Beyond the Life Sentence – A Children’s Rights Lens on Sentencing for Murder

Children around the world who have been found responsible for murder continue to be sentenced to indeterminate or long periods of detention. This is in contravention of children’s rights standards which urge a ban on the life sentence and require that detention is used only for the shortest appropriate period of time. Nonetheless, the public and victims of crime have a legitimate interest in the protection of public safety and appropriate accountability for serious offending. Further, there is little guidance on what a rights compliant approach in such cases might involve. This work builds on previous studies of how children are sentenced for murder across the common law world and extends the analysis to a selection of European civil law jurisdictions. It explores and applies recent updated guidance from the Committee on the Rights of the Child and seeks to develop a framework for a children’s rights and human rights compliant approach to such cases.

How to Identify Potentials and Barriers of Raw Materials Recovery from Tailings? Part II: A Practical UNFC-Compliant Approach to Assess Project Sustainability with On-Site Exploration Data

A sustainable raw materials (RMs) recovery from waste requires a comprehensive generation and communication of knowledge on project potentials and barriers. However, a standardised procedure to capture sustainability aspects in early project development phases is currently missing. Thus, studies on different RM sources are not directly comparable. In this article, an approach is presented which guides its user through a practical interpretation of on-site exploration data on tailings compliant with the United Nations Framework Classification for Resources (UNFC). The development status of the overall project and the recovery of individual RMs are differentiated. To make the assessment results quickly comparable across different studies, they are summarised in a heat-map-like categorisation matrix. In Part I of this study, it is demonstrated with the case study tailings storage facility Bollrich (Germany) how a tailings mining project can be assessed by means of remote screening. In Part II, it is shown how to develop a project from first on-site exploration to a decision whether to intensify costly on-site exploration. It is concluded that with a UNFC-compliant assessment and classification approach, local sustainability aspects can be identified, and a commonly acceptable solution for different stakeholder perspectives can be derived.

Prepayment rebate in Islamic microfinance cost-plus sale: a descending rebate proposed approach

Purpose This paper aims to propose an Islamic compliant approach that deals with the prepayment rebate on debts resulting from cost-plus sales and their accompanied sale-based financing contracts. The proposed approach uses the time value of money concept without charging excessive fees from the debtor in the early settlement of debts. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses a qualitative analysis via analyzing and reviewing relevant literature. A quantitative analysis is subsequently used with a proposed computation that addresses prepayment rebate accompanied by debts resulting from cost-plus sales. Findings The proposed approach results in a rebate amount for the debtor greater than those rebate amounts resulting from either conventional finance techniques or current Islamic finance practices. Research limitations/implications The application of the descending rebate proposed computation in this paper is restricted to cost-plus sale and their accompanied sale-based financing contracts only. The computation does not address any agreement or deal that may involve a rebate without a selling transaction. Originality/value The paper criticizes the prevailing practices for computing rebates in the case of debt prepayment, whether those nominated by conventional finance or others currently employed by most Islamic financial institutions. The paper also introduces a new rebate computation aimed to comply with Islamic finance's real context.

Semi-probabilistische Bemessung von Silikon-Klebeverbindungen: Ein Eurocode-konformer Ansatz unter Verwendung der Finiten-Elemente-Methode/Semi-probabilistic design of silicone adhesive joints: A Eurocode-compliant approach using the finite element method

Zusammenfassung Dieser Beitrag befasst sich mit der Anwendung des semi-probabilistischen Designkonzepts (Stufe I, DIN EN 1990) bei strukturellen Silikonklebstoffen. Zunächst werden Hintergrundinformationen zur Sicherheitstheorie und zum allgemeinen Rahmen des Eurocodes für die Herleitung von partiellen Materialsicherheitsbeiwerten gegeben. Dann wird im Rahmen dieses Beitrags ein konkreter Teilsicherheitsbeiwert für das Silikon „DOWSIL 993“ auf der Basis experimenteller Daten und einer neu vorgeschlagenen streckungsbasierten Grenzzustandsfunktion kalibriert. Dieser Teilsicherheitsbeiwert wurde dann für die Anwendung in Finite-Elemente-Berechnungsprogrammen derart erweitert, dass es nun zum ersten Mal möglich ist, diskretisierungsunabhängige statische Berechnungen von Silikon-Klebeverbindungen durchzuführen. Ein Beispiel für den statischen Nachweis einer geklebten Fassadenkonstruktion mittels Finite-Elemente-Berechnung zeigt die Anwendung von EC-0 auf Silikonklebstoffe und die Übertragung der EC-0-Methode auf die Finite-Elemente-Methode mit dem Ergebnis, dass netzunabhängige Traglasten ermittelt werden können.

Biomaterials for topical and transdermal drug delivery in reconstructive transplantation

Lifelong systemic immunosuppression remains the biggest challenge in vascularized composite allotransplantation (VCA) due to the adverse effects it causes. Since VCA is a life-enhancing procedure as compared with solid organ transplant which is life-saving; one needs to weigh the benefits and risks carefully. Thus, there is a huge unmet clinical need to design biomaterial-based vehicles that can deliver drugs more efficiently, topically and locally to eliminate adverse effects of systemic immune suppression. This review discusses several biomaterial-based systems that have been carefully designed, conceived and attempted to make VCA a more patient compliant approach. Variety of promising preclinical studies has shown the feasibility of the approaches, and clinical trials are required to bridge the gap. Several challenges for the future and new approaches have been discussed.

A novel approach for exposing and sharing clinical data: the Translator Integrated Clinical and Environmental Exposures Service

ObjectiveThis study aimed to develop a novel, regulatory-compliant approach for openly exposing integrated clinical and environmental exposures data: the Integrated Clinical and Environmental Exposures Service (ICEES).Materials and MethodsThe driving clinical use case for research and development of ICEES was asthma, which is a common disease influenced by hundreds of genes and a plethora of environmental exposures, including exposures to airborne pollutants. We developed a pipeline for integrating clinical data on patients with asthma-like conditions with data on environmental exposures derived from multiple public data sources. The data were integrated at the patient and visit level and used to create de-identified, binned, “integrated feature tables,” which were then placed behind an OpenAPI.ResultsOur preliminary evaluation results demonstrate a relationship between exposure to high levels of particulate matter ≤2.5 µm in diameter (PM2.5) and the frequency of emergency department or inpatient visits for respiratory issues. For example, 16.73% of patients with average daily exposure to PM2.5 >9.62 µg/m3 experienced 2 or more emergency department or inpatient visits for respiratory issues in year 2010 compared with 7.93% of patients with lower exposures (n = 23 093).DiscussionThe results validated our overall approach for openly exposing and sharing integrated clinical and environmental exposures data. We plan to iteratively refine and expand ICEES by including additional years of data, feature variables, and disease cohorts.ConclusionsWe believe that ICEES will serve as a regulatory-compliant model and approach for promoting open access to and sharing of integrated clinical and environmental exposures data.