Tolstoy, stories, and facilitating insight in end of life care: Exploring ethics through vicarious experience (with Glackin M and Henry R)

Facilitating moral insight in end of life care can be challenging, and the purpose of this paper is to illustrate how this can be nurtured by means of creative literature. Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych is presented as an example of such literature. Aristotle's Nichomean Ethics provides the philosophical underpinning for the method used. Sources also include the nursing literature, and students' evaluations of the impact of Tolstoy's novella on their ability to perceive the ethical issues arising in end of life care. Comments from evaluations were analysed and significant themes emerged. Students' comments clearly support the suggestion that use of this novella has facilitated insight into ethical issues at the end of life. Evaluations also indicate that vicarious experience gained through reading this novella has helped to nurture sensitivity and professional insight into the importance of compassion and offering ‘comfort’ to the dying person.

Echolocation signal structure in the Megachiropteran bat Rousettus aegyptiacus Geoffroy 1810

Rousettus aegyptiacus Geoffroy 1810 is a member of the only genus of Megachiropteran bats to use vocal echolocation, but the structure of its brief, click-like signal is poorly described. Although thought to have a simple echolocation system compared to that of Microchiroptera, R. aegyptiacus is capable of good obstacle avoidance using its impulse sonar. The energy content of the signal was at least an order of magnitude smaller than in Microchiropteran bats and dolphins (approximately 4 X 10(-8) J m(-2)). Measurement of the duration, amplitude and peak frequency demonstrate that the signals of this animal are broadly similar in structure and duration to those of dolphins. Gabor functions were used to model signals and to estimate signal parameters, and the quality of the Gabor function fit to the early part of the signal demonstrates that the echolocation signals of R. aegyptiacus match the minimum spectral spread for their duration and amplitude and are thus well matched to its best hearing sensitivity. However, the low energy content of the signals and short duration should make returning echoes difficult to detect. The performance of R. aegyptincus in obstacle avoidance experiments using echolocation therefore remains something of a conundrum.

Advances in the Design of the Oyster Wave Energy Converter

This short paper, structured in 3 distinct sections will touch on some of the key features of the Oyster wave energy device and its recent development. The first section discusses the nature of the resource in the nearshore environment,
some common misunderstandings in relation to it and its suitability for exploitation of commercial wave energy. In the second section a brief description of some of the fundamentals governing flap type devices is given. This serves to emphasise core differences between the Oyster device and other devices. Despite the simplicity of the design and the operation of the device itself, it is shown that Oyster occupies a theoretical space which is substantially outside most established theories and axioms in wave energy. The third section will give a short summary of the recent developments in the design of the Oyster 2 project and touch on how its enhanced features deal with some of the key commercial and technical challenges present in the sector.

An anthropometric history of the World, 1810-1980: did migration and globalization influence country trends?

We find that regional height levels around the world were fairly uniform throughout most of the 19th century, with two exceptions: above-average levels in Anglo-Saxon settlement regions and below-average levels in Southeast Asia. After 1880, substantial diver- gences began to differentiate other regions -- making the world population taller, but more unequal. During the late 19th century and 20th century, heights between world regions devi- ated significantly, when incomes also became very unequal. Interestingly, during the “breaking point period” between the two regimes, heights declined significantly in the cattle-rich New World countries, whereas they started to increase in Old Europe. We discuss in this study whether immigration was a core factor to influence the height decline in the “Anthropometric Decline of the Cowboy and Gaucho Empires”.