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The foreskin is a complex structure that protects and moisturizes the head of the penis, and, being the most densely innervated and sensitive portion of the penis, is essential to providing the complete sexual response. Circumcision—the removal of this structure—is non-therapeutic, painful, irreversible surgery that also risks serious physical injury, psychological sequelae, and death. Men rarely volunteer for it, and increasingly circumcised men are expressing their resentment about it.Circumcision is usually performed for religious, cultural and personal reasons. Early claims about its medical benefits have been proven false. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control have made many scientifically untenable claims promoting circumcision that run counter to the consensus of Western medical organizations.Circumcision violates the cardinal principles of medical ethics, to respect autonomy (self-determination), to do good, to do no harm, and to be just. Without a clear medical indication, circumcision must be deferred until the child can provide his own fully informed consent.In 2012, a German court held that circumcision constitutes criminal assault. Under existing United States law and international human rights declarations as well, circumcision already violates boys› absolute rights to equal protection, bodily integrity, autonomy, and freedom to choose their own religion. A physician has a legal duty to protect children from unnecessary interventions. Physicians who obtain parental permission through spurious claims or omissions, or rely on the American Academy of Pediatrics' position, also risk liability for misleading parents about circumcision.

Nontherapeutic circumcision (NTC) of male infants and boys is a common but misunderstood form of iatrogenic injury that causes harm by removing functional tissue that has known erogenous, protective, and immunological properties, regardless of whether the surgery generates complications. I argue that the loss of the foreskin itself should be counted, clinically and morally, as a harm in evaluating NTC; that a comparison of benefits and risks is not ethically sufficient in an analysis of a nontherapeutic procedure performed on patients unable to provide informed consent; and that circumcision violates clinicians' imperatives to respect patients' autonomy, to do good, to do no harm, and to be just. When due consideration is given to these values, the balance of factors suggests that NTC should be deferred until the affected person can perform his own cost-benefit analysis, applying his mature, informed preferences and values.

All forms of genital cutting – female genital cutting (FGC), intersex genital cutting, male genital cutting (MGC), and even cosmetic forms of FGC – are performed in a belief that they will improve the subject’s life. Genital autonomy is a unified principle that children should be protected from genital cutting that is not medically necessary. Safeguarding genital autonomy encompasses helping societies and individuals to explore wounds common across different forms of genital cutting regarding gender, power, the quest for cultural belonging, and social and sexual control. A desire to prevent alternative sexualities helps explain the origins of MGC’s medicalization starting in the nineteenth century, as well as the roots of the failed attempt to similarly medicalize FGC. The child with ‘ambiguous’ genitalia brings us face to face with the failure of the attempted alignment of sex and gender. Medical ethics, law, and human rights suggest a path forward toward genital autonomy.

Every infant has a right to bodily integrity. Removing healthy tissue from an infant is only permissible if there is an immediate medical indication. In the case of infant male circumcision there is no evidence of an immediate need to perform the procedure. As a German court recently held, any benefit to circumcision can be obtained by delaying the procedure until the male is old enough to give his own fully informed consent. With the option of delaying circumcision providing all of the purported benefits, circumcising an infant is an unnecessary violation of his bodily integrity as well as an ethically invalid form of medical violence. Parental proxy 'consent' for newborn circumcision is invalid. Male circumcision also violates four core human rights documents-the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention Against Torture. Social norm theory predicts that once the circumcision rate falls below a critical value, the social norms that currently distort our perception of the practice will dissolve and rates will quickly fall.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recently released a policy statement and technical report on circumcision, in both of which the organisation suggests that the health benefits conferred by the surgical removal of the foreskin in infancy definitively outweigh the risks and complications associated with the procedure. While these new documents do not positively recommend neonatal circumcision, they do paradoxically conclude that its purported benefits 'justify access to this procedure for families who choose it,' claiming that whenever and for whatever reason it is performed, it should be covered by government health insurance. The policy statement and technical report suffer from several troubling deficiencies, ultimately undermining their credibility. These deficiencies include the exclusion of important topics and discussions, an incomplete and apparently partisan excursion through the medical literature, improper analysis of the available information, poorly documented and often inaccurate presentation of relevant findings, and conclusions that are not supported by the evidence given.

