Include medical ethics in the Research Excellence Framework

The Research Excellence Framework of the Higher Education Funding Council for England is taking place in 2013, its three key elements being outputs (65% of the profile), impact (20%), and “quality of the research environment” (15%). Impact will be assessed using case studies that “may include any social, economic or cultural impact or benefit beyond academia that has taken place during the assessment period.”1 Medical ethics in the UK still does not have its own cognate assessment panel—for example, bioethics or applied ethics—unlike in, for example, Australia. Several researchers in medical ethics have reported to the Institute of Medical Ethics that during the internal preliminary stage of the Research Excellence Framework several medical schools have decided to include only research that entails empirical data gathering. Thus, conceptual papers and ethical analysis will be excluded. The arbitrary exclusion of reasoned discussion of medical ethics issues as a proper subject for medical research unless it is based on empirical data gathering is conceptually mistaken. “Empirical ethics” is, of course, a legitimate component of medical ethics research, but to act as though it is the only legitimate component suggests, at best, a partial understanding of the nature of ethics in general and medical ethics in particular. It also mistakenly places medicine firmly on only one side of the science/humanities “two cultures” divide instead of in its rightful place bridging the divide. Given the emphasis by the General Medical Council on medical ethics in properly preparing “tomorrow’s doctors,” we urge medical schools to find a way of using the upcoming Research Excellence Framework to highlight the expertise residing in their ethicist colleagues. We are confident that appropriate assessment will reveal work of high quality that can be shown to have social and cultural impact and benefit beyond academia, as required by the framework

Receipt for sale of Gabriel

Receipt for the sale of a boy named Gabriel, for William A. Burnside.https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/lantern-msu/1000/thumbnail.jp

Upper Bounds on Lepton-number Violating Processes

We consider four lepton-number violating (\lv) processes: (a) neutrinoless double-beta decay (0\nu\beta\beta), (b) Delta L = 2 tau decays, (c) Delta L = 2 rare meson decays and (d) nuclear muon-positron conversion. In the absence of exotic \lv interactions, the rates for these processes are determined by effective neutrino masses _{\ell_1\ell_2}, which can be related to the sum of light neutrino masses, the neutrino mass-squared differences, the neutrino mixing angles, a Dirac phase and two Majorana phases. We sample the experimentally allowed ranges of _{\ell_1\ell_2} based on neutrino oscillation experiments as well as cosmological observations, and obtain a stringent upper bound _{\ell_1\ell_2} \lsim 0.14 eV. We then calculate the allowed ranges for _{\ell_1\ell_2} from the experimental rates of direct searches for the above Delta L = 2 processes. Comparing our calculated rates with the currently or soon available data, we find that only the $0\nu\beta\beta$ experiment may be able to probe _{ee} with a sensitivity comparable to the current bound. Muon-positron conversion is next in sensitivity, while the limits of direct searches for the other Delta L = 2 processes are several orders of magnitude weaker than the current bounds on _{\ell_1\ell_2}. Any positive signal in those direct searches would indicate new contributions to the \lv interactions beyond those from three light Majorana neutrinos.Comment: 20 pages, revtex4, 2 figures (5 files), Version published in Physical Review

NASA Space applications of high-temperature superconductors

The application of superconducting technology in space has been limited by the requirement of cooling to near liquid helium temperatures. The only means of obtaining these temperatures has been with cryogenic fluids which severely limit mission lifetime. The development of materials with superconducting transition temperatures above 77 K has made superconducting technology more attractive and feasible for employment in aerospace systems. Here, potential applications of high temperature superconducting technology in cryocoolers, remote sensing, communications, and power systems are discussed