The Equality of Lotteries

Lotteries have long been used to resolve competing claims, yet their recent implementation to allocate school places in Brighton and Hove, England led to considerable public outcry. This article argues that, given appropriate selection is impossible when parties have equal claims, a lottery is preferable to an auction because it excludes unjust influences. Three forms of contractualism are discussed and the fairness of lotteries is traced to the fact that they give each person an equal chance, as a surrogate for their equal claim to the good. It is argued that this can be a reason to favour an artificially-constructed lottery to a 'natural' lottery where there is suspicion that the latter may be biased

Democracy, Political Equality, and Majority Rule

Democracy is commonly associated with political equality and/or majority rule. This essay shows that these three ideas are conceptually separate, so the transition from any one to another stands in need of further substantive argument, which is not always adequately given. It does this by offering an alternative decision-making mechanism, called lottery voting, in which all individuals cast votes for their preferred options but, instead of these being counted, one is randomly selected and that vote determines the outcome. This procedure is democratic and egalitarian, since all have an equal chance to influence outcomes, but obviously not majoritarian

Reformulating Mill’s Harm Principle

Mill's harm principle is commonly supposed to rest on a distinction between self-regarding conduct, which is not liable to interference, and other-regarding conduct, which is. As critics have noted, this distinction is difficult to draw. Furthermore, some of Mill's own applications of the principle, such as his forbidding of slavery contracts, do not appear to fit with it. This article proposes that the self-regarding/other-regarding distinction is not in fact fundamental to Mill's harm principle; what he should have said is that intervention is permissible only to prevent non-consensual harm, regardless of where it falls. This explains both why some other-regarding conduct is immune to interventions and why some self-regarding conduct can be interfered with

The trade and distribution of ceramics in the Western Indian Ocean 1250-1550AD An analysis of current available assemblages from Arabia, Iran and East Africa

This thesis is designed to make a generalized study of the ceramics present in the Western Indian Ocean during the period 1250AD- 1550AD, the period of expansion of the Hormuzi trading empire and its associated site of Julfar. The first part presents an analysis of the recently excavated assemblage from Julfar al-Nudud and then sets out to contextualize this within the wider Indian Ocean. Bringing in the available data from important trading sites in Arabia, southern Iran and East Africa, the work demonstrates a series of generalized assemblages based on period and geographical location, along with identifying a ‘ceramic trading’ assemblage for the study area. This puts forward that certain wares, generally Gulf and Chinese high- quality glazed wares are likely to be found on most sites involved in trade during this time, although not necessarily in great quantities. Other unglazed Iranian and Arabian storage wares, presumably traded for their contents rather than the vessel itself are found in greater quantities but individual wares vary between sites. The study finally identifies the areas where data is currently insufficient and suggests important future research questions for the study area

What concerns do medical students have when faced with caring for a dying patient?

Background Existing research suggests that:Students are highly interested in palliative care competencies and appreciate formal curriculum covering competencies, in conjunction with opportunity to learn skills experientially.Palliative care encompasses a range of skills and knowledge which can potentially be addressed in a variety of ways (eg through lectures, SSMs, communication skills and reflection).Palliative care curricula for undergraduate medical students could creatively cover this breadth of knowledge/skills using learning modalities.However, curriculum tend to be developed based upon the knowledge and skills that professionals feel students should have. There is little research that considers the specific concerns and learning needs identified by medical students themselves, in response to open questioning.Methods:Third year medical students, were asked to reflect on their experience of seeing dying patients, both on the wards and in the media and to answer the open question ‘What concerns do you have about caring for a dying patient?’ Their responses were collated and analysed for themes.Results: Medical students identified a range of concerns and potential learning needs. These included knowledge based competencies (such as managing of pain and symptoms; 20.8%); ethical and legal issues (33.3%) but mostly a desire to provide patient-centred care, respecting the patient‘s wishes and autonomy (41.7%). 20.8% of students identified their own personal concerns when caring for the dying, Interestingly, an explicit concern about communication was raised by just 12.5%, but communication issues were implicit in 37.5% responses.Conclusions:In response to an open question, third year medical students identified insightful concerns about caring for the dying. These themes could be readily addressed through a variety of teaching styles and will influence the Buckingham Medical School palliative care curriculum

The ethics of political participation: engagement and democracy in the 21st century

The ethics of political participation: engagement and democracy in the 21st centur

Factors influencing distribution and habitat associations in an endemic group of temperate Western Australian reef fishes over a latitudinal gradient

Similarities and differences in the density, distribution and habitat associations of 3 species from the pomacentrid genus Parma (Parma mccullochi, P. occidentalis, P. victoriae) were identified across 2000 km of temperate coastline in Western Australia. For P. mccullochi, fine-scale habitat associations were also assessed using the position of individual fish as observation points. A fourth species, the endemic P. bicolor, was rarely encountered. Satellite-derived sea-surface temperature was a good predictor of the distribution of the 3 commonly encountered species over the survey area. P. occidentalis were northerly distributed in warmer waters, P. victoriae were southerly distributed in cooler waters, while P. mccullochi were cosmopolitan over the survey area, with the highest densities recorded towards the centre of the study area. These findings suggest that eco-physiological theory may be applicable to describing the distribution of these, and similar, species. Similar habitat associations were observed for the 3 commonly encountered species and, in the case of P. mccullochi, at a range of spatial scales. All species were associated with vertical or overhanging rock walls and avoided areas of continuous algal canopy. P. occidentalis and P. mccullochi were associated with turfing and understorey algal forms. As the species use similar habitats, we suggest that where their distributions overlap they will experience niche overlap and resource competition. While each species may occupy different fundamental niches defined by different sea-surface temperature requirements, further study may reveal that competition for resources between these species leads to competitive displacement on both local and geographical scales

Marshall University Department of Music presents the Marshall University Symphonic Band and the Marshall University Wind Symphony

https://mds.marshall.edu/music_perf/1054/thumbnail.jp

Adversarial Training for Multi-Channel Sign Language Production

Sign Languages are rich multi-channel languages, requiring articulation of both manual (hands) and non-manual (face and body) features in a precise, intricate manner. Sign Language Production (SLP), the automatic translation from spoken to sign languages, must embody this full sign morphology to be truly understandable by the Deaf community. Previous work has mainly focused on manual feature production, with an under-articulated output caused by regression to the mean. In this paper, we propose an Adversarial Multi-Channel approach to SLP. We frame sign production as a minimax game between a transformer-based Generator and a conditional Discriminator. Our adversarial discriminator evaluates the realism of sign production conditioned on the source text, pushing the generator towards a realistic and articulate output. Additionally, we fully encapsulate sign articulators with the inclusion of non-manual features, producing facial features and mouthing patterns. We evaluate on the challenging RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather-2014T (PHOENIX14T) dataset, and report state-of-the art SLP back-translation performance for manual production. We set new benchmarks for the production of multi-channel sign to underpin future research into realistic SLP