Physician assisted suicide : an unbiased review

Medical ethics has become a highly discussed topic in the United States. Physician assisted suicide is one of the most commonly discussed ethical issues in the medical field. Physician assisted suicide dates back to the ancient Greek and Roman empires but has only become a heavily talked about subject in the past century. An unbiased analysis of the ethics behind physician assisted suicide along with the physicians' perspective is challenging and, therefore, rare to find. I attempt to give an unbiased look into the history, pros and cons, current issues, ethics, physician perspective and future of physician assisted suicide with a focus on terminally ill senior patients. This will allow readers to form their own opinions about physician assisted suicide before I reveal my personal opinion on the subject.Honors CollegeThesis (B.?.

Adoption and Aspiration: The Uniform Adoption Act, the Deboer-Schmidt Case, and the American Quest for the Ideal Family

When the state must designate a child\u27s legal parentage, should the goal be to protect the biological parents\u27 opportunity interests to raise their child or to protect the child\u27s established relationships with the individuals who have actually functioned as her parents? What characteristics render an adult an appropriate parent? These questions, long in the background of disputes over adoption, have been raised with new intensity in the early 1990s in two distinctive settings. The first is the debate about these questions waged in the courts and the media. The second is the effort of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) to create a Uniform Adoption Act. The fate of the child called Jessica by her would-be adopters in Michigan and Anna by her birth parents in Iowa was a matter of agitated public debate before, during, and after it was decided by a legal system slow to resolve the conflicting claims of the adoptive and birth parents and even slower to recognize the young child\u27s interest in a quick decision. 1 Similarly, the law\u27s inability to resolve the competing claims of entitlement with respect to other young children--Richard Doe in Illinois, Emily W. in Florida, Michael S. in California--generates yet more media attention to the questions of where do children belong? and to whom do children belong? 2 As American culture\u27s internal conflicts over the ideal family are projected onto the various individuals, relationships, and households involved in each case, images of the conflicting ..

More new distribution records for Florida water beetles (Coleoptera: Dytiscidae, Elmidae, Hydrophilidae, Scirtidae), with additional notes on Scirtes oblongus Guérin-Méneville

New distribution records for the State of Florida are given for several genera and species of water beetles. These include Dytiscidae: Acilius confusus Bergsten; Dytiscus carolinus Aubé; Matus bicarinatus (Say); Elmidae: Oulimnius nitidulus LeConte; Stenelmis mera Sanderson; S. morsei White; Hydrophilidae: Laccobius minutoides d’Orchymont; Scirtidae: Sarabandus robustus (LeConte); Scirtes oblongus Guérin-Méneville. Additional information is provided on the distribution, morphology and three color forms of S. oblongus which is considered to be a senior synonym of Scirtes sexlineatus Chevrolat and S. interruptus Chevrolat

Strongly nonlinear convection in binary fluids: Minimal model for extended states using symmetry decomposed modes

Spatially extended stationary and traveling states in the strongly nonlinear regime of convection in layers of binary fluid mixtures heated from below are described by a few-mode-model. It is derived from the proper hydrodynamic balance equations including experimentally relevant boundary conditions with a non-standard Galerkin approximation that uses numerically obtained, symmetry decomposed modes. Properties of the model are elucidated and compared with full numerical solutions of the field equations.Comment: 16 pages, including 5 postscript figure

Determination of sea surface conditions using Skylab L-band and Radscat passive microwave radiometers

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Low-frequency microwave radiometer for N-ROSS

The all weather, global determination of sea surface temperature (SST) has been identified as a requirement needed to support naval operations. The target SST accuracy is + or - 1.0 K with a surface resolution of 10 km. Investigations of the phenomenology and technology of remote passive microwave sensing of the ocean environment over the past decade have demonstrated that this objective is presently attainable. Preliminary specification and trade off studies were conducted to define the frequency, polarization, scan geometry, antenna size, and other esstential parameters of the low frequency microwave radiometer (LFMR). It will be a dual polarized, dual frequency system at 5.2 and 10.4 GHz using a 4.9 meter deployable mesh surface antenna. It is to be flown on the Navy-Remote Ocean Sensing System (N-ROSS) satellite scheduled to be launched in late 1988

Monitoring parasitic abundance in cage-based aquaculture : the effects of clustering

Most discussions of sampling protocols within the literature on monitoring aquatic parasites are based on the assumptions of simple random sampling. There has been a growing recognition within the fields of human and terrestrial veterinary epidemiology that data are often collected from individuals within clusters where such assumptions are not valid. These circumstances arise when monitoring ectoparasitic sea lice on Scottish salmon farms. In previous work the authors have demonstrated that significant intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) values are associated with cage-level abundance of sea lice, particularly when the parasite reaches its adult stage of development. In this paper two sets of data from Scottish farms with ICC values for adult L. salmonis of 0.35 [0.08-0.72, 95%CI] and for adult C. elongatus of 0.42 [0.14-0.66, 95%CI] are used to investigate the implications of clustering. A Monte Carlo simulation approach is used to illustrate the effect of various sampling approaches. The protocols simulated reflect those typically used across a range of countries and production environments in which salmon are currently reared. By illustrating clearly from empirical data sets what is known by theoretical argument it is hoped that guidelines for sampling parasites, and disease monitoring more generally, within aquaculture will in future incorporate appropriate consideration of issues related to the clustering that is typically present in cage-based production systems

Active Classification: Theory and Application to Underwater Inspection

We discuss the problem in which an autonomous vehicle must classify an object based on multiple views. We focus on the active classification setting, where the vehicle controls which views to select to best perform the classification. The problem is formulated as an extension to Bayesian active learning, and we show connections to recent theoretical guarantees in this area. We formally analyze the benefit of acting adaptively as new information becomes available. The analysis leads to a probabilistic algorithm for determining the best views to observe based on information theoretic costs. We validate our approach in two ways, both related to underwater inspection: 3D polyhedra recognition in synthetic depth maps and ship hull inspection with imaging sonar. These tasks encompass both the planning and recognition aspects of the active classification problem. The results demonstrate that actively planning for informative views can reduce the number of necessary views by up to 80% when compared to passive methods.Comment: 16 page