Jacobs and Arora (2015) offer an impassioned defense of infant male circumcision, yet their article falls short of being very convincing. The authors employ a highly selective reading of the releva...

The Helsinki Declaration, first published in 1964, is the universally accepted standard for ethical behavior in research involving human subjects. The Declaration was formulated in response to the abuses of human subjects by the scientists in Nazi Germany and to update the Nuremberg Code. Amended in 1975, 1983, 1989, 1996, and 2000, the Declaration provides the foundation for the United States federal regulations for research involving human subjects.To conform to standards developed in the Declaration, a researcher must fulfill the following: (1) respect the autonomy of the individual; (2) promote and safeguard the individual’s health; (3) provide informed consent without coercion; (4) take special measures with vulnerable populations; (5) compare new therapies to the best current therapies; (6) have a thorough scientific knowledge of the subject; (7) assess risk versus benefit of the intervention; (8) perform studies that will ultimately benefit the population involved in the research; (9) accurately report their findings; and (10) fully disclose ethical concerns in their research protocols.

A commercially available soil moisture probe was modified by replacing rigid electrode waveguides with flexible electrode traces that can be attached to the interior of soil column walls. This new design minimizes soil packing difficulties and potential bias in water and solute flow pathways commonly associated with rigid probe installations in column experiments. Tests demonstrated that the modified flexible electrode design maintains a voltage response that is proportional to the electrode trace length and is reduced by approximately one-half when only one side of the electrode trace is in contact with the soil media. Laboratory experiments confirmed that the longer electrode traces attached to the interior of a column wall have a comparable sensitivity of that of a commercially available rigid probe inserted horizontally across the diameter of a soil column. The replacement of the rigid electrode with a flexible electrode offers an improved method of measuring the water content in solute transport experiments while minimizing sensor intrusion into laboratory soil columns.

Resume Les parodontolyses correspondent a la destruction des tissus de soutien des dents, entrainant a plus ou moins long terme la perte de celles-ci. On sait aujourd'hui que l'etiologie de ces parodontolyses est bacterienne. Organisees en biofilm, les bacteries se retrouvent dans les conditions ideales pour exprimer leurs facteurs de virulence. Cette organisation repose sur des associations entre les differentes especes bacteriennes, chaque groupe ayant ses specificites et intervenant a des stades differents de la pathologie. Les techniques de la microbiologie permettent d'identifier les differentes souches bacteriennes virulentes, et aussi de caracteriser leurs facteurs de virulence.

Resume Le developpement des parodontopathies est en relation avec la presence de plaque dentaire (ou biofilm). L’accumulation de ces depots bacteriens cree une niche ecologique ou chaque espece bacterienne va pouvoir se developper, favorisant ainsi une flore pathogene pour le parodonte. Si le travail du chirurgien-dentiste consiste a eliminer les depots tartriques et bacteriens de maniere mecanique ou chirurgicale, il doit egalement enseigner au patient les techniques d’hygiene buccodentaire a appliquer quotidiennement. Cet enseignement repondra a trois objectifs : le materiel disponible, l’utilisation de ce materiel et l’adaptation a la situation clinique propre a chaque patient. Associe a un entretien professionnel regulier, l’hygiene buccodentaire individuelle doit permettre de maitriser l’evolution des parodontopathies et demande un controle permanent de la part du patient et du praticien.

Wing Rock or limit cycle oscillation (LCO) in an aircraft is often caused by aerodynamic nonlinearities or mechanical hysteresis. A dynamic recurrent radial basis function neural networ~s (DR-RBF) are proposed for modelling the nonlinear hysteresis. The concept based on Preisach hysteresis model is used in the design of neural networks. The structure and memory mechanism in the hysteresis model is analogous to parallel connectivity and memory formation in neural networks. Adaptive control law based on minimisation of the energy function to ensure stability in the Lyapunov sense is presented.

