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Donating a Kidney to a Stranger:A Review of the Benefits and Controversies of Unspecified Kidney Donation
No full textOF BACKGROUND DATA: Unspecified kidney donation (UKD) describes living donation of a kidney to a stranger. The practice is playing an increasingly important role within the transplant programme in the United Kingdom, where these donors are commonly used to trigger a chain of transplants; thereby amplifying the benefit derived from their donation. The initial reluctance to accept UKD was in part due to uncertainty about donor motivations and whether the practice was morally and ethically acceptable. OBJECTIVES: This article provides an overview of UKD and answers common questions regarding the ethical considerations, clinical assessment, and how UKD kidneys are used to maximize utility. Existing literature on outcomes after UKD is also discussed, along with current controversies. CONCLUSIONS: We believe UKD is an ethically acceptable practice which should continue to grow, despite its controversies. In our experience, these donors are primarily motivated by a desire to help others and utilization of their kidney as part of a sharing scheme means that many more people seek to benefit from their very generous donation.</p
Writing as Living Archive:An Interview with Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse
No full textBeata Umubyeyi Mairesse is a Rwandan writer who moved to France aged fifteen, after surviving the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. Critically acclaimed in the Francophone world, her collections of short stories, two novels, and a testimony have won numerous international prizes, including the Prix des cinq continents de la francophonie, Prix Kourouma, and most recently, Prix Franz-Hessel. Her work explores varied perspectives on genocide, the enduring presence of colonial violence, and above all – drawing on her own mixed race identity – the possibility of nuanced and chosen identifications in a world that increasingly favours division. When I first read Umubyeyi Mariesse’s novels, I was struck by the ambition. Here was writing that was intergenerational, featuring multiple points of view, layered landscapes of memory, and complex family dynamics replete with love, longing, and disappointment. Umubyeyi Mairesse cares for craft, for long-form structure, for the possibilities of poetic language, and for the ways in which words might stretch our perceptions of the world. She is also unequivocally Rwandan: grounded in the riches of Kinyarwanda’s long poetic tradition and in her own childhood growing up in Butare. These allegiances are intertwined. In the epigraph to her first novel, All your Children, Scattered (Tous tes enfants dispersés, 2019), we find Holocaust survivor Georges Perec’s description of seeking kinship in books, nestled alongside a Rwandan proverb about the location of sorrow in the body, and a quotation from Bessie Head about the embodied expression of belonging. She finds, through literature, new paths to solidarity.We spoke in spring 2025 at the Maison de l’Institut de France in South Kensington (London), where Umubyeyi Mairesse was staying to launch her latest autobiographical book, The Convoy (Open Borders Press, 2025), translated from French (Le Convoi, Flammarion, 2024) into English by Ruth Diver. It recounts how she escaped Rwanda as part of a humanitarian convoy during the genocide, and how she has searched to learn more about this rescue operation as an adult. Shifting between English, French, and the occasional phrase in Kinyarwanda, we discussed the loneliness of the genocide survivor when their experience isn’t heard, and how she found community through the words of survivors of earlier violence. We explored her turn to testimony after many years working with fiction, and her desire to witness both the international community’s failure to intervene, and the extraordinary bravery of a few individuals who risked their lives to help. Throughout, we considered how her work reinserts the inflections of missing voices into the archives, and witnesses the persistence of the past in the present.<br/
Concurrent Planning and Execution Using Dispatch-Dependent Values
Full text linkAgents operating in the real world must cope with the fact that time passes while they plan. In some cases, such as under tight deadlines, the only way for such an agent to achieve its goal is to execute an action before a complete plan has been found. This problem is called Concurrent Planning and Execution (CoPE). Previous work on CoPE relied on a value function that assumes search will finish before actions are executed, causing the agent to be overly pessimistic in many situations.In this paper, we define a new value function that takes into account the agent's ability to dispatch actions incrementally. This allows us to devise a much simpler algorithm for concurrent planning and execution. An experimental evaluation on problems with time pressure shows that the new method significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art
Concurrent Planning and Execution Using Dispatch-Dependent Values
Full text linkAgents operating in the real world must cope with the fact that time passes while they plan. In some cases, such as under tight deadlines, the only way for such an agent to achieve its goal is to execute an action before a complete plan has been found. This problem is called Concurrent Planning and Execution (CoPE). Previous work on CoPE relied on a value function that assumes search will finish before actions are executed, causing the agent to be overly pessimistic in many situations.In this paper, we define a new value function that takes into account the agent's ability to dispatch actions incrementally. This allows us to devise a much simpler algorithm for concurrent planning and execution. An experimental evaluation on problems with time pressure shows that the new method significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art
Back to the Slash
No full textThis essay is a delayed addendum to my book on punctuation, considering the forward slash mark as it traverses theory, art, and visual culture. I focus in particular on its uses in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when writers and artists were under the spell of structuralism and poststructuralism. More specifically, I examine the proliferation of forward slash marks across video art (Dara Birnbaum’s work Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman), Kirk/Spock slash zines, and academic film criticism (Raymond Bellour’s analyses, which chart out shot-by-shot descriptions of Hollywood films to reveal dynamics of alternation structured around gender and heterosexual union)
A break with tradition::Gail McConnell’s post-conflict elegy.
No full textEmerging from the rich and complex tradition of Northern Irish elegiac poetry, Gail McConnell’s 2021 poetry collection The Sun is Open unpacks the life and death of her father William McConnell almost four decades after his murder by the IRA in 1983. Navigating the difficulties of mourning post-conflict, McConnell interrogates the very structures that politicise mourning and make it difficult terrain to negotiate– even, or perhaps especially, post-conflict. This essay unpacks McConnell’s elegiac poetry, both The Sun is Open and its predecessor “Type Face”, to explore the politics of the archive and the dynamics of gender both within the context of post-conflict Northern Ireland and the elegiac tradition itself
Situated science and the state:rethinking the role of Scientific Administrative Organisations in India’s Disaster Governance
No full textIndia's National Disaster Management Plan (NDMP) positions Scientific Administrative Organizations (SAOs) as nodal agencies for early warning and risk assessment across a range of hazards. This paper critically examines what it means for an SAO—specifically the Geological Survey of India (GSI)—to take on this expanded mandate in the context of landslide risk and early warning systems. Drawing on insights from the LANDSLIP project, which aimed to develop a prototype Landslide Early Warning System (LEWS), the study reveals that such responsibility allocation entails not only technical upskilling but also a fundamental shift in the epistemological underpinnings guiding the institutional practices of these SAOs. We use theories of co-production (Jasanoff, 2004b) and situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988) to argue that disaster risk knowledge is not merely transferred from science to policy but actively produced through historically situated institutional arrangements. The paper shows how GSI's transformation involves negotiating interdisciplinary relationships, grappling with methodological uncertainty, and redefining its role as a producer of actionable knowledge. The analysis reveals that the NDMP's current framework fails to recognize the institutional work and epistemic restructuring required to operationalize early warnings. We propose a shift from static task allocations to a dynamic, networked approach to knowledge production and coordination. This reframing offers critical insights into how national science-policy infrastructures must evolve to make disaster risk reduction more contextually grounded, socially inclusive, and institutionally robust. Crucially, this paper also challenges the often-felt—but rarely articulated—tension of drafting national disaster management policies that are largely modelled on frameworks developed in and for the Global North. It argues that such transplants frequently neglect the institutional histories, epistemic cultures, and infrastructural realities of countries like India, leading to gaps between intended policy goals and the actual capacities and contexts of their implementing agencies.</p
