Representations of palliative care, euthanasia and assisted dying within advocacy declarations

It is well known that there are disagreements between the proponents of palliative care and of euthanasia or assisted dying, often with little common ground,shaping the end of life discourse internationally. Advocacy documents or ‘declarations’constitute a significant feature of this discourse. The aim of this study was to explore the content of such declarations and to focus on what they can tell us about palliative care and assisted dying and their dispositions towards one another. 104 declarations were identified and included in the study, covering the period 1974 to 2017. These declarations were analysed following the principles of thematic content analysis. We classified them based on their primary purpose: those with the goal of advocating for palliative care services, education and research were grouped under ‘palliative care declarations’; those with the primary objective of advocating for or against euthanasia/assisted dying were classified as “euthanasia/assisted dying declarations”. Our analysis revealed that the content of the declarations could be broadly categorised into three dimensions: framing, claiming and demanding. We demonstrate that these declarations reveal a struggle over the construction of meanings relating to palliative care and assisted dying and constitute a valuable resource for the analysis of an unfolding debate

Arctic Ocean outflow shelves in the changing Arctic: A review and perspectives

Published version. Source at http://doi.org/10.1016/j.pocean.2015.08.007. License in accordance with the journal's policy - CC-BY-NC-ND.Over the past decade or so, international research efforts, many of which were part of the International Polar Year, have accrued our understanding of the Arctic outflow shelves. The Arctic outflow shelves, namely the East Greenland Shelf (EGS) and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (CAA), serve as conduits through which Arctic sea ice and waters and their properties are exported to the North Atlantic. These shelves play an important role in thermohaline circulation and global circulation patterns, while being influenced by basin-scale and regional changes taking place in the Arctic. Here, we synthesize the current knowledge on key forcings of primary production and ecosystem processes on the outflow shelves, as they influence their structure and functionalities and, consequently their role in Arctic Ocean productivity and global biogeochemical cycles. For the CAA, a fresh outlook on interannual and decadal physical and biological time-series reveals recent changes in productivity patterns, while an extensive analysis of sea ice conditions over the past 33 years (1980–2012) demonstrates significant declines in multi-year ice and a redistribution of ice types. For the EGS, our analysis shows that sea ice export strongly contributes to structuring spatially diverse productivity regimes. Despite the large heterogeneity in physical and biological processes within and between the outflow shelves, a conceptual model of productivity regimes is proposed, helping identify general productivity patterns and key forcings. The different productivity regimes are expected to respond differently to current and future Arctic change, providing a useful basis upon which to develop predictive scenarios of future productivity states. Current primary production estimates for both outflow shelves very likely underestimate their contribution to total Arctic production

Integrated Radiation Transport and Nuclear Fuel Performance for Assembly-Level Simulations

The Advanced Multi-Physics (AMP) Nuclear Fuel Performance code (AMPFuel) is focused on predicting the temperature and strain within a nuclear fuel assembly to evaluate the performance and safety of existing and advanced nuclear fuel bundles within existing and advanced nuclear reactors. AMPFuel was extended to include an integrated nuclear fuel assembly capability for (one-way) coupled radiation transport and nuclear fuel assembly thermo-mechanics. This capability is the initial step toward incorporating an improved predictive nuclear fuel assembly modeling capability to accurately account for source-terms and boundary conditions of traditional (single-pin) nuclear fuel performance simulation, such as the neutron flux distribution, coolant conditions, and assembly mechanical stresses. A novel scheme is introduced for transferring the power distribution from the Scale/Denovo (Denovo) radiation transport code (structured, Cartesian mesh with smeared materials within each cell) to AMPFuel (unstructured, hexagonal mesh with a single material within each cell), allowing the use of a relatively coarse spatial mesh (10 million elements) for the radiation transport and a fine spatial mesh (3.3 billion elements) for thermo-mechanics with very little loss of accuracy. In addition, a new nuclear fuel-specific preconditioner was developed to account for the high aspect ratio of each fuel pin (12 feet axially, but 1 4 inches in diameter) with many individual fuel regions (pellets). With this novel capability, AMPFuel was used to model an entire 17 17 pressurized water reactor fuel assembly with many of the features resolved in three dimensions (for thermo-mechanics and/or neutronics), including the fuel, gap, and cladding of each of the 264 fuel pins; the 25 guide tubes; the top and bottom structural regions; and the upper and lower (neutron) reflector regions. The final, full assembly calculation was executed on Jaguar using 40,000 cores in under 10 hours to model over 162 billion degrees of freedom for 10 loading steps. The single radiation transport calculation required about 50% of the time required to solve the thermo-mechanics with a single loading step, which demonstrates that it is feasible to incorporate, in a single code, a high-fidelity radiation transport capability with a high-fidelity nuclear fuel thermo-mechanics capability and anticipate acceptable computational requirements. The results of the full assembly simulation clearly show the axial, radial, and azimuthal variation of the neutron flux, power, temperature, and deformation of the assembly, highlighting behavior that is neglected in traditional axisymmetric fuel performance codes that do not account for assembly features, such as guide tubes and control rods

Improvements in ECF bleaching: use of activated oxygen species and xylanase

"March 1995.""Submitted to TAPPI journal.

Using genomic sequence information to increase conservation and sustainable use of crop diversity and benefit-sharing

This article describes how CGIAR centers and partners are using genomic sequence information to promote the conservation and sustainable use of crop genetic diversity, and to generate and share benefits derived from those uses. The article highlights combined institutional, and benefit-sharing-related challenges that need to be addressed to support expanded use of digital sequence information in agricultural research and developmen

Exile Vol. XXIX No. 1

Once by Kate Silliman 1 Mute by Robert Youngblood 1 Photo by Walter Gunn 2 Cactus Man by Bruce Pedretti 3 From Years On Nauset Beach by 4 Lazy Days of The Matter That Fills You With Guild (And Ecstacy) by Eric Stevenson 5 Tennessee Friday by Becky Hinshaw 6 Photo by Jenny Gardner 7 Street Opera by Bill Hayes 7 Antonia by Ruth Wick 8 Photo by Sheila Waters 9 Tunnel Vision by Jeff Reynold 10 Mrs. Matthews by Kate Reynolds 10 A White Mountain by Ruth Wick 11 The Last Days Of Oliver Descantes by Jeff Hamilton 12-23 Photo by Christopher Hooper 24 Baptism by Becky Hinshaw 25 Sunday Afternoon by August West 26 The Joke\u27s On by Christopher B. Broughm 26 Photo by Mark Baganz 27 Blues by Dave Rheingold 28 Speaking To You Through Derision by Jeff Hamilton 29 Photo by Jenny Gardner 30 Northern Lights by Adrienne Wehr 31 Tripping On The Yawn Of Tomorrow by Kate Reynolds 32 Cleo by Kim Kiefer 33 Kuei Mei by Amy Pence 34 Drawing by Peter Brooke 35 Cover Drawing by Peter Brooke -title pag

Feasibility of image-guided radiotherapy based on helical tomotherapy to reduce contralateral parotid dose in head and neck cancer

Background To evaluate the feasibility of image-guided radiotherapy based on helical Tomotherapy to spare the contralateral parotid gland in head and neck cancer patients with unilateral or no neck node metastases. Methods A retrospective review of 52 patients undergoing radiotherapy for head and neck cancers with image guidance based on daily megavoltage CT imaging with helical tomotherapy was performed. Results Mean contralateral parotid dose and the volume of the contralateral parotid receiving 40 Gy or more were compared between radiotherapy plans with significant constraint (SC) of less than 20 Gy on parotid dose (23 patients) and the conventional constraint (CC) of 26 Gy (29 patients). All patients had PTV coverage of at least 95% to the contralateral elective neck nodes. Mean contralateral parotid dose was, respectively, 14.1 Gy and 24.7 Gy for the SC and CC plans (p < 0.0001). The volume of contralateral parotid receiving 40 Gy or more was respectively 5.3% and 18.2% (p < 0.0001) Conclusion Tomotherapy for head and neck cancer minimized radiotherapy dose to the contralateral parotid gland in patients undergoing elective node irradiation without sacrificing target coverage

Genetic insights into the introduction history of black rats into the eastern Indian Ocean

Islands can be powerful demonstrations of how destructive invasive species can be on endemic faunas and insular ecologies. Oceanic islands in the eastern Indian Ocean have suffered dramatically from the impact of one of the world’s most destructive invasive species, the black rat, causing the loss of endemic terrestrial mammals and ongoing threats to ground-nesting birds. We use molecular genetic methods on both ancient and modern samples to establish the origins and minimum invasion frequencies of black rats on Christmas Island and the Cocos-Keeling Islands. We find that each island group had multiple incursions of black rats from diverse geographic and phylogenetic sources. Furthermore, contemporary black rat populations on these islands are highly admixed to the point of potentially obscuring their geographic sources. These hybridisation events between black rat taxa also pose potential dangers to human populations on the islands from novel disease risks. Threats of ongoing introductions from yet additional geographic sources is highlighted by genetic identifications of black rats found on ships, which provides insight into how recent ship-borne human smuggling activity to Christmas Island can negatively impact its endemic species