The new Scotland Parliament bill to legalize assisted suicide–which I noted in an earlier post, permits disabled or dying teenagers access to “end of life assistance”–clearly includes active mercy killing. Note that since the method of killing isn’t specified or limited, it would seem that any method agreed upon by the suicidal person and the killing actor would be legal, theoretically including being shot in the head, so long as it “allowed a person to die with dignity,” which is in the eye of the dying person, it would seem, and caused “a minimum of distress,” which a bullet to the head would provide. And it is very clear that the actual suicide assister/killer need not be the patient’s physician or, for that matter, even a health care practioner.
The Divisional Court's judgment in the cases of Tony Nicklinson and 'Martin' is awash with statements that it is for parliament alone to legalise assisted dying. However, there is little appetite for statutory legalisation in Westminster. Meanwhile, Tony and Martin are condemned to live against their wishes.
This week, lobbyists for euthanasia appeared to be winning people over to their way of thinking. The 71-year-old physicist Stephen Hawking gave an interview to the BBC in which he was asked whether he supported assisted suicide. “Those who have a terminal illness and are in great pain should have the right to choose to end their lives, and those that help them should be free from prosecution ...” he replied. “But there must be safeguards that the persons concerned genuinely want to end their life and are not being pressurised into it, or having it done without their knowledge and consent.”
Two weeks ago, The New York Times ran a story about a pregnant 33-year-old woman in Texas, Marlise Munoz, whose family has been unable to have her removed from life support, notwithstanding her wishes and those of her family. The hospital has refused to remove Munoz’s life support because of a Texas law that prohibits the withdrawal or withholding of life-sustaining treatment from a pregnant patient. Political groups have weighed in on the controversy in predictable ways, corresponding to their views regarding abortion. This column will analyze the dilemma as one that is, in some respects, legally and morally distinct from the situation that confronts us in the abortion context. - See more at: http://verdict.justia.com/2014/01/22/excluding-pregnant-women-right-terminate-life-support#sthash.JBLvcBMZ.dpuf
There a 4 generations working side by side right now. That has never happened before at any time in human history. None of them are stepping aside for the current generation.
The Haskell project was begun in order to unify "more than a dozen non-strict, purely functional programming languages". (mirror) We are rapidly approaching that many viable choices for programming with dependent types. 1. Epigram 2. ATS (successor to Dependent ML) 3. Agda (successor to Cayenne) 4. Ωmega 5. NuPrl 6. Twelf 7. Isabelle 8. Coq etc caveats * Some of the items on this list are theorem provers first and dependently-typed programming languages second. Adam Chlipala argues that this is not such a problem for Coq. * Some of these choices may not be real options for programing with dependent types. Twelf is designed for programming about programming languages, and, if I remember correctly, doesn't have parametric polymorphism because of something having to do with higher-order abstract syntax. Is it time yet to do anything about the cornucopia of options? see comments
Peng Li's 2008 PhD dissertation, First, this dissertation presents a Haskell solution based on concurrency monads. This approach provides clean interfaces to both multithreaded programming and event-driven programming in the same application, but it also does not require native support of continuations from compilers or runtime systems. Then, this dissertation investigates for a generic solution to support lightweight concurrency in Haskell, compares several possible concurrency configurations and summarizes the lessons learned. The paper's summary explains what I like most about it: the project ... solves a systems problem using a language-based approach. Systems programmers, Haskell implementors and programming language designers may each find their own interests in this dissertation. Even if concurrency isn't your thing, section 6.3 describes the author's findings on the pros and cons of both purity and laziness in a systems programming context.
"Forschung im Ingenieurwesen" - "Engineering Research" erscheint im Einvernehmen mit dem Verein Deutscher Ingenieure.
Die Zeitschrift wendet sich an Leser, die einen Überblick über aktuelle Forschungsarbeiten auf grundlegenden Gebieten der Ingenieurwissenschaften suchen. Die Zeitschrift fördert damit den Austausch zwischen den Arbeitsgebieten Forschung und Entwicklung.
"Forschung im Ingenieurwesen" - "Engineering Research" is published in agreement with Verein Deutscher Ingenieure.
This journal is aimed at those who require an overview of current research in fundamental areas of engineering science. It, thereby, hopes to encourage an exchange of ideas between the areas of research and development.
C. Huang, Q. Jiang, and Y. Zhang. Proceedings of the 2010 international conference on Web-age information management, page 222--233. Berlin, Heidelberg, Springer-Verlag, (2010)