Getting There With Parents: interactional processes surrounding withdrawal of life-sustaining treatments in a London NICU

In the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), healthcare professionals regularly conclude that withdrawal of life-sustaining treatments would be in their patients’ best interests. Recently, the legal disputes between parents and healthcare professionals when the former disagree with the latter’s recommendation to withdraw lifesustaining treatments have attracted much attention. This thesis seeks to examine and evaluate lesser-known informal interactional processes taking place before such disagreement reach the court. To do so, I devised grounded normative theory, a research methodology combining the insights of empirical ethics and legal pluralism with grounded theory. Based on fieldwork I conducted in and around the NICU of a London paediatric hospital, I constructed a model of the determination and operationalisation of the best interests of NICU patients in that unit. This qualitative model, entitled Getting There With Parents, highlights two main processes: ‘Justifying intensive care’ and ‘Getting there with parents’. In the first, I show how a child’s best interests are first appreciated in terms of ‘medical best interests’ and only then modulated considering ‘wider best interests’, which includes a projection of the child’s future quality of life and the preferences of parents. In the second, I examine the process through which healthcare professionals seek to persuade parents to accept recommendations to withdraw life-sustaining treatments. I then turn to ethically evaluating the grounded normative model. On one hand, using the concept of legal chronotope, I demonstrate how intertwined understandings of time and space overly narrow the scope of the determination of best interests. On the other, I relate the doubts of healthcare professionals about parents’ capacity to assess best interests to cognitive biases and I argue that even if some strategies they deploy amount to manipulating parents, they might nonetheless sometimes be justified

New information from fish diets on the importance of glassy flying squid (Hyaloteuthis pelagica) (Teuthoidea: Ommastrephidae) in the epipelagic cephalopod community of the tropical Atlantic Ocean

Squids of the family Ommastrephidae are a vital part of marine food webs and support major fisheries around the world. They are widely distributed in the open ocean, where they are among the most abundant in number and biomass of nektonic epipelagic organisms. In turn, seven of the 11 genera of this family (Dosidicus, Illex, Martialia, Nototodarus, Ommastrephes, Sthenoteuthis, and Todarodes) are heavily preyed upon by top marine predators, i.e., birds, mammals, and fish, and currently support fisheries in both neritic and oceanic waters (Roper and Sweeney, 1984; Rodhouse, 1997). Their commercial importance has made the large ommastrephids the target of many scientific investigations and their biology is consequently reasonably well-known (Nigmatullin et al., 2001; Zuyev et al., 2002; Bower and Ichii, 2005). In contrast, much less information is available on the biology and ecological role of the smaller, unexploited species of ommastrephids (e.g., Eucleoteuthis, Hyaloteuthis, Ornithoteuthis, and Todaropsis)

VANET Applications: Hot Use Cases

Current challenges of car manufacturers are to make roads safe, to achieve free flowing traffic with few congestions, and to reduce pollution by an effective fuel use. To reach these goals, many improvements are performed in-car, but more and more approaches rely on connected cars with communication capabilities between cars, with an infrastructure, or with IoT devices. Monitoring and coordinating vehicles allow then to compute intelligent ways of transportation. Connected cars have introduced a new way of thinking cars - not only as a mean for a driver to go from A to B, but as smart cars - a user extension like the smartphone today. In this report, we introduce concepts and specific vocabulary in order to classify current innovations or ideas on the emerging topic of smart car. We present a graphical categorization showing this evolution in function of the societal evolution. Different perspectives are adopted: a vehicle-centric view, a vehicle-network view, and a user-centric view; described by simple and complex use-cases and illustrated by a list of emerging and current projects from the academic and industrial worlds. We identified an empty space in innovation between the user and his car: paradoxically even if they are both in interaction, they are separated through different application uses. Future challenge is to interlace social concerns of the user within an intelligent and efficient driving

Real scenario and simulations on GLOSA traffic light system for reduced CO2 emissions, waiting time and travel time

Cooperative ITS is enabling vehicles to communicate with the infrastructure to provide improvements in traffic control. A promising approach consists in anticipating the road profile and the upcoming dynamic events like traffic lights. This topic has been addressed in the French public project Co-Drive through functions developed by Valeo named Green Light Optimal Speed Advisor (GLOSA). The system advises the optimal speed to pass the next traffic light without stopping. This paper presents results of its performance in different scenarios through simulations and real driving measurements. A scaling is done in an urban area, with different penetration rates in vehicle and infrastructure equipment for vehicular communication. Our simulation results indicate that GLOSA can reduce CO2 emissions, waiting time and travel time, both in experimental conditions and in real traffic conditions.Comment: in 22nd ITS World Congress, Oct 2015, Bordeaux, France. 201

