Health, Medicine and the Media

Far more deeply than most of us realize, the media (in particular film, but also television, magazines, newspapers, and, more recently, the internet) has been intrinsic to the history of medicine and public health. For many of us, what we know about public health, medicine, and disease has come to us through the media. The medical profession, and public health policies, came into being in their modern forms during the second part of the nineteenth century, as medicine professionalized and as public health became defined, codified and embodied in government bureaucracies as well as public and private institutions. These developments have coincided with, and relied upon, the growth of popular media that reached audiences of a variety of classes and backgrounds. Images of physicians, as well as images of health and disease, are disseminated through the modern media. In fact while we know a great deal about the way images have functioned in the history of health and medicine, much remains to be explored with respect to the role of the media in the history of health and medicine. In addition to providing diversion and entertainment, the media provide us with messages about health and disease (as every newspaper and magazine editor knows, these stories are read by the public with great interest). Public health officials have often aimed to mimic the way the media entices the public by presenting health information in ways that are entertaining. The medical profession itself has only a limited influence on these representations. As a consequence, medical and media understandings of health and disease do not always coincide. This volume offers a smorgasbord exploration of some of the issues arising from the at times amicable and at other times rather strained relationship between medicine and the media over the past century in the only-just-postcolonial zone of Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia. It carries us from the health education movies made for Indonesians in the 1930s and Maoris in the 1950s to the sex education movies for the white Australian public catching up with the sexual revolution of the 1970s. Its authors analyse portrayals of physicians and medical knowledge in contemporary film and television, such as the depiction of a physician diagnosing homosexuality in Heavenly Creatures and a troubled female medical student in Charlene Does Med at Uni. As a result, the articles in this volume stimulate us to explore the relationship between health and medicine and the media in much greater detail

Binary populations and stellar dynamics in young clusters

We first summarize work that has been done on the effects of binaries on theoretical population synthesis of stars and stellar phenomena. Next, we highlight the influence of stellar dynamics in young clusters by discussing a few candidate UFOs (unconventionally formed objects) like intermediate mass black holes, Eta Carinae, Zeta Puppis, Gamma Velorum and WR 140.Comment: Contributed paper IAU 250: Massive Stars as Cosmic Engine

Evaluating irreversible social harms

In this paper we investigate how irreversible social harms should be evaluated from an ethical perspective. First, we define a general notion of irreversibility, drawing on discussions in ecology and economics. This notion is relational in the sense that 'irreversibility' is always 'irreversibility for a certain party'. We also note that a change may be more or less difficult to reverse, with full reversibility and irreversibility as two extremes. Second, we examine what can make an irreversible change a harm, and why these kinds of harms have particular ethical significance. Here we draw on discussions from ethics, particularly regarding the Capability Approach. We also show how our notion of irreversibility connects to, and can add to, discussions in the fields of development studies and disaster management, particularly on the concept of resilience. Third, we suggest how potentially irreversible harms can be recognised and dealt with in policy-making. Finally, we show how our framework can be applied by evaluating the land acquisition process of two biofuel producers in Tanzania

The late stages of evolution of helium star-neutron star binaries and the formation of double neutron star systems

With a view to understanding the formation of double neutron-stars (DNS), we investigate the late stages of evolution of helium stars with masses of 2.8 - 6.4 Msun in binary systems with a 1.4 Msun neutron-star companion. We found that mass transfer from 2.8 - 3.3 Msun helium stars and from 3.3 - 3.8 Msun in very close orbits (P_orb > 0.25d) will end up in a common-envelope (CE) and spiral-in phase due to the development of a convective helium envelope. If the neutron star has sufficient time to complete the spiraling-in process before the core collapses, the system will produce very tight DNSs (P_orb ~ 0.01d) with a merger timescale of the order of 1 Myr or less. These systems would have important consequences for the detection rate of GWR and for the understanding of GRB progenitors. On the other hand, if the time left until the explosion is shorter than the orbital-decay timescale, the system will undergo a SN explosion during the CE phase. Helium stars with masses 3.3 - 3.8 Msun in wider orbits (P_orb > 0.25d) and those more massive than 3.8 Msun do not go through CE evolution. The remnants of these massive helium stars are DNSs with periods in the range of 0.1 - 1 d. This suggests that this range of mass includes the progenitors of the galactic DNSs with close orbits (B1913+16 and B1534+12). A minimum kick velocity of 70 km/s and 0 km/s (for B1913+16 and B1534+12, respectively) must have been imparted at the birth of the pulsar's companion. The DNSs with wider orbits (J1518+4904 and probably J1811-1736) are produced from helium star-neutron star binaries which avoid RLOF, with the helium star more massive than 2.5 Msun. For these systems the minimum kick velocities are 50 km/s and 10 km/s (for J1518+4904 and J1811-1736, respectively).Comment: 16 pages, latex, 12 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA