Informal Working Group Research Articles

Getting to Grips with Torture

In October 2000 an informal working group of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights met to discuss the latest drafts of an Optional Protocol to the 1984 United Nations Convention against Torture. The Working Group itself met for its 9th session in February 2001 and its 10th session was held in January 2002.2The primary purpose of this Optional Protocol is to create a new international mechanism that will have a preventive role and which would operate by conducting visits to states and to places of detention within states and, in the light of such visits, enter into a ‘dialogue’ with the state concerned in order to help them ensure that torture does not occur. The origins of this initiative lie in a proposal formally tabled in the early 1980s during the negotiations that led up to the adoption of the UNCAT itself but at that time it was clear that so radical a move as the establishment of an international body with an automatic right of entry into any place of detention would be unacceptable within the broader international community.3However, the idea was taken up on a regional level within Europe and in 1987 the Council of Europe adopted the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment which established the European Committee of the same name (known as the CPT), very much by way of an example to the rest of the world, or so it was thought.4

SIAM Conference on Optimization, Validated Computing 2002, and the Fields Institute Informal Working Group on Validated Optimization

SIAM Conference on Optimization, Validated Computing 2002, and the Fields Institute Informal Working Group on Validated Optimization

All women with breast conservation surgery for ductal carcinoma in situ should have radiation

Women today who opt for breast conservation surgery for the treatment of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) elect this treatment over the alternate surgery, that is simple mastectomy. They do so because they perceive that mastectomy, with removal of all of the breast tissue, is too radical a procedure for a diagnosis of non-invasive cancer. But these same women want assurance from their physicians that the breast-conserving surgery will not compromise their prognosis. Since DCIS by definition cannot spread beyond the treated breast at the time of diagnosis, but can return as a local failure, with a risk of invasive cancer in about one of every two local failures, minimizing this recurrent event is an important therapeutic goal. In the transition from treatment of DCIS with mastectomy to breast conservation surgery, several treatment schemas have been identified. The branches in the decisionmaking tree have become numerous over time, with increasing availability of detailed information on the extent of the lesion on imaging, the margin status and width, and other pathology details, and how these factors relate to a patient’s risk of local failure. An increasing knowledge about patient risk factors, such as age at the time of the diagnosis, and how this relates to local control or failure, also must be considered in the decision about the ‘best’ therapy. Finally, what is the impact of available treatment options on both the risk of local failure and the patient’s long-term health? As we have learned over time, breast cancer is a disease with a long natural history. Yet many of the ‘facts’ that we know today about DCIS were not recognized a decade ago, so trying to relate a given prognostic factor to long-term clinical outcome is problematic. An example of this is found in the work of the DCIS Collaborative Group, an informal working group of university hospitals in the USA and in Europe, which have pooled data on patients treated with breast-conservation surgery and radiation, to establish a large data base for the purpose of learning more about this disease. After an extensive central review of pathology material from 172 patients, multivariate analysis identified a significantly higher rate of local failure in patients whose tumors exhibited a nuclear grade of 3 and the histologic features of ‘comedo’ carcinoma, compared with those that did

Peatbog informal working group

Peatbog informal working group

Human-centered modeling in human reliability analysis: some trends based on case studies

As an informal working group of researchers from France, Germany and The Netherlands created in 1993, the EARTH association is investigating significant subjects in the field of human reliability analysis (HRA). Our initial review of cases from nuclear operating experience showed that decision-based unrequired actions (DUA) contribute to risk significantly on the one hand. On the other hand, our evaluation of current HRA methods showed that these methods do not cover such actions adequately. Especially, practice-oriented guidelines for their predictive identification are lacking. We assumed that a basic cause for such difficulties was that these methods actually use a limited representation of the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) paradigm. We proposed a human-centered model, which better highlights the active role of the operators and the importance of their culture, attitudes and goals. This orientation was encouraged by our review of current HRA research activities. We therefore decided to envisage progress by identifying cognitive tendencies in the context of operating and simulator experience. For this purpose, advanced approaches for retrospective event analysis were discussed. Some orientations for improvements were proposed. By analyzing cases, various cognitive tendencies were identified, together with useful information about their context. Some of them match psychological findings already published in the literature, some of them are not covered adequately by the literature that we reviewed. Finally, this exploratory study shows that contextual and case-illustrated findings about cognitive tendencies provide useful help for the predictive identification of DUA in HRA. More research should be carried out to complement our findings and elaborate more detailed and systematic guidelines for using them in HRA studies.

The WHO informal working group on echinococcosis

The WHO informal working group on echinococcosis

Initial report of the Working Group on Frontiers in Perioperative Myocardial Management.

An informal working group on perioperative myocardial management has been formed, which is predominantly composed of cardiac surgeons and anesthesiologists. The first meeting was introduced with a reminder that perioperative ischemia is still an important component of cardiac operations when sophisticated tools are used to monitor its presence and physiological effects. Moreover, perioperative ischemia is associated with adverse outcomes in many instances. The discussion touched upon generalized problems that included leukocyte activation, oxidant stress, warm cardioplegia, warm heart surgery, echocardiographic assessment of coronary blood flow, vascular endothelial responses to cardiac operations and cardiopulmonary bypass, myocardial stunning, substrate enhancement of cardioplegic solutions, tools for assessing perioperative ventricular performance, and detection of perioperative myocardial ischemia. It was agreed that a highly focused program on the agenda of myocardial stunning would be the topic for the next meeting of the group, with the results to be published in a future issue.

Preface

In June 1989, Dansk Olie- og Gasproduktion A/S (DOPAS) sponsored a well-attended symposium on the Jurassic in the Southern Central Trough held at the DOPAS premises in Hørsholm, Denmark. The background for the symposium was a desire among geologists working in the Dutch, German and Danish sectors of the North Sea to establish a forum to discuss problems of lithostratigraphic correlation across the sector boundaries and eventually arrive at a common nomenclature. A number of lectures were held at the symposium and an informal working group was established to deal with the details of lithostratigraphic correlation. The present publication, sponsored partly by DOPAS and partly by the Geological Survey of Denmark (DGU), contains extended abstracts of the lectures.

Continuing Medical Education

As the field of continuing medical education (CME) looked forward to the decade of the 1990s, 1989 held a number of pivotal events. This report summarizes some of those events and updates ongoing CME and American Medical Association/Physician's Recognition Award (AMA/PRA) activities that occurred between June 1989 and June 1990. <h3>COOPERATION IN CME</h3> The informal working group formed on October 8, 1988, to explore potential areas of cooperation and collaboration in CME met on October 26, 1989, in Chicago, Ill. The same "charter" organizations participated (the Alliance for Continuing Medical Education [ACME], the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education [ACCME], the Association of American Medical Colleges, the Association for Hospital Medical Education, the AMA, the Council of Medical Specialty Societies, the Society of Medical College Directors of Continuing Medical Education, the Southern Medical Association, and state medical societies). Topics discussed included the Second Congress on Continuing Medical Education, the change of publisher

Volcanic influences: International working group on volcanogenic sediments

A conclusion of the Geological Society of America Penrose Conference on Volcanic Influences on Terrestrial Sedimentation (August 28 to September 2, 1988) was that establishment of an informal working group would enhance our understanding of volcanogenic sedimentation. To establish the group, an ad hoc steering committee was formed at the conference and consists of W. J. Fritz (Georgia State University), R. S. Hildebrand (Geological Survey of Canada), R. Iverson (U.S. Geological Survey), P. Kokelaar (Chairman, University of Liverpool), T. C. Pierson (USGS), and G. A. Smith (University of New Mexico). The working group is open to researchers of any nation interested in the study of secondary transport and deposition of volcaniclastic materials in subaerial or subaqueous environments (e.g., transport, deposition, nomenclature, volcanic history, experiment, theory, hazard).

An intercomparison exercise on technetium-99 in seaweed

This paper reports the results of an intercomparison exercise carried out on the determination of 99Tc in Fucus vesiculosus taken from the coastline adjacent to Sellafield. This species of seaweed has a very high affinity for the radionuclide (e.g., two orders of magnitude higher than has the edible prophyra species); it presents, therefore, a potential source for a biological reference material with the highest possible specific activity. Details of the preparation and homogeneity testing before distribution of samples for analysis are described and summaries of analytical procedures used by each participants provided. The exercise was arranged by the UK Analysts' Informal Working Group and participants comprised laboratories considered to be expert in the analysis and others who were using the opportunity to demonstrate their capability to perform this type of determination.

Is Crisis Management Always Possible?

After the Cuban missile crisis had been resolved, President John F. Kennedy confessed that the odds of the Soviets going to war seemed to him at the time somewhere between one out of three and even.' Kennedy's judgment has remained a matter of controversy among scholars and members of the Ex Com, the informal working group the President assembled to help him manage the crisis. Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy contend that it may have been a reasonably accurate estimate of the risks at the time.2 Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze, by contrast, argued that the President greatly exaggerated the prospect of war.3 Even if he did, Kennedy's judgment nevertheless reflects an undisputed political reality: the Cuban missile crisis was, relatively speaking, the closest the superpowers had ever come to nuclear war. It was not an experience that any of the participants looked forward to repeating. Whether by skill or by circumstance, or both, the superpowers have managed to avoid war-threatening confrontations since. There have been crises, to be sure, but none of them of the magnitude of Cuba. Even the 1973 Middle East crisis, the most serious superpower clash after 1962, was by all accounts a faint echo