Ensuring operational compliance and ethical responsibility in the regulation of ART: the HFEA, past, present, and future

Under the Public Bodies Bill 2010, the HFEA, cornerstone in the regulation of assisted reproduction technologies (ART) for the last twenty years, is due to be abolished. This implies that there is no longer a need for a dedicated regulator for ART and that the existing roles of the Authority as both operational compliance monitor, and instance of ethical evaluation, may be absorbed by existing healthcare regulators. This article presents a timely analysis of these disparate functions of the HFEA, charting reforms adopted in 2008 and assessing the impact of the current proposals. Taking assisted conception treatment as the focus activity, it will be shown that the last few years have seen a concentration on the HFEA as a technical regulator based upon the principles of Better Regulation, with little analysis of how the ethical responsibility of the Authority fits into this framework. The current proposal to abolish the HFEA continues to fail to address this crucial question. Notwithstanding the fact that the scope of the Authority's ethical role may be questioned, its abolition requires that the Government consider what alternatives exists - or need to be put in place - to provide both responsive operational regulation and a forum for ethical reflection and decision-making in an area which continues to pose regulatory challenges

Normative, systemic and procedural aspects: a review of indicator‐based sustainability assessments in agriculture

Several methods for assessing the sustainability of agricultural systems have been developed. These methods do not fully: (i) take into account the multi‐functionality of agriculture; (ii) include multidimensionality; (iii) utilize and implement the assessment knowledge; and (iv) identify conflicting goals and trade‐offs. This paper reviews seven recently developed multidisciplinary indicator‐based assessment methods with respect to their contribution to these shortcomings. All approaches include (1) normative aspects such as goal setting, (2) systemic aspects such as a specification of scale of analysis, (3) a reproducible structure of the approach. The approaches can be categorized into three typologies. The top‐down farm assessments focus on field or farm assessment. They have a clear procedure for measuring the indicators and assessing the sustainability of the system, which allows for benchmarking across farms. The degree of participation is low, potentially affecting the implementation of the results negatively. The top‐down regional assessment assesses the on‐farm and the regional effects. They include some participation to increase acceptance of the results. However, they miss the analysis of potential trade‐offs. The bottom‐up, integrated participatory or transdisciplinary approaches focus on a regional scale. Stakeholders are included throughout the whole process assuring the acceptance of the results and increasing the probability of implementation of developed measures. As they include the interaction between the indicators in their system representation, they allow for performing a trade‐off analysis. The bottom‐up, integrated participatory or transdisciplinary approaches seem to better overcome the four shortcomings mentioned above.

Predicting the impact of the EU common agricultural policy reform in England: micro and macroeconomic aspects

In this article we investigate the effects of the European CAP reform on a selection of arable crops in England, both at a regional and national level. The results show that the CAP reform will push farmers to adjust to the new market conditions, which will cause a further restructuring of the English agricultural business sector. Our results show that, under the new market conditions, economically-small farms will increase their output by allocating more land to cereals, whereas economically-large farms will need to decrease land allocated to cereals to reduce production costs and achieve better returns.

Translating Lucretia: word, image and 'ethical non-indifference' in Simon de Hesdin's translation of Valerius Maximus's 'Facta et dicta memorabilia'

An analysis of how illustrations functioned as a distinctive and important aspect of the translation of Latin versions of the story of the rape and suicide of Lucretia into Middle French texts, especially the 'Faits et dits memorables' (a translation-adaptation of Valerius Maximus's 'Facta et dicta memorabilia'). The study focuses on a selection of 14th- and 15th- century illuminations, and proposes also that the early modern 'Lucretia' portrait tradition should be viewed in the context of these images.

Investigating orthographic and semantic aspects of word learning in poor comprehenders

This study compared orthographic and semantic aspects of word learning in children who differed in reading comprehension skill. Poor comprehenders and controls matched for age (9-10 years), nonverbal ability and decoding skill were trained to pronounce 20 visually presented nonwords, 10 in a consistent way and 10 in an inconsistent way. They then had an opportunity to infer the meanings of the new words from story context. Orthographic learning was measured in three ways: the number of trials taken to learn to pronounce nonwords correctly, orthographic choice and spelling. Across all measures, consistent items were easier than inconsistent items and poor comprehenders did not differ from control children. Semantic learning was assessed on three occasions, using a nonword-picture matching task. While poor comprehenders showed equivalent semantic learning to controls immediately after exposure to nonword meaning, this knowledge was not well retained over time. Results are discussed in terms of the language and reading skills of poor comprehenders and in relation to current models of reading development.

The role of self-teaching in learning orthographic and semantic aspects of new words

This study explores how children learn the meaning (semantics) and spelling patterns (orthography) of novel words encountered in story context. English-speaking children (N = 88) aged 7 to 8 years read 8 stories and each story contained 1 novel word repeated 4 times. Semantic cues were provided by the story context such that children could infer the meaning of the word (specific context) or the category that the word belonged to (general context). Following story reading, posttests indicated that children showed reliable semantic and orthographic learning. Decoding was the strongest predictor of orthographic learning, indicating that self-teaching via phonological recoding was important for this aspect of word learning. In contrast, oral vocabulary emerged as the strongest predictor of semantic learning.

Normative, systemic and procedural aspects: a review of indicator-based sustainability assessments in agriculture

Methods for assessing the sustainability of agricultural systems do often not fully (i) take into account the multifunctionality of agriculture, (ii) include multidimensionality, (iii) utilize and implement the assessment knowledge and (iv) identify conflicting goals and trade-offs. This chapter reviews seven recently developed multidisciplinary indicator-based assessment methods with respect to their contribution to these shortcomings. All approaches include (1) normative aspects such as goal setting, (2) systemic aspects such as a specification of scale of analysis and (3) a reproducible structure of the approach. The approaches can be categorized into three typologies: first, top-down farm assessments, which focus on field or farm assessment; second, top-down regional assessments, which assess the on-farm and the regional effects; and third, bottom-up, integrated participatory or transdisciplinary approaches, which focus on a regional scale. Our analysis shows that the bottom-up, integrated participatory or transdisciplinary approaches seem to better overcome the four shortcomings mentioned above.

The Bomb: Nuclear Weapons in their Historical, Strategic and Ethical Context

This book examines to what extent the invention and first use of nuclear weapons was a turning point in the history of warfare and strategy(to what extent was it a mere continuation or perfection of air power strategy? Were the casualty numbers really unprecedented?), the ethics of war (was this form of war against civilians unprecedented?), and it asks whether it was an expression of total war or did it create total war

International relations theory and peacebuilding

The chapter examines the contribution that International Relations theory has made to the reading and practice of peacebuilding.