A Legislation Review: Bill C-14 “Euthanasia or Assisted Dying”

This article is a policy analysis that covers the request for an amendment for the doctor assisted suicide law introduced as BillC-14 on June 16, 2016, exploring the considerations to further expand the bill to better meet individual’s rights regarding end of life decisions. However, the purpose of legislation which has been achieved in this bill presented both ethical infractions and creates restrictive requirements that explicitly exclude a specific population that suffers from degenerative diseases. Attempts to improve the restrictions and requirements for Bill C-14 are outlined and discussed

Non-uniform wordlength delay lines for FIR filters

When FIR filters are designed floating point arithmetic is generally used. However when implemented on hardware such as ASICs, fixed point arithmetic must be used to minimise cost and power requirements. Research to minimise hardware costs has mainly focused on the quantization effects of fixed point wordlengths for the coefficients, multipliers and adders of FIR filters, but with the actual data delays assigned a uniform wordlength and essentially not optimised. This paper proposes that the wordlengths of the delay line can be non-uniform with a minimal increase in quantization noise for parallel implementation of FIR filters where there are differences in the magnitudes of the coefficients. A non-uniform delay line allows hardware savings in terms of delay register wordlengths, delay signal wordlengths and multiplier wordlengths. Results for an FIR design are presented which demonstrate the hardware savingswhen using a non-uniform wordlength delay lin

Amplifier enhances ring-down spectroscopy

In recent years, investigators have adapted the principles of ringdown spectroscopy (see sidebar, facing page) to fiber optic configurations by placing high reflectors on each end of a fiber and observing the ringdown time of an injected pulse. But a major drawback is the difficulty of creating a low-loss, high-Q resonator in an optical fiber

Implicit amenity prices and the location of retirees in England and Wales

General equilibrium models in which compensation for local amenities occurs in both housing and labour markets have been widely used to generate implicit amenity prices and regional quality of life indices. An implication and prospective test of such models is that individuals who are outside the labour market have an incentive to locate in regions where amenities are capitalised into wages. In this paper we construct a measure of the extent of amenity capitalisation into wages for each county in England and Wales. We then test the multimarket amenity model by applying this measure to county-level data on the location of retirees. Our results provide strong support for the mode

Multiwavelength operation of erbium-doped fiber lasers by periodic filtering and phase modulation

This paper explains the principles behind multiwavelength operation of an erbium-doped fiber laser (EDFL) under the combined effect of cavity phase modulation and periodic wavelength filtering. A mathematical model is developed to simulate the behaviour of the multiwavelength EDFL, both in time and frequency domains. The effects of various parameters such as pump power, filter channel spacing, modulation index and frequency are observed and explained. An all-fiber EDFL was constructed, using a piezo-transducer-based phase modulator and a Sagnac loop periodic filter, to validate the theoretical results. The effects of pump power, modulation frequency and modulation index were monitored experimentally, justifying the theoretical explanation. The multiwavelength EDFL has several potential applications in fiber sensing due to its flexible all-fiber design

Hamiltonian theory of nonlinear waves in planetary rings

The derivation of a Hamiltonian field theory for nonlinear density waves in Saturn's rings is discussed. Starting with a Hamiltonian for a discrete system of gravitating streamlines, an averaged Hamiltonian is obtained by successive applications of Lie transforms. The transformation may be carried out to any desired order in q, where q is the nonlinearity parameter defined in the work of Shu, et al (1985) and Borderies et al (1985). Subsequent application of the Wentzel-Kramer-Brillouin Method approximation yields an asymptotic field Hamiltonian. Both the nonlinear dispersion relation and the wave action transport equation are easily derived from the corresponding Lagrangian by the standard variational principle

A selective control information detection scheme for OFDM receivers

In wireless communications, both control information and payload (user-data) are concurrently transmitted and required to be successfully recovered. This paper focuses on block-level detection, which is applicable for detecting transmitted control information, particularly when this information is selected or chosen from a finite set of information that are known at both transmitting and receiving devices. Using an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing architecture, this paper investigates and evaluates the performance of a time-domain decision criterion in comparison with a form of Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimation method. Unlike the ML method, the proposed time-domain detection technique requires no channel estimation as it uses the correlation (in the time-domain) that exists between the received and the transmitted selective information as a means of detection. In comparison with the ML method, results show that the proposed method offers improved detection performance, particularly when the control information consists of at least 16. However, the implementation of the proposed method requires a slightly increased number of mathematical computations