Close bosom friends revisited

I didn't get around to blogging it at the end of last term, but one of the things that impressed me in the last writing assignment was that a couple of people cited Keats' poem "To Autumn" in their analysis of the meaning of Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken". As you know, I cited the same poem to support the thesis in my own essay on Frost, and it was a pleasant surprise to come across the same work used for similar purposes in other essays on that topic. The people who did that had not read my essay in advance, since I only wrote it the day your first drafts were due, nor am I aware of any online source you were likely to come across that made teh same link, so I was pretty sure that the connection between the poems had been independently made by the writers.

What I wanted to blog was the genesis of Keats' poem being cited to support an understanding of Frost's. Very briefly, in his first essay last term, Petch used the phrase close-bosomed, and when she reviewed it, Roong made exactly the the comment that I would have made, clearly having gone to some trouble to research the term. Whilst agreeing with Roong's suggestion that it might be better not to use such an unusual and dated term in that particular essay, I also very much liked it, because it reminded me of the Keats poem, which has long been one of my favourites. In fact, the poem is so perfect that not even having to study it in high school could make me dislike it. (That's not really fair. The senior English master at my high school, who taught us that year, was very capable, and obviously loved his job.) Anyway, the phrase, and Roong's considered response in her review comments, prompted me to blog on it (Peter, 2010), which I guess is where others might have come across it and decided that Keats' "To Autumn" could be used as relevant support to help us better appreciate Frost's poem, to which use they very competently put it.

And now I'm wondering: is that right, or did Keats end up in essays on Frost via some other road taken?

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References

Peter. (2010, January 20). Close bosom friends. Class Blog - AEP at AUA. Message posted to http://peteraep.blogspot.com/ Retrieved February 28, 2010 from http://peteraep.blogspot.com/2010/01/close-bosom-friends.html

(This reference list entry is slightly different to what the latest (2007) APA style guide recommends, which does not include the link to the specific post or the name of the Blog.)

Airport Body Scanning Raises Radiation Exposure, Committee Says

I found this news is interesting.Thus, I quoted from the website to post.

According to the news on Bloomberg 's website, Trone published this interesting article.
"Feb. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Air passengers should be made aware of the health risks of airport body screenings and governments must explain any decision to expose the public to higher levels of cancer-causing radiation, an inter-agency report said.

Pregnant women and children should not be subject to scanning, even though the radiation dose from body scanners is “extremely small,” said the Inter-Agency Committee on Radiation Safety report, which is restricted to the agencies concerned and not meant for public circulation. The group includes the European Commission, International Atomic Energy Agency, Nuclear Energy Agency and the World Health Organization.

A more accurate assessment about the health risks of the screening won’t be possible until governments decide whether all passengers will be systematically scanned or randomly selected, the report said. Governments must justify the additional risk posed to passengers, and should consider “other techniques to achieve the same end without the use of ionizing radiation.”

President Barack Obama has pledged $734 million to deploy airport scanners that use x-rays and other technology to detect explosives, guns and other contraband. The U.S. and European countries including the U.K. have been deploying more scanners at airports after the attempted bombing on Christmas Day of a Detroit-bound Northwest airline flight.

“There is little doubt that the doses from the backscatter x-ray systems being proposed for airport security purposes are very low,” Health Protection Agency doctor Michael Clark said by phone from Didcot, England. “The issue raised by the report is that even though doses from the systems are very low, they feel there is still a need for countries to justify exposures.”

3-D Imaging

A backscatter x-ray is a machine that can render a three- dimensional image of people by scanning them for as long as 8 seconds, the report says. The technology has also raised privacy issues in countries including Germany because it yields images of the naked body.

The Committee cited the IAEA’s 1996 Basic Safety Standards agreement, drafted over three decades, that protects people from radiation. Frequent exposure to low doses of radiation can lead to cancer and birth defects, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Most of the scanners deliver less radiation than a passenger is likely to receive from cosmic rays while airborne, the report said. Scanned passengers may absorb from 0.1 to 5 microsieverts of radiation compared with 5 microsieverts on a flight from Dublin to Paris and 30 microsieverts between Frankfurt and Bangkok, the report said. A sievert is a unit of measure for radiation.

European Union regulators plan to finish a study in April on the effects of scanning technology on travelers’ privacy and health. Amsterdam, Heathrow and Manchester are among European airports that have installed the devices or plan to do so.

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration has said that it ordered 150 scanners from OSI Systems Inc.’s Rapiscan unit and will buy an additional 300 imaging devices this year. The agency currently uses 40 machines, which cost $130,000 to $170,000 each, produced by L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. at 19 airports including San Francisco, Atlanta and Washington D.C. "


References

Jonathan Tirone."Airport Body Scanning Raises Radiation Exposure, Committee Says". (2010, Febuary 06). Bloomberg. Retrieved February 6, 2010 from http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aoG.YbbvnkzU&pos=11

Sensible, but is it moral? Popular, but is it just?

