About the Conditions, Issues and Problems of Children Palliative Care Using the Example of the Children’s Hospice Activity in Saint Petersburg

The topicality of reforming the children palliative care (CPC) system due to the increase of the number of patients with cancer, congenital disorders, neurological damages, injuries consequences, genetically determined pathologies is discussed. The patterns of CPC service development, the importance to track those in need, to determine the required volume, forms, and methods of palliative care, and to develop human capacity were analyzed. The results of “Children's Hospice” (Saint Petersburg) activities in 2014–2019 years are presented alongside with the data on CPC development in Russia. This example shows the advantages of clear routing, establishment of indications for patients’ hospitalization, and availability of high-technology medical care and medications. All innovations have led to the significant change in medical conditions structure (over 80% of patients are children with neurological pathology), to the decrease in the number of hospitalizations, to the increase in the number of children who can get required respiratory support at home. The issues of high employees’ turnover and low staffing level in CPC institutions are discussed.

Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence

This volume forms a tribute to Adriana Cavarero’s extraordinary contribution to feminist philosophy. Responding to Cavarero’s provocative style the text presents an engagement between Cavarero, Judith Butler, Bonnie Honig, and seven other interlocutors, engaging with the themes of horrorism, sex, maternity, inclination, and the body to develop her feminist ethics of nonviolence. Presented as a musical arrangement that demonstrates Cavarero’s theory of pluriphony, this volume captures the collaborative yet diverse mood of much contemporary feminism, and particularly the inspirational, scholarly friendship between Butler, Honig, and Cavarero.

Reflections on post-bailout policy analysis in Ireland

This short article reflects on observations from the forthcoming volume Policy Analysis in Ireland, edited by Hogan & Murphy. The volume forms part of the International Library of Policy Analysis series, which covers more than twenty countries, published by Policy Press and edited by Michael Howlett and Iris Geva-May. While various themes emerge from the Irish volume, this article focuses on only one core question: whether and how the 2008 economic crisis contracted and expanded the capacity for policy analysis in Ireland. The troika of the International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank and the European Commission are associated with policy capacity innovation, but also with significant austerity. Both had a major and long-term impact on public services. While the article documents a range of successful post-bailout attempts to improve policy analysis capacity, it also points to often less conscious, but sometimes deliberate, decisions that diminished some forms of policy analysis capacity. We find economic policymaking capacity enhanced while changes to resources and policy opportunity structures depleted both space and the capacity for social policy analysis. This was particularly so within the equality and social justice sectors. Given ongoing social risks, the Covid-19 pandemic and the climate crisis, Ireland needs to adjust for a future of permanent uncertainty, or perpetual crises, and should seek to rebalance investment in social policy capacity and to develop systems for integrated policy analysis.

Strength of the naked singularity in critical collapse

The critical collapse of a scalar field is a threshold solution of black hole formation, in which a naked singularity arises. We study here the curvature strength of this singularity using a numerical ansatz. The behavior of the Jacobi volume forms is examined along a non-spacelike geodesic in the limit of approach to the singularity. These are seen to be vanishing, thus showing that all physical objects will be crushed to zero size near the singularity. Consequently, although the critical collapse is considered to be a fine-tuning problem, the naked singularity forming is gravitationally strong. This implies that the spacetime cannot be extended beyond the singularity, thus making the singularity genuine and physically interesting. These results imply that the nature of critical collapse may need to be examined and explored further.

Kathryn Vulić, Susan Uselmann, and C. Annette Grisé, ed., Devotional Literature and Practice in Medieval England: Readers, Reading, and Reception. Disputatio 29. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2016, 282 pp.

For medieval men and women, the process of reading—especially devotional reading—was far more complex that merely deciphering the letters on a page, as explained in this collection of nine distinguished essays with an Introduction and Afterword. Building on earlier scholarship, copiously cited, this volume forms “a contribution to the history of reading” (1) through its highly interdisciplinary approach that recurrently traces the influence of monastic reading practices, especially lectio divina, among the wider devout population. Most of the essays focus on vernacular materials sought after and read—or read aloud—among the laity, although the same English books (in manuscript or print) might also have been owned by religious houses.

Dust mass, cloud condensation nuclei, and ice-nucleating particle profiling with polarization lidar: updated POLIPHON conversion factors from global AERONET analysis

The POLIPHON (Polarization Lidar Photometer Networking) method permits the retrieval of particle number, surface area, and volume concentration for dust and non-dust aerosol components. The obtained microphysical properties are used to estimate height profiles of particle mass, cloud condensation nucleus (CCN) and ice-nucleating particle (INP) concentrations. The conversion of aerosol-type-dependent particle extinction coefficients, derived from polarization lidar observations, into the aerosol microphysical properties (number, surface area, volume) forms the central part of the POLIPHON computations. The conversion parameters are determined from Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) aerosol climatologies of optical and microphysical properties. In this article, we focus on the dust-related POLIPHON retrieval products and present an extended set of dust conversion factors considering all relevant deserts around the globe. We apply the new conversion factor set to a dust measurement with polarization lidar in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in central Asia. Strong aerosol layering was observed with mineral dust advected from Kazakhstan (0–2 km height), Iran (2–5 km), the Arabian peninsula (5–7 km), and the Sahara (8–10 km). POLIPHON results obtained with different sets of conversion parameters were contrasted in this central Asian case study and permitted an estimation of the conversion uncertainties.