Physician Assisted Dying as an Extension of Healing

The role of a physician is to provide care for those who seek their assistance. Lisa Yount attributes the most ancient statement about this activity to the Hippocratic Oath. Many doctors, in fact, still take this oath, part of which reads, “I will [not] give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to that effect,” (8). This vow is still widely considered to be the ultimate statement of the physician’s moral creed (Yount 8). Debate over whether active physician assisted dying is an extension of healing ability or a violation of their moral code is a longstanding argument. As medicine has developed, legal systems around the world have attempted to meet the needs of the patients in end of life care, but the practice of active physician assisted dying remains illegal in most parts of the world. Passive physician assisted dying is a generally accepted legal option for patients in extreme suffering, or terminal cases based on the intent to relieve pain. Due to its legal status and its shared intent with active physician assisted dying, it presents a strong pretense for the legalization of active physician assisted dying. Arguments posed against the legalization of active physician assisted dying are founded on hasty assumptions of extremity that can be disproven. Critics are worried that patients will be forced to make hasty decisions to end their lives, will be vulnerable to a pressured request for death even if they are unwilling to die, that physicians will end lives of patients who could have been adequately alleviated otherwise, and that regrettable societal consequences will result from people losing the ability to distinguish between permissible and impermissible forms of death. Active physician assisted dying should be legalized for all suffering persons because it is an extension of the physicians healing abilities in correspondence with a person’s right to die

Probabilistic sophistication and multiple priors.

We show that under fairly mild conditions, a maximin expected utility preference relation is probabilistically sophisticated if and only if it is subjective expected utility.

A strong law of large numbers for capacities

We consider a totally monotone capacity on a Polish space and a sequence of bounded p.i.i.d. random variables. We show that, on a full set, any cluster point of empirical averages lies between the lower and the upper Choquet integrals of the random variables, provided either the random variables or the capacity are continuous.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009117904000001062 in the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

A strong law of large numbers for capacities.

We consider a totally monotone capacity on a Polish space and a sequence of bounded p.i.i.d. random variables. We show that, on a full set, any cluster point of empirical averages lies between the lower and the upper Choquet integrals of the random variables, provided either the random variables or the capacity are continuous.Capacities; Choquet integral; Strong law of large numbers

On Concavity and Supermodularity

Concavity and supermodularity are in general independent properties. A class of functionals defined on a lattice cone of a Riesz space has the Choquet property when it is the case that its members are concave whenever they are supermodular. We show that for some important Riesz spaces both the class of positively homogeneous functionals and the class of translation invariant functionals have the Choquet property. We extend in this way the results of Choquet [2] and Konig [5].Concavity, Supermodularity

On convexity and supermodularity.

Concavity and supermodularity are in general independent properties. A class of functionals defined on a lattice cone of a Riesz space has the Choquet property when it is the case that its members are concave whenever they are supermodular. We show that for some important Riesz spaces both the class of positively homogeneous functionals and the class of translation invariant functionals have the Choquet property. We extend in this way the results of Choquet [1] and Konig [4].

Unique Solutions of Some Recursive Equations in Economic Dynamics

We study unique and globally attracting solutions of a general nonlinear equation that has as special cases some recursive equations widely used in Economics.Recursive equations, Intertemporal consumption

The formation of disc galaxies in high resolution moving-mesh cosmological simulations

We present cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of eight Milky Way-sized haloes that have been previously studied with dark matter only in the Aquarius project. For the first time, we employ the moving-mesh code AREPO in zoom simulations combined with a comprehensive model for galaxy formation physics designed for large0 cosmological simulations. Our simulations form in most of the eight haloes strongly disc-dominated systems with realistic rotation curves, close to exponential surface density profiles, a stellar-mass to halo-mass ratio that matches expectations from abundance matching techniques, and galaxy sizes and ages consistent with expectations from large galaxy surveys in the local Universe. There is no evidence for any dark matter core formation in our simulations, even so they include repeated baryonic outflows by supernova-driven winds and black hole quasar feedback. For one of our haloes, the object studied in the recent `Aquila' code comparison project, we carried out a resolution study with our techniques, covering a dynamic range of 64 in mass resolution. Without any change in our feedback parameters, the final galaxy properties are reassuringly similar, in contrast to other modelling techniques used in the field that are inherently resolution dependent. This success in producing realistic disc galaxies is reached, in the context of our interstellar medium treatment, without resorting to a high density threshold for star formation, a low star formation efficiency, or early stellar feedback, factors deemed crucial for disc formation by other recent numerical studies.Comment: 28 pages, 23 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRAS. Added 2 figures and minor text changes to match the accepted versio

Magnetic fields in cosmological simulations of disk galaxies

Observationally, magnetic fields reach equipartition with thermal energy and cosmic rays in the interstellar medium of disk galaxies such as the Milky Way. However, thus far cosmological simulations of the formation and evolution of galaxies have usually neglected magnetic fields. We employ the moving-mesh code \textsc{Arepo} to follow for the first time the formation and evolution of a Milky Way-like disk galaxy in its full cosmological context while taking into account magnetic fields. We find that a prescribed tiny magnetic seed field grows exponentially by a small-scale dynamo until it saturates around $z=4$ with a magnetic energy of about $10\%$ of the kinetic energy in the center of the galaxy's main progenitor halo. By $z=2$, a well-defined gaseous disk forms in which the magnetic field is further amplified by differential rotation, until it saturates at an average field strength of \sim 6 \mug in the disk plane. In this phase, the magnetic field is transformed from a chaotic small-scale field to an ordered large-scale field coherent on scales comparable to the disk radius. The final magnetic field strength, its radial profile and the stellar structure of the disk compare well with observational data. A minor merger temporarily increases the magnetic field strength by about a factor of two, before it quickly decays back to its saturation value. Our results are highly insensitive to the initial seed field strength and suggest that the large-scale magnetic field in spiral galaxies can be explained as a result of the cosmic structure formation process.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, accepted to ApJ