Research on clinical ethics and consultation. Introduction to the theme

Clinical ethics consultation has developed from local pioneer projects into a field of growing interest among both clinicians and ethicists. What is needed are more systematic studies on the ethical challenges faced in clinical practice and problem solving through ethics consultation from interdisciplinary perspectives. The Thematic Issue covers a range of topics and includes five recent studies from various European countries and the USA, focusing on issues such as the ethical difficulties of end of life decisions, experiences with newly developed or well established ethics consultation services, and the expectations of physicians in various clinical fields who are still unfamiliar with clinical ethics consultation. The papers included illustrate the interface between different socio-cultural contexts and their ways of dealing with clinical ethics consultation. They deepen the dialogue on clinical ethics consultation that has emerged at the European and International leve

An empirical examination of traditional equity valuation models : the case of the Athens stock exchange

Early theoretical work on equity valuation suggests that equity prices are determined by variables such as dividends and growth in dividends. This paper employs panel data methodology and equity prices from Athens Stock Exchange to empirically investigate the performance of the traditional models of equity valuation.peer-reviewe

Assessment of single extraction methods for the prediction of bioavailability of metals to Vigna unguiculata l (beans) grown on crude oil contaminated soil

The bioavailability of toxic metals in the soils is increasingly an important issue as soil always becomes  contaminated from various anthropogenic activities. Total concentrations of metals in the soils are generally  poor indicators of metal toxicity because they exit in different solution and solid phase forms that can differ in  terms of their bioavailability. As such, regulators are looking at bioavailability as an indicator of risk  associated with metal contamination in soils. Since the bioavailability of metals, their biological uptake and  eco-toxicological effect on soil biota can be understood better in terms of their biogeochemical forms, the  study assessed the effect of crude oil applied at rates, 0, 2, 5, and 10% on the fractional chemical forms and  availability of some metals in soils from Usen, Edo State, with no known crude oil contamination and soil from  a crude oil spill site in Ubeji, Delta State, Nigeria, using several techniques as a basis for predicting metal uptake by plants. Bean seeds were grown in the contaminated soil for 21days and the metal concentrations in the seedlings were compared with the total soil metal concentrations, bioavailable metal concentrations and EDTA-extractable metal concentrations.Keywords: bioavailability, chemical forms, crude oil-contaminated soil, EDTA, metal concentrations

Visual and Analytic Strategies in Geometry

We argue that there is an increasing reliance on analytic strategies compared to visuo-spatial strategies, which is related to geometry expertise and not on individual differences in cognitive style. A Visual/Analytic Strategy Test (VAST) was developed to investigate the use of visuo-spatial and analytic strategies in geometry in 30 mathematics teachers and 134 11th grade students. Students’ performance in the VAST was also compared to performance in tests of visuo-spatial abilities, of abstract reasoning, and of geometrical knowledge. The results showed high performance of all the participants in the VAST items that could be solved by relying on visuo-spatial strategies. However, only the math teachers showed high performance in the VAST items that required the application of analytic geometrical strategies. There were high correlations between the students’ performance in the tests of visuo-spatial and abstract reasoning abilities and the VAST Analytic Strategies scale, but the contribution of these tests to the VAST analytic performance became statistically insignificant when geometrical knowledge was used as a mediating factor. The implications of this work for the learning and assessment of geometrical knowledge are discussed.

Literary Myths in Mixed Reality

It is well-known that the Decadent movement in European literature (fin de siècle) depends on the narrative of the antiquity, as it is revealed from the discoveries of archeology in the second half of the nineteenth century. Amid the ruins of the past authors, painters and poets re-conceptualize time and history through a modernist vision based on an imaginary reconfiguration of the antiquity. In this context, the myth of a city (Pompeii) or of a woman (Salomé) offer examples that would illustrate in a great variety the synergy of a multi-temporal and multi-cultural memory of the myth. In this paper we identify a “content-based” shortcoming of modern Mixed Reality (MR) intangible and tangible digital heritage storytelling applications for digital humanities. It is an important problem as the very nature of these applications has often been identified with either misguided storytelling, or non-compelling, non-engaging narratives, except the initial captivating moments due to the immersive 3D visual simulation. We propose a new concept that forthcoming MR applications can draw from: “Literature-based MR Presence.” Based on modern literature excerpts associated with the real heritage sites, digital narratives can achieve new depths of Presence (phenomenon of behaving and feeling, as if we are in the virtual/augmented world created by computerized displays). They would evoke deeper sensations if their dramaturgical plots were based on literary texts associated with the heritage sites, from users, as similar to those often associated with cognitive presence, e.g., when someone is feeling of being transported in an alternate reality when simply reading a compelling novel or poem. We examine modern MR simulations and serious games for digital heritage and propose this conceptual framework to study them under this new concept, in order to achieve heightened feeling of Presence in the virtual heritage simulations, based on recent novel h/w advances. Two cases of a tangible historical place (Pompeii) and an intangible character (Salome) are identified as cultural heritage items, with associated reconstruction examples via Mixed Reality simulations and corresponding early modern literary works

Numerical strategies for recursive least squares solutions to the matrix equation AX = B

The recursive solution to the Procrustes problem -with or without constraints- is thoroughly investigated. Given known matrices A and B, the proposed solution minimizes the square of the Frobenius norm of the difference AX−B when rows or columns are added to A and B. The proposed method is based on efficient strategies which reduce the computational cost by utilizing previous computations when new data are acquired. This is particularly useful in the iterative solution of an unbalanced orthogonal Procrustes problem. The results show that the computational efficiency of the proposed recursive algorithms is more significant when the dimensions of the matrices are large. This demonstrates the usefulness of the proposed algorithms in the presence of high-dimensional data sets. The practicality of the new method is demonstrated through an application in machine learning, namely feature extraction for image processing