An Act of Futility, or Pascal’s Wager?

Medical futility and the Texas Advance Directives Act of 1999.

Cardiac Mapping: Utility or Futility?

Introduction: Cardiac mapping is a broad term that covers several modes of mapping such as body surface,1 endocardial,2 and epicardial3 mapping. The recording and analysis of extracellular electrograms, reported as early as 1915, forms the basis for cardiac mapping.4 More commonly, cardiac mapping is performed with catheters that are introduced percutaneously into the heart chambers and sequent...

The Wager

The PortraitPrograms Project grew out of hyperinterdisciplinarianism of the famed Gigabase Sculpture Group,l in turn stimulated by recent cutbacks in government support for the arts. The National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation had jointly funded the Gigabase Sculpture Project to foster the literary/musical genre of composing genetic codes for novel organisms. L...

Pragmatic Awareness of the Request Speech Act in English as an Additional Language: Monolinguals or Bilinguals?

This study attempted to investigate the effect of bilingualism on pragmaticawareness and development among Iranian Turkish/Persian EFL learners. Data werecollected through a personal profile questionnaire with questions about theparticipants’ language background and a WDCT with 10 situations to determine theextent to which the bilinguals demonstrated their pragmatic awareness of requests.They w...

Sectioning on the street – futility or utility?

Aims and method A service evaluation was undertaken to examine outcomes in patients who were street homeless ('rough sleepers') and who were compulsorily admitted to hospital under the Mental Health Act 1983. The data were collected from the patients' case notes. Results At 1-year follow-up, patients had positive outcomes in areas such as accommodation status, registration with a general practi...