Religious perspectives on human suffering: Implications for medicine and bioethics

The prevention and relief of suffering has long been a core medical concern. But while this is a laudable goal, some question whether medicine can, or should, aim for a world without pain, sadness, anxiety, despair or uncertainty. To explore these issues, we invited experts from six of the world’s major faith traditions to address the following question. Is there value in suffering? And is something lost in the prevention and/or relief of suffering? While each of the perspectives provided maintains that suffering should be alleviated and that medicine’s proper role is to prevent and relieve suffering by ethical means, it is also apparent that questions regarding the meaning and value of suffering are beyond the realm of medicine. These perspectives suggest that medicine and bioethics has much to gain from respectful consideration of religious discourse surrounding suffering. Keywords Suffering; religion; medicine; bioethic

Religious perspectives on human suffering: Implications for medicine and bioethics

The prevention and relief of suffering has long been a core medical concern. But while this is a laudable goal, some question whether medicine can, or should, aim for a world without pain, sadness, anxiety, despair or uncertainty. To explore these issues, we invited experts from six of the world’s major faith traditions to address the following question. Is there value in suffering? And is something lost in the prevention and/or relief of suffering? While each of the perspectives provided maintains that suffering should be alleviated and that medicine’s proper role is to prevent and relieve suffering by ethical means, it is also apparent that questions regarding the meaning and value of suffering are beyond the realm of medicine. These perspectives suggest that medicine and bioethics has much to gain from respectful consideration of religious discourse surrounding suffering. Keywords Suffering; religion; medicine; bioethic

Corporate financing decisions: UK survey evidence

Despite theoretical developments in recent years, our understanding of corporate capital structure remains incomplete. Prior empirical research has been dominated by archival regression studies which are limited in their ability to fully reflect the diversity found in practice. The present paper reports on a comprehensive survey of corporate financing decision-making in UK listed companies. A key finding is that firms are heterogeneous in their capital structure policies. About half of the firms seek to maintain a target debt level, consistent with trade-off theory, but 60 per cent claim to follow a financing hierarchy, consistent with pecking order theory. These two theories are not viewed by respondents as either mutually exclusive or exhaustive. Many of the theoretical determinants of debt levels are widely accepted by respondents, in particular the importance of interest tax shield, financial distress, agency costs and also, at least implicitly, information asymmetry. Results also indicate that cross-country institutional differences have a significant impact on financial decisions

Tunneling and the Spectrum of the Potts Model

The three-dimensional, three-state Potts model is studied as a paradigm for high temperature quantum chromodynamics. In a high statistics numerical simulation using a Swendson-Wang algorithm, we study cubic lattices of dimension as large as $64^3$ and measure correlation functions on long lattices of dimension $20^2\times 120$ and $30^2\times 120$. These correlations are controlled by the spectrum of the transfer matrix. This spectrum is studied in the vicinity of the phase transition. The analysis classifies the spectral levels according to an underlying $S_3$ symmetry. Near the phase transition the spectrum agrees nicely with a simple four-component hamiltonian model. In the context of this model, we find that low temperature ordered-ordered interfaces nearly always involve a disordered phase intermediate. We present a new spectral method for determining the surface tension between phases.Comment: 26 pages plus 13 Postscript figures (Axis versions also provided), UU-HEP-92/

Micro-level economic factors and incentives in Children's energy balance related behaviours findings from the ENERGY European cross-section questionnaire survey

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>To date, most research on obesogenic environments facing school children has focused on physical and socio-cultural environments. The role of economic factors has been investigated to a much lesser extent. Our objective was to explore the association of micro-level economic factors and incentives with sports activities and intake of soft drinks and fruit juice in 10-12 year-old school children across Europe, and to explore price sensitivity in children’s soft drink consumption and correlates of this price sensitivity.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Data for the study originate from a cross-sectional survey undertaken in seven European countries (Belgium, Greece, Hungary, Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia and Spain) in 2010 among 10-12 year-old school children and their parents. In total, 7234 child questionnaires and 6002 parent questionnaires were completed. The child questionnaire included questions addressing self-reported weekly intake of soft drinks and fruit juices and time spent on sports activities, perception of parental support for sports activities, use of pocket money for soft drinks and perceived price responsiveness. Parent questionnaires included questions addressing the role of budget and price considerations in decisions regarding children’s sports activities, soft drink consumption, home practices and rules and socio-demographic background variables. Data were analysed using multiple linear regression and discrete-choice (ordered probit) modelling.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Economic factors were found to be associated with children’s sports participation and sugary drink consumption, explaining 27% of the variation in time for sports activities, and 27% and 12% of the variation in the children’s soft drink and juice consumption, respectively. Parents’ financial support was found to be an important correlate (Beta =0.419) of children’s sports activities. Children’s pocket money was a strong correlate (Beta =21.034) of soft drink consumption. The majority of the responding children reported to expect that significantly higher prices of soft drinks would lead them to buy less soft drinks with their own pocket money, but a majority of parents did not expect higher soft drink prices to reduce their children’s soft drink consumption.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We conclude that economic factors, especially parents’ financial support and amount of pocket money, appear to be of importance for children’s sports participation and soft drink consumption, respectively.</p

