Developing a Living Donor Ethics Framework

This chapter advances an ethical framework for living donor transplantation. Given the analogies between living donor transplantation and human subjects research, the three principles enumerated in the National Commission’s Belmont Report are adopted as the starting point: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. Two additional principles are also adopted: the principle of vulnerability and the principle that special relationships create special obligations. Whereas the Belmont Report discussed vulnerable groups, vulnerability is more aptly understood as an assortment of vulnerabilities that may apply to different people in different circumstances at different times of their lives. Eight distinct but overlapping vulnerabilities are described: capacitational, juridic, deferential, social, medical, situational, allocational, and infrastructural. The living donor advocate team (LDAT) stands in special relationship with the potential living donor and supports living organ donation provided that the living donor successfully addresses the challenges to autonomy and voluntariness that these vulnerabilities pose.

Data classification methods for preserving spatial patterns

The primary purpose of choropleth maps is to display or even to emphasize special relationships or patterns in the spatial distribution of attribute values. However, because classification methods commonly used and implemented in software packages (such as equidistance, quantiles, Jenks, etc.) are data-driven, a preservation of such spatial patterns is not guaranteed. Instead of such a data-driven approach in the following a task-oriented procedure is pursued: For typical patterns (local and global extreme values, large value differences to neighbours, spatial clusters, hot/cold spots) specific algorithms have been developed, implemented and tested.

Military Diplomacy

The armies of Arabia depend on foreign countries in many respects—as a source of protection, contract soldiers, and armaments—therefore, it is important take a closer look at their external relations. Chapter 5 begins with an analysis of the GCC, asking why it has failed to foster close military cooperation and examining the special relationships and deepening conflicts within the group. Since the Gulf’s militaries’ relations with all world regions could not possibly be tackled, the focus here is on Arab and Muslim states in the Middle East. The discussion of Gulf relations with the United States and the United Kingdom centers on the military bases they have used and maintained in Arabia. Israel has always occupied a unique place in the foreign affairs of Gulf countries; therefore, the last section of the chapter is taken up with the examination of the changing relationship between Jerusalem and the GCC.

Scholar2vec: Vector Representation of Scholars for Lifetime Collaborator Prediction

While scientific collaboration is critical for a scholar, some collaborators can be more significant than others, e.g., lifetime collaborators. It has been shown that lifetime collaborators are more influential on a scholar’s academic performance. However, little research has been done on investigating predicting such special relationships in academic networks. To this end, we propose Scholar2vec, a novel neural network embedding for representing scholar profiles. First, our approach creates scholars’ research interest vector from textual information, such as demographics, research, and influence. After bridging research interests with a collaboration network, vector representations of scholars can be gained with graph learning. Meanwhile, since scholars are occupied with various attributes, we propose to incorporate four types of scholar attributes for learning scholar vectors. Finally, the early-stage similarity sequence based on Scholar2vec is used to predict lifetime collaborators with machine learning methods. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets show that Scholar2vec outperforms state-of-the-art methods in lifetime collaborator prediction. Our work presents a new way to measure the similarity between two scholars by vector representation, which tackles the knowledge between network embedding and academic relationship mining.

Language, citizenship and schooling: A minority teacher’s perspective

In an age in which a shift towards increased authoritarianism and populism means that citizenship is defined in increasingly exclusive ways, migrant teachers’ perspectives are vital in informing inclusive educational decision making, policies and practices. We draw on the life history tradition to present the perspectives of one minority teacher, living and working in Norway. Elif, a Turkish-Norwegian, reflects on her motivations in pursuing teaching as a career. As a multilingual minority teacher, she considers the relationships between language use, citizenship and belonging. For Elif, having Turkish roots and living in Norway presents certain advantages, possibilities and challenges, both in school and society. She suggests that her intercultural experiences and multilingual skills provide her with insights that enable special relationships with minority students, whose language skills and identities she seeks to activate and demystify. She identifies tensions between the Norwegian ideal of equality, her experiences of being minoritized by her professional peers and the mechanisms of exclusion operating among teachers to the detriment of minority students. Minority teachers’ insights inform education for social justice. Including their stories avoids distorting knowledge critical to inclusive citizenship and inclusive processes of teaching and learning.

Parliamentary Elections in Georgia in the Context of US Policy

The current parliamentary elections in Georgia have clearly demonstrated the fact that today Washington is becoming a key figure not only in the country’s foreign policy, but also in its internal political life. Under a new J.Biden administration it seems that Washington’s approach to Georgia, taking into account both countries’ special relationships as well as Georgian extremely favorable geopolitical/ geographical factor will become more proactive, which may greatly affect changes in the configuration of the entire South Caucasus.