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 demand for autonomy in medical decision making is increasing among Korean people, but it is not well known why some people prefer autonomy in decision making but others do not. Research objectives: The aim of this study was to determine the extent to which Korean adults wished to exercise autonomy in the process of decision making regarding end-of-life treatment and to determine whether economic issues and family functioning, in particular, were associated with preferences for participation in decision making (...) in Korean people. Research design: This study was a cross-sectional correlational study using a survey. Participants and research context: Data were collected using structured questionnaires from 354 patients or their families who visited ambulatory departments at two general hospitals in South Korea, recruited by the proportionate quota sampling method. Data analysis was performed using multinomial logistic regression analyses. Ethical considerations: The study was approved by the hospitals’ directors and the ethics committee of Kyungpook National University Hospital. Written informed consent was given by all participants. Findings: A majority of Korean people wanted to make autonomous decisions regarding treatment at the end of life. Preferences for autonomous decision making regarding end-of-life treatment, rather than relying on family, showed a significant increase in association with poor family functioning and low income. Discussion: Results of this study suggested the necessity for development of alternatives to a dominant traditional “family-centered” approach in Korean people, in order to enhance end-of-life decision making for people who wish to take an active role in the decision-making process. Conclusion: Healthcare providers need to examine not only patients’ preferred decision-making style but also any reasons for their choice, in particular, family conflict and financial burden. (shrink)

The use of technology and teaching techniques derived from technology is currently a bourgeoning topic in higher education. Teachers at all levels and types of institutions want to know how these new technologies will affect what happens in and outside of the classroom. Many teachers have already embraced some of these technologies but remain uncertain about their educational efficacy. Other teachers have waited because they are reluctant to try tools or techniques that remain unproven or, as is often the case, (...) lack institutional support. This book is designed to help both groups, so that those with technological expertise can extend their knowledge, while technological novices can "ramp up" at their own pace and for their own purposes. Best Practices for Technology-Enhanced Teaching and Learning brings together expert teacher-scholars who apply and assess technology's impact on traditional, hybrid or blended, or completely on-line courses, relying on technology as a teaching tool for classroom management and interaction, as well as student-based uses of technology largely independent of instructors. Each chapter will address how technological improvements can be connected to assessment initiatives, as is now routinely advocated in psychology and social science education. The book features current scholarship and pedagogy involving innovative technology that impacts on student learning in psychology and related disciplines, focusing also on student reactions to these novel technologies, and proper assessments of how well they promote learning. This text will serve as the standard reference on emerging technologies for undergraduate instructors. (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)

Juvenal opens his eighth Satire with the question stemmata quid faciunt?, supplies an answer in line 20, nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus, and devotes the rest of the poem to exhorting his addressee to virtuous activity, both by negative exempla drawn from the degenerate nobility and by positive exempla drawn from the plebs, novi homines and the like. In lines 39–70 he addresses one particularly self-important noble and attempts to deflate his bombastic pride: in 56–67 he adduces an extended (...) illustration from the animal world, apparently such as was common in the schools of rhetoric. (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.