BRG1 and BRM function antagonistically with c-MYC in adult cardiomyocytes to regulate conduction and contractility

Rationale The contractile dysfunction that underlies heart failure involves perturbations in multiple biological processes ranging from metabolism to electrophysiology. Yet the epigenetic mechanisms that are altered in this disease state have not been elucidated. SWI/SNF chromatin-remodeling complexes are plausible candidates based on mouse knockout studies demonstrating a combined requirement for the BRG1 and BRM catalytic subunits in adult cardiomyocytes. Brg1/Brm double mutants exhibit metabolic and mitochondrial defects and are not viable although their cause of death has not been ascertained. Objective To determine the cause of death of Brg1/Brm double-mutant mice, to test the hypothesis that BRG1 and BRM are required for cardiac contractility, and to identify relevant downstream target genes. Methods and results A tamoxifen-inducible gene-targeting strategy utilizing αMHC-Cre-ERT was implemented to delete both SWI/SNF catalytic subunits in adult cardiomyocytes. Brg1/Brm double-mutant mice were monitored by echocardiography and electrocardiography, and they underwent rapidly progressive ventricular dysfunction including conduction defects and arrhythmias that culminated in heart failure and death within 3 weeks. Mechanistically, BRG1/BRM repressed c-Myc expression, and enforced expression of a DOX-inducible c-MYC trangene in mouse cardiomyocytes phenocopied the ventricular conduction defects observed in Brg1/Brm double mutants. BRG1/BRM and c-MYC had opposite effects on the expression of cardiac conduction genes, and the directionality was consistent with their respective loss- and gain-of-function phenotypes. To support the clinical relevance of this mechanism, BRG1/BRM occupancy was diminished at the same target genes in human heart failure cases compared to controls, and this correlated with increased c-MYC expression and decreased CX43 and SCN5A expression. Conclusion BRG1/BRM and c-MYC have an antagonistic relationship regulating the expression of cardiac conduction genes that maintain contractility, which is reminiscent of their antagonistic roles as a tumor suppressor and oncogene in cancer

Mothers behaving badly: chaotic hedonism and the crisis of neoliberal social reproduction

This article focuses on the significance of the plethora of representations of mothers ‘behaving badly’ in contemporary anglophone media texts, including the films Bad Moms, Fun Mom Dinner and Bad Mom’s Christmas, the book and online cartoons Hurrah for Gin and the recent TV comedy dramas Motherland, The Let Down and Catastrophe. All these media texts include representations of, first, mothers in the midst of highly chaotic everyday spaces where any smooth routine of domesticity is conspicuous by its absence; and second, mothers behaving hedonistically, usually through drinking and partying, behaviour that is more conventionally associated with men or women without children. After identifying the social type of the mother behaving badly (MBB), the article locates and analyses it in relation to several different social and cultural contexts. These contexts are: a neoliberal crisis in social reproduction marked by inequality and overwork; the continual if contested role of women as ‘foundation parents’; and the negotiation of longer-term discourses of female hedonism. The title gestures towards a popular British sitcom of the 1990s, Men Behaving Badly, which popularized the idea of the ‘new lad’; and this article suggests that the new lad’s counterpart, the ladette, is mutating into the mother behaving badly, or the ‘lad mom’. Asking what work this figure does now, in a later neoliberal context, it argues that the mother behaving badly is simultaneously indicative of a widening and liberating range of maternal subject positions and symptomatic of a profound contemporary crisis in social reproduction. By focusing on the classed and racialised dynamics of the MBB – by examining who exactly is permitted to be hedonistic, and how – and by considering the MBB’s limited and partial imagining of progressive social change, the article concludes by emphasizing the urgency of creating more connections between such discourses and ‘parents behaving politically’

Can filesharers be triggered by economic incentives? Results of an experiment

Illegal filesharing on the internet leads to considerable financial losses for artists and copyright owners as well as producers and sellers of music. Thus far, measures to contain this phenomenon have been rather restrictive. However, there are still a considerable number of illegal systems, and users are able to decide quite freely between legal and illegal downloads because the latter are still difficult to sanction. Recent economic approaches account for the improved bargaining position of users. They are based on the idea of revenue-splitting between professional sellers and peers. In order to test such an innovative business model, the study reported in this article carried out an experiment with 100 undergraduate students, forming five small peer-to-peer networks.The networks were confronted with different economic conditions.The results indicate that even experienced filesharers hold favourable attitudes towards revenue-splitting.They seem to be willing to adjust their behaviour to different economic conditions

Convection in colloidal suspensions with particle-concentration-dependent viscosity

The onset of thermal convection in a horizontal layer of a colloidal suspension is investigated in terms of a continuum model for binary-fluid mixtures where the viscosity depends on the local concentration of colloidal particles. With an increasing difference between the viscosity at the warmer and the colder boundary the threshold of convection is reduced in the range of positive values of the separation ratio psi with the onset of stationary convection as well as in the range of negative values of psi with an oscillatory Hopf bifurcation. Additionally the convection rolls are shifted downwards with respect to the center of the horizontal layer for stationary convection (psi>0) and upwards for the Hopf bifurcation (psi<0).Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, submitted to European Physical Journal