Desire for euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide in palliative cancer care.

Objective: To investigate the attitudes of terminally ill individuals toward the legalization of euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide (PAS) and to identify those who would personally desire such a death. Design: In the Canadian National Palliative Care Survey, semistructured interviews were administered to 379 patients who were receiving palliative care for cancer. Patients who expressed a desire for physician-hastened death were followed prospectively. Main Outcome Measures: Attitudes toward the legalization of euthanasia or PAS were determined, as was the personal interest in receiving a hastened death. Demographic and clinical characteristics were also recorded, including a 22-item structured interview of symptoms and concerns. Results: There were 238 participants (62.8%) who believed that euthanasia and/or PAS should be legalized, and 151 (39.8%) who would consider making a future request for a physician-hastened death. However, only 22 (5.8%) reported that, if legally permissible, they would initiate such a request right away, in their current situations. This desire for hastened death was associated with lower religiosity (p = .010), reduced functional status (p = .024), a diagnosis of major depression (p     

Employing virtual humans for education and training in X3D/VRML worlds

Web-based education and training provides a new paradigm for imparting knowledge; students can access the learning material anytime by operating remotely from any location. Web3D open standards, such as X3D and VRML, support Web-based delivery of Educational Virtual Environments (EVEs). EVEs have a great potential for learning and training purposes, by allowing one to circumvent physical, safety, and cost constraints. Unfortunately, EVEs often leave to the user the onus of taking the initiative both in exploring the environment and interacting with its parts. A possible solution to this problem is the exploitation of virtual humans acting as informal coaches or more formal instructors. For example, virtual humans can be employed to show and explain maintenance procedures, allowing learners to receive more practical explanations which are easier to understand. However, virtual humans are rarely used in Web3D EVEs, since the programming effort to develop and re-use them in different environments can be considerable. In this paper, we present a general architecture that allows content creators to easily integrate virtual humans into Web3D EVEs. To test the generality of our solution, we present two practical examples showing how the proposed architecture has been used in different educational contexts.     

Constructive nonlinear anti-windup design for exponentially unstable linear plants

In this paper we give a constructive method for anti-windup design for general linear saturated plants with exponentially unstable modes. The constructive solution is independent of the controller dynamics so that the size of the (necessarily bounded) operating region in the exponentially unstable directions of the plant state space is large. Desirable properties of the closed-loop are formally proved and shown to induce a very desirable behavior on a MIMO example with two exponentially unstable modes.     

Stigmatic spectrometers for extended sources: design with toroidal varied-line-space gratings

Performances are presented of three classes of imaging slit spectrometers for extended sources with aberration-corrected gratings. A general analytical expression for minimizing off-axis grating aberrations is obtained, and it is demonstrated that these aberrations are minimized when the spectrometer is operated at a magnification higher than unity. Classical designs with toroidal uniform-line-spaced (TULS) or spherical varied-line-space (SVLS) gratings are compared with a new class of designs that utilize toroidal varied-line-space (TVLS) gratings. Although TULS and SVLS designs with two stigmatic points can be designed to operate at near-unity magnification with excellent on-axis spectral and spatial resolutions, they cannot be made to satisfy the general off-axis condition, and so their off-axis performances are not optimum. On the contrary TVLS designs with two stigmatic points can be operated at almost any magnification, thus satisfying the off-axis condition perfectly. Such designs are suitable for imaging spectrometer observations that require an extended field of view.     

DYRE: a DYnamic REconfigurable solution to increase GPGPU’s reliability

The Journal of Supercomputing - General-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) are extensively used in high-performance computing. However, it is well known that these devices’...     

Nanostructures in diatom frustules: functional morphology of valvocopulae in Cocconeidacean monoraphid taxa

Nanopositioning is one of the most intriguing challenges in nanoelectronics and photonics. As the optoelectronic circuit components become more and more complex, the importance of nanopositioning becomes critical. For example, in single-mode fiber telecommunications it is easy to show that an alignment deviation as small as a few tens of nanometers can yield to 50 percent of loss performance. Diatoms are unicellular plants occurring in almost every aquatic environment. Their main morphological character is the frustule, a silica cell wall that consists of two valves, encasing the protoplasm, joined together by a girdle. The girdle is composed of a series of silica bands (copulae) linked together along their margins. In several diatom species, the first girdle bands (valvocopulae), which associate the valves with the rest of the girdle, appear different in shape and bring specific nanostructures devoted to facilitate this linkage. The species of the diatom family Cocconeidaceae show elaborate linkage systems between the valves in which functionally complex valvocopulae are involved. Different levels of complexity and functional efficiency are recognizable in the valve-valvocopula and valvocopula-valvocopula linkages of different cocconeidacean taxa. This work briefly reviews the morphological characteristics and the functional role of the nanostructures involved in the linkages; in fact, we firmly believe that they are stimulating models for design and manufacturing engineers working in the technological nanoworld.     

The current state and future outlook of rescue robotics

Robotic technologies, whether they are remotely operated vehicles, autonomous agents, assistive devices, or novel control interfaces, offer many promising capabilities for deployment in real‐world environments. Postdisaster scenarios are a particularly relevant target for applying such technologies, due to the challenging conditions faced by rescue workers and the possibility to increase their efficacy while decreasing the risks they face. However, field‐deployable technologies for rescue work have requirements for robustness, speed, versatility, and ease of use that may not be matched by the state of the art in robotics research. This paper aims to survey the current state of the art in ground and aerial robots, marine and amphibious systems, and human–robot control interfaces and assess the readiness of these technologies with respect to the needs of first responders and disaster recovery efforts. We have gathered expert opinions from emergency response stakeholders and researchers who conduct field deployments with them to understand these needs, and we present this assessment as a way to guide future research toward technologies that will make an impact in real‐world disaster response and recovery.     

An algebraic formulation of inverse problems in MP dynamics

Metabolic P (MP) grammars are a particular class of multiset rewriting grammars introduced in the MP theory for modelling metabolic processes. In this paper, a new algebraic formulation of inverse problems, based on MP grammars and Kronecker product, is given, for further motivating the correctness of the LGSS (Log-Gain Stoichiometric Stepwise) algorithm, introduced in 2010s for solving inverse problems in the MP framework. At the end of the paper, a section is included that introduces the problem of multicollinearity, which could arise during the execution of LGSS, and that defines an algorithm, based on a hierarchical clustering technique, that solves it in a suitable way.     

Neutronic characterization of the MEGAPIE target

The MEGAPIE project aimed to design, build and operate a liquid metal spallation neutron target of about 1 MW beam power in the SINQ facility at the Paul Scherrer Institut (Villigen, Switzerland). This project is an important step in the roadmap towards the demonstration of the accelerator driven system (ADS) concept and high power liquid metal targets in general. Following the design phase, an experimental program was defined to provide a complete characterization of the facility by performing a “mapping” of the neutron flux at different points, from the center of the target to the beam lines. The neutronic performance of the target was studied using different experimental techniques with the goals of validating the Monte Carlo codes used in the design of the target; additionally, the performance was compared with the solid lead targets used before and after the MEGAPIE experiment.     

Validation of a Methodology for Cure Process Optimization of Thick Composite Laminates

The cure degree must be as uniform as possible during the manufacture cycle of polymer–matrix composite laminate to obtain parts without defects. Thermal cycle recommended by technical sheet is usually suitable for thin components, so its redesign is necessary to solve unconformities for thick laminate parts, which usually show these problems. In this study, a methodology to optimize the cure cycle of a thick composite laminate, presented in previous studies, has been validated by a more reliable direct method based on dielectrical analysis through the use of an interdigital sensor capable to measure the local cure degree trend.