An Ethical Analysis of Contemporary Healthcare Practices and Issues

The purpose of this analysis is to examine specific segments of healthcare policy and practice, applying various ethical perspectives. We examine the economic and political influences that surround ethical behavior in health services, as well as how practitioners, patients, and families respond and act as a result of such influences. We then delve into the fundamental principles that guide ethical behavior by medical practitioners, including the Hippocratic Oath and vows of medical professionalism. Further, we analyze disparities in healthcare provisions based on gender, race, and ethnicity. Ethical theory is weaved into each of these sections, as the philosophical and ethical writings of prominent scholars illuminate how the conditions of contemporary healthcare administration are affected by the injustices and political influences that pervade the entire health services industry

Nuclear effects on J/{\psi} production in proton-nucleus collisions

The study of nuclear effects for J/{\psi} production in proton-nucleus collisions is crucial for a correct interpretation of the J/{\psi} suppression patterns experimentally observed in heavy-ion collisions. By means of three representative sets of nuclear parton distribution, the energy loss effect in the initial state and the nuclear absorption effect in the final state are taken into account in the uniform framework of the Glauber model. A leading order phenomenological analysis is performed on J/{\psi} production cross-section ratios RW/Be(xF) for the E866 experimental data. The J/{\psi} suppression is investigated quantitatively due to the different nuclear effects. It is shown that the energy loss effect with resulting in the suppression on RW/Be(xF) is more important than the nuclear effects on parton distributions in high xF region. The E866 data in the small xF keep out the nuclear gluon distribution with a large anti-shadowing effect. However, the new HERA-B measurement is not in support of the anti-shadowing effect in the nuclear gluon distribution. It is found that the J/{\psi}-nucleon inelastic cross section {\sigma} J/{\psi} abs depends on the kinematical variable xF, and increases as xF in the region xF > 0.2. 1 Introductio

Channel-Coupling Effects in High-Energy Hadron Collisions

The Two-Gluon Model of the Pomeron predicts strongly size-dependent high-energy hadron cross sections. Yet experimental cross sections for radially excited mesons appear surprisingly close in value. The strong coupling of these mesons in hadron collisions also predicted by the model permits a qualitative understanding of this puzzling behavior in terms of eigenmode propagation with a common eigen-$\sigma$. A detailed semiempirical coupled-channel model of the Pomeron is constructed to elucidate this and other features of high-energy hadron cross sections.Comment: 13 pages, latex, no figure

Phase Stability Effects on Hydrogen Embrittlement Resistance in Martensite–Reverted Austenite Steels

Earlier studies have shown that interlath austenite in martensitic steels can enhance hydrogen embrittlement (HE) resistance. However, the improvements were limited due to microcrack nucleation and growth. A novel microstructural design approach is investigated, based on enhancing austenite stability to reduce crack nucleation and growth. Our findings from mechanical tests, X-ray diffraction, and scanning electron microscopy reveal that this strategy is successful. However, the improvements are limited due to intrinsic microstructural heterogeneity effects

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies in East Asian-ancestry populations identifies four new loci for body mass index

Recent genetic association studies have identified 55 genetic loci associated with obesity or body mass index (BMI). The vast majority, 51 loci, however, were identified in European-ancestry populations. We conducted a meta-analysis of associations between BMI and ∼2.5 million genotyped or imputed single nucleotide polymorphisms among 86 757 individuals of Asian ancestry, followed by in silico and de novo replication among 7488–47 352 additional Asian-ancestry individuals. We identified four novel BMI-associated loci near the KCNQ1 (rs2237892, P = 9.29 × 10−13), ALDH2/MYL2 (rs671, P = 3.40 × 10−11; rs12229654, P = 4.56 × 10−9), ITIH4 (rs2535633, P = 1.77 × 10−10) and NT5C2 (rs11191580, P = 3.83 × 10−8) genes. The association of BMI with rs2237892, rs671 and rs12229654 was significantly stronger among men than among women. Of the 51 BMI-associated loci initially identified in European-ancestry populations, we confirmed eight loci at the genome-wide significance level (P < 5.0 × 10−8) and an additional 14 at P < 1.0 × 10−3 with the same direction of effect as reported previously. Findings from this analysis expand our knowledge of the genetic basis of obesity