background esophageal cancer is highly prevalent among the turkman people in northeastern iran. in order to evaluate its etiology, there is an on-going prospective cohort study in this area involving approximately 50000 subjects over the age of 40 years. the majority of these subjects are illiterate, thus obtaining inâ­formed consent is very important and difficult. methods initially, we explai...

The problematic nature of informed consent to medical treatment and research, and its relation to autonomy, trust and clinical practice, has been addressed on many occasions and from a variety of ethical perspectives in the pages of the Journal of Medical Ethics. This paper gives an account of how discussion of these issues has developed and changed, by describing a number of significant contri...

Objectives Research has tended to focus on the information that researchers and ethicists deem important for informed consent to clinical trial participation and on the deficits in patients’ understanding of this information. Drawing on an alternative ‘capabilities’ approach we explored what information parents prioritised when making a decision about their child’s participation in a clinical t...

Korf et al. (2001) developed a formula, KRE, to predict the number of nodes expanded by IDA* for consistent heuristics. They proved that the predictions were exact asymptotically (in the limit of large d), and experimentally showed that they were extremely accurate even at depths of practical interest. Zahavi et al. (2010) generalized KRE to work with inconsistent heuristics and to account for ...

Korf et al. (2001) developed a formula, KRE, to predict the number of nodes expanded by IDA* for consistent heuristics. They proved that the predictions were exact asymptotically (in the limit of large d), and experimentally showed that they were extremely accurate even at depths of practical interest. Zahavi et al. (2010) generalized KRE to work with inconsistent heuristics and to account for ...

O(log n) rounds has been a well known upper bound for rumor spreading using push&pull in the random phone call model (i.e., uniform gossip in the complete graph). A matching lower bound of Ω(logn) is also known for this special case. Under the assumption of this model and with a natural addition that nodes can call a partner once they learn its address (e.g., its IP address) we present a new di...