The doctrine of informed consent functions reasonably within its area of applicability of competent adults, though even in that setting it suffers from some difficulties both theoretical and practical. When applied by proxy to incompetent persons such as mentally incapacitated adults and newborn babies, the doctrine becomes a legal fiction, i.e., a legal construct created to force-fit a set of facts into an established legal analysis that is not literally applicable. The conceptual, ethical and practical difficulties are maximized with proxy permission to authorize circumcision of neonates. “Proxy consent” for neonatal circumcision is a legal fiction that cloaks a usurpation of agency allowing ostensibly hallowed principles of autonomy and self-determination to be violated with impunity. Such legal fictions conceal our violations from ourselves and others under the pretenses of legal authorization and compliance with ethics and human rights, and—in the circumcision context—the further pretense of medical authorization, masking our failure to properly safeguard human dignity and autonomy.

Voltage mode filters implemented using (non-ideal) current conveyors are compared with the corresponding filters implemented using (non-ideal0 op.-amp. and current conveyor niters are found to perform similarly although the parasitic impedances of the non-ideal current conveyor sometimes complicate the design of current conveyor filters.

A procedure for synthesizing active networks due to Hilberman (1968) is revisited in view of recent interest in current conveyors. It is seen that Hilberman's work provides a general procedure for designing RC current conveyor networks to have a specified voltage transfer function, An example is considered in which the current conveyors are implemented using the AD844.

Infant male circumcision continues despite growing questions about its medical justification. As usually performed without analgesia or anaesthetic, circumcision is observably painful. It is likely that genital cutting has physical, sexual and psychological consequences too. Some studies link involuntary male circumcision with a range of negative emotions and even post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Some circumcised men have described their current feelings in the language of violation, torture, mutilation and sexual assault. In view of the acute as well as long-term risks from circumcision and the legal liabilities that might arise, it is timely for health professionals and scientists to re-examine the evidence on this issue and participate in the debate about the advisability of this surgical procedure on unconsenting minors.

The authors describe a simple procedure for using PSPICE to calculate the relative stability of an active circuit. The active circuit can be implemented using a variety of active devices, including op amps, current conveyors, transimpedance amplifiers, and operational transconductance amplifiers. This procedure can be used with the PSPICE macromodels provided by amplifier manufacturers. This procedure is applied to circuits containing operational transconductance amplifiers and transimpedance amplifiers. Examples are given. >

It is demonstrated that a commercially available integrated circuit, the AD844 from Analog Devices, implements a current conveyor.

Barriers of many different types make successful circumcision-related lawsuits extremely difficult to bring. Actual cases we and others have brought show that among factors impeding progress are (1) financial risks; (2) procedural difficulties; (3) misconceptions and compassion misallocation among judges, lawyers, jury members, the media, and the general public; (4) constraints unique to circumcision lawsuits that are imposed by statutes of limitation and statutes of repose; (5) need for parental participation in lawsuits; (6) problem of damages not being atrocious enough to justify litigation; and (7) the scarcity of helpful case law. Players whose roles we will be scrutinizing include clients, lawyers, judges, juries, courts and procedures, doctors, media, and fellow activists. We will discuss the many reasons why potential plaintiffs never even make it to the filing stage. We will look at why judges and juries are starting to understand that just having a foreskin is not reason enough to have a circumcision.

In this article, we offer a critical examination of the tendency to segregate discussion of surgical alterations to the male and female genitals into separate compartments--the first known as circumcision, the second as genital mutilation. We argue that this fundamental problem of definition underlies the considerable controversy surrounding these procedures when carried out on minors, and that it hinders objective discussion of the alleged benefits, harms, and risks. We explore the variable effects of male and female genital surgeries, and we propose a scale of damage for male circumcision to complement the World Health Organization's categorization of female genital mutilation. The origins of the double standard identified are placed in historical perspective, and in a brief conclusion we make a plea for greater gender neutrality in the approach to this contentious issue.

One of the greatest challenges facing lawyers and other activists advocating a halt to male “circumcision,” or male genital mutilation, is achieving universal agreement that this practice constitutes a human rights violation. A straightforward reading of numerous human rights treaties demonstrates that circumcision constitutes a violation of numerous international agreements. Acknowledgments of this fact have been recorded by scholars, non-governmental organisations, courts, and the United Nations. To date, neither the United Nations nor any other major, internationally recognised human rights agency or non-governmental organisations has initiated any program to pursue the eradication of male genital mutilation. The organisation to which such a campaign must ultimately be addressed is, of course, the United Nations.

