1,721,055 research outputs found

    Comment on Andrew Sanders 'The CPS, Policy-Making and Assisted Dying: Towards a 'Freedom' Approach'

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    First paragraph: As Andrew Sanders makes depressingly clear, those who are considering whether to ask another for help in ending their lives, or whether to respond to such requests by providing such help, face a still uncertain, and unsatisfactory, legal position. If they provide assistance to another’s suicide, their conduct satisfies the definition of a criminal offence—an offence definition that allows no room for a defence based on, for instance, the earnestness and rationality of the request to which they respond; if what they do amounts to causing the requester’s death, their conduct satisfies the definition of criminal homicide. Someone seeking such assistance might think that the law that criminalises it violates the ‘right to respect for … private and family life’ declared in Article 8(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR): the ECHR has held that ‘the right of an individual to decide how and when to end his life … is one aspect of the right to respect for private life’, and English courts have accepted that the formal criminalisation of assisting suicide ‘represents an interference with’ that right. But the courts will not help such a person by declaring that law to be incompatible with the ECHR (or with the English Human Rights Act 1998): for Article 8(2) of the ECHR allows interference with that right if it ‘is necessary in a democratic society … for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others’; and the courts have held that such purposes as ‘protection of the weak and vulnerable’, and of the moral value of ‘the sanctity of life’, can thus make such interference legitimate. Someone seeking help, especially if that help would involve killing them rather than helping them to kill themselves (which is not to say that that is a sharp distinction), can thus look for no support from the law; any assistance she can find will need to be, to put it mildly, discreet, from someone willing to commit a crime and to face the prospect of prosecution. If, however, the assistance is relatively minor, and is provided out of compassion by a friend or loved one (rather than by a medical professional), she and her assister might find reassurance in the ‘guidelines’ issued by the Director of Public Prosecutions, as required by the Law Lords’ decision in Purdy: for if the situation, and the help provided, fit enough of the ‘factors tending against prosecution’, and none or few enough of those ‘tending in favour of prosecution’, they can expect that the DPP will decide that a prosecution is not ‘in the public interest’

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Variations on the Author

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    “Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship

    Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis

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    We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

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    We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more sophisticated methods

    Author Index

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    Introduction: Towards a Theory of Criminalization?

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    First paragraph: This is the fourth volume of papers arising from an AHRC funded project on Criminalization conducted by the five editors. The three previous volumes contained papers from three pairs of workshops held during the project’s first three years; most of the chapters in this volume were originally delivered as plenary papers at the project’s final conference in 2011; three monographs by members of the project team will complete the mini-series that the project has produced

    koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist

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    We have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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