that the numbers of these procedures were not yet substantially impacted by vaccination. RESULTS The total cost of the screening program in 2010 (excluding administrative program overheads) was estimated to be A$194.8M. We estimated that a total of 1.7 million primary screening smears costing$96.7M were conducted, a further 188,900 smears costing $10.9M were conducted to follow-up low grade abnormalities, 70,900 colposcopy and 34,100 histological evaluations together costing$21.2M were conducted, and about 18,900 treatments for precancerous lesions were performed (including retreatments), associated with a cost of $45.5M for treatment and post-treatment follow-up. We also estimated that$20.5M was spent on work-up and treatment for approximately 761 women diagnosed with invasive cervical cancer. Overall, an estimated $23 was spent in 2010 for each adult woman in Australia on cervical screening program-related activities. CONCLUSIONS Approximately half of the total cost of the screening program is spent on delivery of primary screening tests; but the introduction of HPV vaccination, new technologies, increasing the interval and changing the age range of screening is expected to have a substantial impact on this expenditure, as well as having some impact on follow-up and management costs. These estimates provide a benchmark for future assessment of the impact of changes to screening program recommendations to the costs of cervical screening in Australia

End-to-end neural segmental models for speech recognition

Segmental models are an alternative to frame-based models for sequence prediction, where hypothesized path weights are based on entire segment scores rather than a single frame at a time. Neural segmental models are segmental models that use neural network-based weight functions. Neural segmental models have achieved competitive results for speech recognition, and their end-to-end training has been explored in several studies. In this work, we review neural segmental models, which can be viewed as consisting of a neural network-based acoustic encoder and a finite-state transducer decoder. We study end-to-end segmental models with different weight functions, including ones based on frame-level neural classifiers and on segmental recurrent neural networks. We study how reducing the search space size impacts performance under different weight functions. We also compare several loss functions for end-to-end training. Finally, we explore training approaches, including multi-stage vs. end-to-end training and multitask training that combines segmental and frame-level losses

Dairy foods and dairy protein consumption is inversely related to markers of adiposity in obese men and women

A number of intervention studies have reported that the prevalence of obesity may be in part inversely related to dairy food consumption while others report no association. We sought to examine relationships between energy, protein and calcium consumption from dairy foods (milk, yoghurt, cheese, dairy spreads, ice-cream) and adiposity including body mass index (BMI), waist (WC) and hip circumference (HC), and direct measures of body composition using dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (% body fat and abdominal fat) in an opportunistic sample of 720 overweight/obese Australian men and women. Mean (SD) age, weight and BMI of the population were 51 ± 10 year, 94 ± 18 kg and 32.4 ± 5.7 kg/m2, respectively. Reduced fat milk was the most commonly consumed dairy product (235 ± 200 g/day), followed by whole milk (63 ± 128 g/day) and yoghurt (53 ± 66 g/day). Overall dairy food consumption (g/day) was inversely associated with BMI, % body fat and WC (all p < 0.05). Dairy protein and dairy calcium (g/day) were both inversely associated with all adiposity measures (all p < 0.05). Yoghurt consumption (g/day) was inversely associated with % body fat, abdominal fat, WC and HC (all p < 0.05), while reduced fat milk consumption was inversely associated with BMI, WC, HC and % body fat (all p < 0.05). Within a sample of obese adults, consumption of dairy products, dairy protein, and calcium was associated with more favourable body composition