Highly chemoselective formation of aldehyde enamines under very mild reaction conditions

Abstract: Although ketone enamines are widely used in organic synthesis, aldehyde enamines are rarely employed due to the limitations of their preparation using known methods (need for acid or base, excess of amine, and/or elevated temperature). We have successfully developed rapid and particularly mild condensation conditions (1 h, 0 °C, 1.2 equiv of amine) leading to di- and trisubstituted enamines with excellent conversion (84−100%). Remarkably high chemoselectivity was observed with complete discrimination between aldehyde and ketone, among other functional groups positively tested

Addition of tethered nonaromatic carbon nucleophiles to chemoselectively activated amides

Abstract: In an effort to develop new ways of synthesizing polycyclic alkaloids, we successfully added silyl enol ethers, allylsilanes, and enamines to iminium ions generated from amides. Because of their higher oxidation state, such iminiums show a yet unexploited advantage of potential double cyclizations over standard Mannich monocyclizations. We report herein the first example of tethered nonaromatic carbon nucleophiles adding to activated amides for the generation of enaminals of various ring sizes, with endo- or exo-cyclic nitrogen

Bycatch of billfishes by the European tuna purse-seine fishery in the Atlantic Ocean

Billfishes are a component of offshore ecosystems; thus it is important to quantify the impact of the tuna fishery on these species in the world’s ocean. The aim of this study was to assess the bycatch of billfishes generated by the tropical tuna purse-seine fishery in the eastern Atlantic Ocean. Information on bycatch was collected by observers at sea during the European Union Bigeye Program. With a total of 62 observers’ trips, conducted on Spanish and French vessels between June 1997 and May 1999, this project is the biggest observer program ever carried out in the European tuna purse-seine fishery. This study showed that billfish bycatch by the purse seiners is very low (less than 0.021% of the total tuna catches and less than 10% of the total billfish catches currently reported). A Monte Carlo simulation was performed to account for some uncertainties in the fishing strategies of purse seiners operating in this ocean. One of the findings of this study indicated that the temporary moratorium on fishing with FADs (fish aggregating devices), adopted by the European purse-seine fishery in the eastern Atlantic Ocean, produced a decrease in incidental catches of marlins from 600–700 metric tons (t) to less than 300 t. In contrast, this trend was reversed for sailfishes, for which the bycatch increased from 25 t to 45 t. The difficulty of defining indices that express the conservation status in marine fishes and that gauge key ecosystem parameters and the need to promote an ecosystem approach for large-pelagic-resource management which takes into account biologic and socioeconomic criteria are briefly discussed

Multi-criteria self-organization: Example of motor-dependent phonetic representation for a multi-modal robot

Colloque avec actes et comité de lecture. internationale.International audienceThis paper presents a computational self-organizing model of multi-modal information, inspired from cortical maps. It shows how the organization in a map can be influenced by the same process occurring in other maps. We illustrate this approach on a phonetic - motor association, that shows that the organization of words can integrate motor constraints, as observed in humans

Impact de la formation à l’enseignement et de l’encadrement sur le sentiment d’autoefficacité des nouveaux enseignants de cégep

This research assessed the effects of teacher training and supervision on new college teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs. A questionnaire, including a measurement scale of self-efficacy, was completed twice by 102 novice teachers. Analysis of the results leads to the conclusion that, if both pre-service and in-service trainings have some impact, supervision increases the most selfefficacy beliefs, more specifically regarding the teaching strategies, student engagement, and classroom management components.Keywords: Teacher training, educational support, self-efficacy belief, collegeCette recherche mesure l’impact de la formation à l’enseignement et de l’encadrement pédagogique sur le sentiment d’autoefficacité des nouveaux enseignants de cégep. Un questionnaire, incluant une échelle de mesure de ce sentiment, a été complété à deux reprises par 102 novices. L’analyse des résultats permet de conclure que si la formation créditée avant l’embauche et la formation non créditée après l’embauche ont un certain impact, c’est l’encadrement offert qui influence le plus le sentiment d’autoefficacité à l’égard des stratégies d’enseignement, de l’engagement des étudiants et de la gestion de classe.Mots-clés : Formation à l’enseignement, encadrement pédagogique, sentiment d’autoefficacité, cégep