A distinction is commonly drawn between continuous sedation until death and physician-assisted suicide/euthanasia. Only the latter is found to involve killing, whereas the former eludes such characterization. I argue that continuous sedation until death is equivalent to physician-assisted suicide/euthanasia in that both involve killing. This is established by first defining and clarifying palliative sedation therapies in general and continuous sedation until death in particular. A case study analysis and a look at current practices are provided. This is followed by a (...) defense of arguments in favor of definitions of death centering on higher brain (neocortical) functioning rather than on whole brain or cardiopulmonary functioning. It is then shown that continuous sedation until death simulates higher brain definitions of death by eliminating consciousness. Appeals to reversibility and double effect fail to establish any distinguishing characteristics between the simulation of death that occurs in continuous sedation until death and the death that occurs as a result of physician-assisted suicide/euthanasia. Concluding remarks clarify the moral ramifications of these findings. (shrink)

BACKGROUND -/- The need for detailed description and modeling of cells drives the continuous generation of large and diverse datasets. Unfortunately, there exists no systematic and comprehensive way to organize these datasets and their information. CELDA (Cell: Expression, Localization, Development, Anatomy) is a novel ontology for the association of primary experimental data and derived knowledge to various types of cells of organisms. -/- RESULTS -/- CELDA is a structure that can help to categorize cell types based on species, anatomical localization, (...) subcellular structures, developmental stages and origin. It targets cells in vitro as well as in vivo. Instead of developing a novel ontology from scratch, we carefully designed CELDA in such a way that existing ontologies were integrated as much as possible, and only minimal extensions were performed to cover those classes and areas not present in any existing model. Currently, ten existing ontologies and models are linked to CELDA through the top-level ontology BioTop. Together with 15.439 newly created classes, CELDA contains more than 196.000 classes and 233.670 relationship axioms. CELDA is primarily used as a representational framework for modeling, analyzing and comparing cells within and across species in CellFinder, a web based data repository on cells (http://cellfinder.org). -/- CONCLUSIONS -/- CELDA can semantically link diverse types of information about cell types. It has been integrated within the research platform CellFinder, where it exemplarily relates cell types from liver and kidney during development on the one hand and anatomical locations in humans on the other, integrating information on all spatial and temporal stages. CELDA is available from the CellFinder website: http://cellfinder.org/about/ontology. (shrink)

It is shown that the jet mechanism derivable from the Lorentz deformation picture leads to a nearly constant average jet transverse momentum. It is pointed out that this is consistent with the high-energy experimental data. It is pointed out further that this result strengthens the physical basis for the minimal time-energy uncertainty combined covariantly with Heisenberg's space-momentum uncertainty relation.

In this work, the significance of combining the evidence from multitaper mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, linear prediction residual, and linear prediction residual phase features for multilingual speaker identification with the constraint of limited data condition is demonstrated. The LPR is derived from linear prediction analysis, and LPRP is obtained by dividing the LPR using its Hilbert envelope. The sine-weighted cepstrum estimators with six tapers are considered for multitaper MFCC feature extraction. The Gaussian mixture model–universal background model is used for modeling each (...) speaker for different evidence. The evidence is then combined at scoring level to improve the performance. The monolingual, crosslingual, and multilingual speaker identification studies were conducted using 30 randomly selected speakers from the IITG multivariability speaker recognition database. The experimental results show that the combined evidence improves the performance by nearly 8–10% compared with individual evidence. (shrink)

The Casimir force between two neutral metallic plates is often considered conclusive evidence for the reality of electromagnetic zero-point fluctuations in 'empty space' (i.e. in absence of any boundaries). However, it is not well known that the Casimir force can be derived from many different points of view. The purpose of this note is to supply a conceptually oriented introduction to a representative set of these different interpretations. The different accounts suggest that the Casimir effect reveals nothing conclusive about the (...) nature of the vacuum. (shrink)

In Satire 3, Umbricius states his intention to leave Rome and delivers a long explanation of his decision, an explanation which develops into an invective against life in Rome. In the lines quoted above, Umbricius lists the ‘skills’ which are essential for success at Rome, ‘skills’ which he does not possess. The list comprises various mendacious, nefarious and criminal activities; Umbricius' stated inability to undertake such activities reinforces his claim to be a simple, honourable man . In this list is (...) his claim ‘I have never examined frogs’ entrails'. TLL glosses this passage ‘’ , the view taken by Friedländer too . Courtney takes a different view: ‘Presumably not for poisoning, which inspicere would hardly suit, but of divination … of an oriental type.’. (shrink)