Legal Dimensions of Adolescent Sexuality

The ethical and legal obligations with respect to treating a minor can be confusing, particularly in the areas of consent to treatment, confidentiality, and parental involvement. The clinician must be aware of the appropriate course of practice when the patient is an adolescent seeking care for contraception, pregnancy, or sexually transmitted infections. This article examines a number of ethical and legal issues that arise when providing reproductive and sexual health care to an adolescent and offers recommendations for the physician’s most appropriate courses of action regarding adolescent patients and the age of consent to sexual activity, reporting of child abuse, provision of reproductive and sexual health care to a minor, assessing an adolescent’s capacity to consent to treatment, the physician’s duty of confidentiality, and the exceptions to the rule of confidentiality

Analysis and quantification of the benefits of interconnected distribution system operation

In the UK, the Capacity to Customers (C2C) project is underway to determine the potential benefits of increased interconnection in distribution systems, combined with demand side response technology. Managed contracts with customers, i.e., the agreement that certain loads are interruptible following system faults, allows distribution circuits to be loaded beyond the limits presently required for security of supply. This potentially permits load growth but avoids the cost and environmental impact of conventional network reinforcement. This paper provides the results of electrical system modelling to quantify the benefits of the C2C operation, using actual circuit data and typical load distributions. Based upon simulations of these circuits, it is shown that increased interconnection generally leads to minor improvements in electrical losses and system voltage. By connecting managed (i.e., interruptible) loads, circuits typically can be loaded significantly further than the present practice in the UK—an average increase of 66% for radial operation and 74% for interconnected systems

Prenatal Diagnosis and Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis: Legal and Ethical Issues

Prenatal diagnosis of genetic disorders and foetal anomalies has expanded significantly. Hundreds of conditions can be diagnosed through DNA analysis of foetal cells and ultrasound and maternal serum biochemical screening. The purpose of prenatal diagnosis is to rule out the presence in the foetus of a particular medical condition for which the pregnancy is at an increased risk. This information is provided to the individual or couple to assist in the decision-making process regarding the possible options including: carrying the pregnancy to term, preparing for a difficult delivery, preparing for the birth of a child with genetic anomalies and for special newborn care, or terminating the pregnancy. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) involves the creation of embryos outside the body and their subsequent biopsy, in order to test for a genetic disorder. The stated advantage of PGD over prenatal diagnosis or testing is that the genetic diagnosis takes place at a much earlier stage. As a pregnancy has not been established, couples or individuals will not have to consider abortion, which is likely to be a much more stressful and difficult decision than the disposal of affected embryos in their earliest stage of development. It is expected that the range of conditions for which PGD is available will expand as the genes implicated are identified. Prenatal genetic testing and preimplantation diagnosis raise a number of ethical and legal issues that will be discussed below following a brief description of PND and PGD techniques

Understanding the role of Bcl-3 in breast cancer metastasis

Despite recent advances in the treatment and detection of breast cancer it still remains the third most common cause of death from cancer in the UK as a result of its final metastatic stage, which is currently incurable. Numerous targets have been identified in an attempt to prevent and treat this highly aggressive form of cancer with limited success, however recent work has highlighted B-cell lymphoma 3 (Bcl-3) as a promising therapeutic target. Bcl-3 is a mediator of the well characterised NF-kB signalling pathway and both have been implicated with promoting tumour growth and progression. The role of Bcl-3 in mediating tumour proliferation and apoptosis has been extensively researched; however more recent work has also implicated Bcl-3 with an important role in regulating metastasis. Interestingly, suppression of Bcl-3 expression has been shown to inhibit breast cancer metastasis, a result which has been replicated through the use of small-molecule inhibitors designed to disrupt Bcl-3 binding to both p50 and p52. Despite this little is known, other than a reduction in cell motility, on how Bcl-3 is mediating its effects on metastasis, therefore the aims of this project were to elucidate the mechanisms through which Bcl-3 is regulating metastasis. In this work we have shown how Bcl-3 can regulate a variety of single-cell and collective migratory phenotypes through inhibiting Rac1 and Cdc42 GTPase activity. We have also shown for the first time Bcl-3 to be upregulated during EMT, which appears to help regulate the expression of a number of EMT-inducing genes. Interestingly, we have also shown that prolonged inhibition of Bcl-3 results in a loss of cell viability through either senescence or apoptosis which appears to be dependent on cells expressing wildtype or mutant p53 respectively. Finally we have identified a novel set of small molecule Bcl-3 inhibitors that are capable of mimicking Bcl-3 suppression to regulate human breast cancer cell lines as well as both prostate and colorectal cell lines, offering a new therapeutic option for the treatment of breast and other human cancer types

Roman Catholic revivalism: a study of the area that became the diocese of Middlesbrough 1779-1992

This thesis seeks to provide a grassroots study of the diocese of Middlesbrough (1779-1992), in order to contribute to the history of the English Catholic community since it emerged from the Penal Times. Secondly, it is an examination of the manifestation of revivalism and renewal in Catholic devotional practice. The geographical extent of the study covers an area of Yorkshire with a strong recusant history, and that period has been well-served in Catholic historiography. However, writing on the period following the easing of the Penal Laws on Catholics and into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is remarkable for the paucity of references to the diocese and the area that it covers. Therefore this study sheds light upon a particular Catholic community that has been largely invisible to historians. Although the Catholic community itself might appear to be invisible, the devotional practice within it offers many insights, such as the extent to which the social culture influenced the practice of faith. Therefore it teases out and examines the changing nature of devotional practice, and compares it to aspects of Evangelical revivalism that provided the surrounding religious culture. It also examines the influences that came to bear upon the community itself, assessing their importance in the revival and renewal of faith of the people within it. By examining the history of Catholic devotional practice in this area of Yorkshire, it comes to the conclusion that revivalism and renewal are integral elements in Catholic devotion and as a result Catholics and Evangelicals have more in common with each other than their adherents have been ready to acknowledge

Automatically detecting and correcting errors in power quality monitoring data

Dependable power quality (PQ) monitoring is crucial for evaluating the impact of smart grid developments. Monitoring schemes may need to cover a relatively large network area, yet must be conducted in a cost-effective manner. Real-time communications may not be available to observe the status of a monitoring scheme or to provide time synchronization, and therefore undetected errors may be present in the data collected. This paper describes a process for automatically detecting and correcting errors in PQ monitoring data, which has been applied in an actual smart grid project. It is demonstrated how to: unambiguously recover from various device installation errors; enforce time synchronization between multiple monitoring devices and other events by correlation of measured frequency trends; and efficiently visualize PQ data without causing visual distortion, even when some data values are missing. This process is designed to be applied retrospectively to maximize the useful data obtained from a network PQ monitoring scheme, before quantitative analysis is performed. This work therefore ensures that insights gained from the analysis of the data - and subsequent network operation or planning decisions - are also valid. A case study of a UK smart grid project, involving wide-scale distribution system PQ monitoring, demonstrates the effectiveness of these contributions. All source code used for the paper is available for reuse

Roman Catholic revivalism: a study of the area that became the diocese of Middlesbrough 1779-1992

This thesis seeks to provide a grassroots study of the diocese of Middlesbrough (1779-1992), in order to contribute to the history of the English Catholic community since it emerged from the Penal Times. Secondly, it is an examination of the manifestation of revivalism and renewal in Catholic devotional practice. The geographical extent of the study covers an area of Yorkshire with a strong recusant history, and that period has been well-served in Catholic historiography. However, writing on the period following the easing of the Penal Laws on Catholics and into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is remarkable for the paucity of references to the diocese and the area that it covers. Therefore this study sheds light upon a particular Catholic community that has been largely invisible to historians. Although the Catholic community itself might appear to be invisible, the devotional practice within it offers many insights, such as the extent to which the social culture influenced the practice of faith. Therefore it teases out and examines the changing nature of devotional practice, and compares it to aspects of Evangelical revivalism that provided the surrounding religious culture. It also examines the influences that came to bear upon the community itself, assessing their importance in the revival and renewal of faith of the people within it. By examining the history of Catholic devotional practice in this area of Yorkshire, it comes to the conclusion that revivalism and renewal are integral elements in Catholic devotion and as a result Catholics and Evangelicals have more in common with each other than their adherents have been ready to acknowledge