In Islam, the person with somatic sex ambiguity due to a disorder of sex development (DSD), such as 46,XX congenital adrenal hyperplasia or 46,XY androgen insensitivity, is recognized as khunsa. Two types of khunsa are distinguished: wadhih (discernible) and musykil (intractable). A recent fatwa (religious edict) in Malaysia decreed that it is permissible for male-assigned patients from these t...

Gender Identity Disorder (GID) is a condition in which a person experiences discrepancy between the sex assigned atbirth and the gender they identify with. Transsexualism is considered the most extreme form of GID and is characterized by the desire to live and be treated as a member of the opposite gender. The prevalence of male-to-female transsexualism in Belgium is estimated at 1 per 12,900 m...

Time-frequency reassignment may be viewed as a refinement of the short-time Fourier transform, in which phase information is used to reduce the smearing of energy associated with the standard spectrogram. However, even given the perceptibly clearer visual representation yielded by the reassignment method in the case of musical signals, the task remains of extracting useful information from it f...

Dale Jamieson has claimed that conventional human-directed ethical concepts are an inadequate means for accurately understanding our duty to respond to climate change. Furthermore, he suggests that a responsibility to respect nature can instead provide the appropriate framework with which to understand such a duty. Stephen Gardiner has responded by claiming that climate change is a clear case o...

Gender Dysphoria is a distressed state of mind that is of interest to psychiatrists, including forensic psychiatrists. Forensic matters can be best addressed only after one has a good appreciation of relevant psychiatric knowledge and concepts. In this commentary I review the nature of Gender Dysphoria, its relationship to cross-dressing and erotic arousal, and the question of whether it should...

Climate change has serious implications for the agricultural industry-both in terms of the need to adapt to a changing climate and to modify practices to mitigate for the impacts of climate change. In high-income countries where farming tends to be very intensive and large scale, it is important to understand farmers' beliefs and concerns about climate change in order to develop appropriate pol...

The earth's climate is changing and increasing ambient heat levels are emerging in large areas of the world. An important cause of this change is the anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases. Climate changes have a variety of negative effects on health, including cardiac health. People with pre-existing medical conditions such as cardiovascular disease (including heart failure), people carryi...

The workshop started with Doris Buss introducing the issues surrounding “the measurement of violence against women,” and its significance for public services, feminist organizations and scholars. The importance and the limits of measuring violence against women are varied; in some contexts, requirements to measure can impose burdens on overworked activists and service providers, and the product...

The reliable detection and attribution of changes in vegetation growth is a prerequisite for the development of strategies for the sustainable management of ecosystems. This is an extraordinary challenge. To our knowledge, this study is the first to comprehensively detect and attribute a greening trend in China over the last three decades. We use three different satellite-derived Leaf Area Inde...