The struggles to protect male and female genital integrity may be analyzed as parts of larger struggles for men’s and women’s rights. While genital integrity still lacks binding legal safeguards, individual victories have been won. A number of important gender equity cases have been decided by the United States Supreme Court affirming men’s right to equal treatment. Several illuminating parallels link genital integrity and gender equity. Like genital integrity, gender equity is fundamentally a civil rights movement. Both topics seem strange at first but ultimately derive from basic principles. Both causes are relatively unfamiliar to the broader legal community, not to mention the general public. Both can be rendered easily understandable through parallels with familiar topics. Genital integrity may temporarily be less legally robust. Both movements may be on the verge of some major breakthroughs. The interconnections between gender equity and genital integrity are growing in importance. Awareness of the gender equity movement should inform our activism regardless of our personal views. Both movements are relatively neglected at this particular historical moment. The very resistance such discussions raise may represent the barriers faced by activism in gaining support for its male-protective cause.

The objective of this study was to determine whether the justifications given for promoting mass circumcision as a preventive measure for HIV infection are reasonable and whether mass circumcision is a feasible preventive measure for HIV infection in developing countries.The medical literature concerning the practice of circumcision in the absence of medical indication was reviewed regarding its impact on HIV infection and related issues. The literature was analysed with careful attention to historical perspective.Our results show that the medical literature supporting mass circumcision for the prevention of HIV infection is inconsistent and based on observation studies. Even if the two ongoing randomised controlled trials in Africa show a protective benefit of circumcision, factors such as the unknown complication rate of the procedure, the permanent injury to the penis, human rights violations and the potential for veiled colonialism need to be taken into account. Based on the best estimates, mass circumcision would not be as cost-effective as other interventions that have been demonstrated to be effective.Even if effective, mass circumcision as a preventive measure for HIV in developed countries is difficult to justify.

In August 2001, NOCIRC submitted an oral address and a written “intervention” to the United Nations’ Sub-Commission for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, which became part of the official UN record. We provide the text of our written intervention. At this point in time, the Sub-Commission is the most favorable forum in which to seek UN recognition of male genital cutting (MGC) as a human rights violation. The UN and the Sub-Commission are to be congratulated for their progress in acknowledging the importance of MGC. Further work remains to expand on the UN’s and the Sub-Commission’s statements that (1) at least, under certain circumstances, MGC can constitute a human rights violation; and (2) anti-male sex discrimination violates human rights. Analysis of reports regarding MGC is provided by the Sub-Commission’s Special Rapporteur on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and the Girl Child. We review the Sub-Commission’s 1998 excision of male children from the Special Rapporteur’s mandate, in apparent violation of both its own procedures and leading human rights documents.

Using a general procedure for designing C current conveyor networks having a specified voltage transfer function, an example is considered in which the current conveyors are implemented using the AD844. A comparison is made between filters implemented using op amps and filters implemented using current conveyors. It is found that filters containing nonideal current conveyors and filters containing nonideal op amps preform similarly. >

Throughout history and throughout the world, a wide range of body mutilation practices have been carried out by adults on children. Many such practices involve sexual mutilation, including female genital mutilation in present-day Africa, male circumcision in the present-day United States, penile skin stripping in nineteenth-century Arabia, female genital mutilation in the twentieth-century United States, subincision among Australian aborigines, and others. Practices involving non-sexual body mutilation include footbinding in China, infant cranial deformation in ancient Central Asia, infant swaddling in ancient Central Asia, forced bone deformation in Malaysia, and others. Arguably includable here is the drastic practice of infanticide, for which (obviously) no benefit to the individual is claimed but which has taken root in a wide variety of cultures and periods. I will examine infanticide as practiced in nineteenth-century India. These practices are allegedly performed for the benefit of the child but result in overall harm to the child while producing actual or imagined benefits only for others, i.e., parents, surgeons/midwives, and/or society. The practice adopted by a particular culture receives social, cultural and/or legal endorsement within that culture’s set of mores and values. Analytical tools provided by a range of disciplines including law, sociology, human rights, anthropology, and psychology are applied to explore how a broad variety of bizarre and extremely harmful practices on children are justified and rationalized into consistency with a culture’s asserted values.

