16,073 research outputs found
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
Unusual magnetoresistance in a topological insulator with a single ferromagnetic barrier
Tunneling surface current through a thin ferromagnetic barrier in a
three-dimensional topological insulator is shown to possess an extraordinary
response to the orientation of barrier magnetization. In contrast to
conventional magnetoresistance devices that are sensitive to the relative
alignment of two magnetic layers, a drastic change in the transmission current
is achieved by a single layer when its magnetization rotates by 90 degrees.
Numerical estimations predict a giant magnetoresistance as large as 800 % at
room temperature and the proximate exchange interaction of 40 meV in the
barrier. When coupled with electrical control of magnetization direction, this
phenomenon may be used to enhance the gating function with potentially sharp
turn-on/off for low power applications
Correlations and fluctuations of a confined electron gas
The grand potential and the response of a phase-coherent confined noninteracting electron gas depend
sensitively on chemical potential or external parameter . We compute
their autocorrelation as a function of , and temperature. The result
is related to the short-time dynamics of the corresponding classical system,
implying in general the absence of a universal regime. Chaotic, diffusive and
integrable motions are investigated, and illustrated numerically. The
autocorrelation of the persistent current of a disordered mesoscopic ring is
also computed.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure, to appear in Phys. Rev.
Improving Whole Slide Segmentation Through Visual Context - A Systematic Study
While challenging, the dense segmentation of histology images is a necessary
first step to assess changes in tissue architecture and cellular morphology.
Although specific convolutional neural network architectures have been applied
with great success to the problem, few effectively incorporate visual context
information from multiple scales. With this paper, we present a systematic
comparison of different architectures to assess how including multi-scale
information affects segmentation performance. A publicly available breast
cancer and a locally collected prostate cancer datasets are being utilised for
this study. The results support our hypothesis that visual context and scale
play a crucial role in histology image classification problems
Effects of quark family nonuniversality in SU(3)_c X SU(4)_L X U(1)_x models
Flavour changing neutral currents arise in the extension of the standard model because anomaly cancellation among the
fermion families requires one generation of quarks to transform differently
from the other two under the gauge group. In the weak basis the distinction
between quark families is meaningless. However, in the mass eigenstates basis,
the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa mixing matrix motivates us to classify
left-handed quarks in families. In this sense there are, in principle, three
different assignments of quark weak eigenstates into mass eigenstates. In this
work, by using measurements at the Z-pole, atomic parity violation data and
experimental input from neutral meson mixing, we examine two different models
without exotic electric charges based on the 3-4-1 symmetry, and address the
effects of quark family nonuniversality on the bounds on the mixing angle
between two of the neutral currents present in the models and on the mass
scales and of the new neutral gauge bosons predicted by the
theory. The heaviest family of quarks must transform differently in order to
keep lower bounds on and as low as possible without
violating experimental constraints.Comment: 27 pages, 10 tables, 2 figures. Equation (19) and typos corrected.
Matches version to appear in Phys. Rev.
Evolution equations of curvature tensors along the hyperbolic geometric flow
We consider the hyperbolic geometric flow introduced by Kong and Liu [KL]. When the Riemannian
metric evolve, then so does its curvature. Using the techniques and ideas of
S.Brendle [Br,BS], we derive evolution equations for the Levi-Civita connection
and the curvature tensors along the hyperbolic geometric flow. The method and
results are computed and written in global tensor form, different from the
local normal coordinate method in [DKL1]. In addition, we further show that any
solution to the hyperbolic geometric flow that develops a singularity in finite
time has unbounded Ricci curvature.Comment: 15 page
Refraction of Electromagnetic Energy for Wave Packets Incident on a Negative Index Medium is Always Negative
We analyze refraction of electromagnetic wave packets on passing from an
isotropic positive to an isotropic negative refractive index medium. We
definitively show that in all cases the energy is always refracted negatively.
For localized wave packets, the group refraction is also always negative.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure
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