As those who have studied level 4 will be aware, there are strong practical grounds, especially but not limited to economic reasons, for legalising drugs. Hartmann, for example, argues for legalisation based on primarily economic reasons, which are found to also turn out to be best for societies and individuals (2007, p. 227).

In her short paragraph, Hartmann ignores the moral issues in making drugs illegal, but these are a thicket. Most obviously, can it even be morally just for a state to make laws against the use of drugs? If so, on what sort of moral theory can that be right? What could justify such laws?

But on the other hand, if, as many argue, the law itself if grievously unjust in making making drugs illegal, why is it unjust?

What do you think?

• Are Thailand's (or your country's) current drug laws just or unjust? Why?
• What makes them morally right or wrong?
• What are the moral limits on what laws a government may pass?
• Are there any moral limits on what a government can do to its citizens?
  Why? What are such limitations based on?
• Was Thaksin right in declaring his repeated "war on drugs"? It was certainly a popular war. Oddly, even some of his enemies seem to have approved of the anti-drug policies.
• Is the US government right to criminalise marijuana growing, sale and use in the state of California, where it is that state's most valuable cash crop, contributing enormously to the economy? (Hartmann, 2007, p.227; Levitt & Dubner, 2009, p.66)
• And how about the question of prostitution? I don't mean do you like it or not, or would you want your brother to enter that industry or not. I mean, are laws allowing or disallowing prostitution just or unjust? Why? What makes them just or unjust?
• And I'm sure you can think of numerous other common examples where state law conflicts with what appears to be the purely personal decisions of very large numbers of citizens. And now that I come to think of it, does it, should it, matter how large the numbers are?

You might like to quickly jot down your response to the issues I've raised here in preparation for our next class reading.

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References

Hartmann, L. (2007). Quest 2 Reading and Writing (2nd. ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Levitt, S. & Dubner, S. (2009). Superfreakonomics. New York: William Morrow.

Dying to Die, thank you Mr. Doctor

After J. K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter, Terry Pratchett is probably England's most successful writer of children's stories, though his are a bit more complex and informed, especially in science and history, than Ms. Rowlings enjoyable romps. In "Terry Pratchett ready to be test case for suicide law", the BBC News reports that Pratchett wants to put the law on trial when it comes time for him to die (2010).

Pratchett has Alzheimer's disease, which means that his brain, and therefore both his mind and his personhood, will be destroyed before he dies, leaving him a mindless vegetable. He hates this idea, and is determined to die at a time and place of his choosing, in the company of his family and other loved ones, when he still knows who he is and who they are. He is also certain that his doctors are the best people to assist him to die in this way, and that it is a proper part of their job, a final service that he should be legally able to ask his doctors to perform for him to avoid a fate worse than death.

As Sir Terry (Queen Elizabeth the 2nd has bestowed a knighthood on him), says:

"It seems sensible to me that we should look to the medical profession that over the centuries has helped us to live longer and healthier lives to help us die peacefully among our loved ones in our own home without a long stay in God's waiting room," ("God's waiting room" ¶ 9)

In a slightly different but related case, the same article also relates the story of Kay Gilderdale, who was acquitted of attempted murder charges a few days ago after admitting that she had respected the wishes of and helped her seriously ill daughter, Lynn, to die in December 2008. Her daughters illness was not terminal, but was debilitating and there was no doubt that in assisting her suicide Ms Gilderdale was respecting her daughter's wish to die.

For the Gilderdale's, it would have been much easier had their family doctors been allowed to assist with Lynn's suicide as competent healers, rather than forcing the mother and daughter to act alone.

As you have probably inferred, I agree with Sir Terry that it really is a part of the doctors role as healer to also give us control over when and how we die, especially, but not only, in the case of a dehumanising terminal illness. Sadly, too few countries allow the healthy legal means to this end, preferring for bad (I mean immoral) reasons to deny their citizens the legal right to choose when and how to die with dignity as human beings.

But if you disagree with Sir Terry and me, please feel free to argue your case.

You have probably also noticed that I've used a definition of person that would, at least until some point well after conception, entail that abortion is not murder. And now that I think about it, that and similar definitions of what it is to be a human person must also have as a consequence that killing someone in the final stages of, let us say, Alzheimer's would not be, could not, be murder. (And I just added the adjective human to specifically rule out of this post the class of non-human persons: there are already enough definitive issues here without getting into the question of whether or not it would be murder to kill a non-human person. But with the rapid advance of technology, I don't think it will be long before the law will have to grapple with that issues: if you kill a machine that thinks, feels and has a sense of itself as a distinct entity, have you committed murder or just turned off a switch?)

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References

Terry Pratchett ready to be test case for suicide law. (2010, January 31). BBC News. Retrieved February 1, 2010 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8490062.stm