Human rights agreements—applicable either through ratification or through customary law—forbid circumcision based on such important principles as the rights of the child, the right to freedom of religion, the right to the highest attainable standard of health, and the right to protection against torture. Cultural blindness facilitates the perpetuation of many barbaric and/or egregiously discriminatory practices and conditions. The many laws against female sexual mutilation, and the discriminatory failure to outlaw and vilify male sexual mutilation, violate equal protection under both international human rights law and American legal doctrines.

A series of nonsteroidal alkylamines and alkylamides, which apparently inhibit phytosterol dealkylation in insects and free-living nematodes, as well as steps in the ecdysteroid biosynthetic pathway of insects, are also known to affect growth and development of animal-parasitic nematodes. The effect of these compounds on the motility, pairing, and viability of the trematode, Schistosoma mansoni, maintained in vitro was examined by incorporating the potential inhibitors into the medium employed for parasite culture. The alkylamines were more active than their amide counterparts, killing all parasites within 18 hr when tested at 25 parts per million. At lower concentrations, reductions in schistosome pairing and motility were observed. The functional group of the amine compounds influenced the schistosomicidal activity, with N-ethylamines being more effective than N,N-dimethylamines of identical carbon chain-length. Of all the compounds tested, N-ethyldodecanamine appeared to be the most promising schistosomicidal agent, killing all parasites within 22 hr at 10 parts per million and preventing parasite pairing at 3 parts per million.

Recovery after an endodontic treatment can only be assessed clinically, on the basis of symptomatological and radiographic data, for lack of histo-clinical correlations. An anatomicopathological examination of damaged tissues pinpoints the anatomical obstacles and tissular modifications apt to undermine the success of root canal work. The aim of endodontic treatment is to maintain or reinstate an environment conducive to healing through the use of a non-traumatic endodontic technique, followed by functional rehabilitation of the dental organ in its periodontia structures.

Different from hemimetabolous insects in which the adult central nervous system (CNS) is essentially a replica of the embryonic CNS, most of the adult brain in holometabolous insects develops during postembryonic neurogenesis (Panov, 1963). Postembryonic neurogenesis has been well-described in various insects (Panov, 1963; Technau and Heisenberg, 1982; Booker and Truman, 1987). Since postembryonic neurogenesis in Lepidoptera is a critical period of terminal neuroblast differentiation, neuronal cell death and synaptogenesis for transformation of larval neurons into adult neurons, we have been interested in identifying proteins and genes that influence this developmental process in M. sexta. In this paper, we review our previous work concerning: 1) changes in expression of Manduca intracellular brain polypeptides, and of Manduca brain polypeptides that are secreted into an incubation medium at different stages of post-embryonic neurogenesis (Davis, submitted), and 2) cloning, from a Manduca brain cDNA library, genes that are activated during metamorphosis (Davis and Svoboda, 1989). Since it is not known how many of the secreted polypeptides are actual neurosecretory polypeptides, the secreted polypeptides will be referred to as putative neurosecretory polypeptides.

The article presents the use of the hybrid computing technique in the design and optimization of a novel hydrostatic drive for urban vehicles. The vehicle system is modelled on the analog computer whereas the optimization algorithm and overall control is performed in the digital section. The ‘on-line’ features and the high computing speed of the analog model proves very advantageous in both the preliminary design and the system optimization process. The drive system consists of a small IC-engine, a hydrostatic transmission and a hydraulic accumulator energy storage. The hydraulic accumulator assists the engine during acceleration and allows for regenerative braking which results in a high overall efficiency in urban driving, where frequent stops occur. In the first stage of the design, the feasibility of the drive concept was evaluated. Thus preliminary designed system is repeatedly ‘driven’ through a short driving cycle under the control of the digital computer. A direct search optimization routine known as complex method evaluates the drive performance and readjusts four drive controller parameters. The objective of the optimization is to minimize the fuel consumption without any loss of drive dynamics. The comparison of the drive performance before and after optimization is presented and discussed.