The neutrality of the art and architecture of courtrooms and courthouses has dominated the public perception in the Indian context. The courtroom design and the visual artistic elements present within these judicial places have very often been considered to be insignificant to the notions of law and justice that they reflect. As art and architecture present certain historical narratives, reflect political allegories and have significant impact on the perceptions of their viewers, they have critical socio-political ramifications. This makes it pertinent (...) to explore them and investigate the paradox of their deployment and interpretation in today’s increasingly mediatized world. Through an ethnographic study of the Supreme Court of India, this paper interprets its art and architecture, and, the symbolism and semiotics reflected through them. Arguing against their neutrality and insignificance, the paper demonstrates how they reflect nationalism, certain ideologies and power-space dynamics. It further argues that they act as evidence of political metaphors related to justice, power and democracy. With a conversation between law, architecture and semiotics, the paper investigates the historical and spatial dimensions of its architecture and artistic elements. Mapping the Court’s architectural elements, I examine how the visual representation of ‘justice as virtue’ finds translation in its design through transfer of certain images, including the image of the ‘scales of justice’, into it, while absenting the notion of ‘justice as struggle’—to contemplate on how legal architecture gives evidence to the vexed relationship between law and justice and also of the break from the colonial past. (shrink)

BackgroundCompetent end-of-life care is an essential component of total health care provision, but evidence suggests that it is often deficient. This study aimed to evaluate the knowledge and attitudes about key end-of-life issues and principles of good death among doctors in clinical settings.MethodsA cross-sectional study was conducted among allopathic medical doctors working in in-ward clinical settings of tertiary care hospitals in Sri Lanka using a self-administered questionnaire with open- and close-ended questions as well as hypothetical clinical scenarios. Univariate and logistic (...) regression analysis were used to identify the independent factors associated with knowledge and attitudes.ResultsOf the responders who had not been a caregiver for a terminally ill relative (n = 390), 57.9% were men with a mean age of 36.5 years (SD = 8.2). Compared to undergraduate (65.6%; n = 256), only 27.4% (n = 107) had received end-of-life care training at postgraduate level. Only 65.9% of doctors favoured disclosing terminal prognosis to patients; 27.7% of doctors were aware of advance directives; 14.6% were aware of the correct time of death when certifying brain death; 70.3% felt more comfortable in withholding than withdrawing life-sustaining treatment; 61.3% were aware of do-not-attempt cardiopulmonary resuscitation (DNACPR) decisions while 26.7% felt reluctant to administer it; 15.1% thought that all life-sustaining therapy should be withdrawn with a DNACPR decision; and only17.9% were able to name the four principles of medical ethics while 57.9% could not name a single. Participants scored a mean of 9.2 (SD = 3.9) of a maximum 14 points when tested on principles of a ‘good death’. Doctors who had pursued postgraduate studies were more likely to be aware of breaking bad news (adjusted-Odds-Ratio:1.99; 95%CI = 1.19–3.32), advance directives (adjusted-OR: 4.15; 95%CI = 2.49–6.94), aware of certifying the correct time of death (adjusted-OR:2.37; 95%CI = 1.33–4.2) and less reluctant to make DNACPR decisions (adjusted-OR:1.74; 95%CI = 1.13–2.68). Doctors who had worked in ICU were more comfortable withholding than withdrawing treatment (adjusted-OR:1.99; 95%CI = 1.2–3.31).ConclusionsKnowledge and attitudes about end-of-life care, good death and principles of medical ethics among doctors in Sri Lanka were suboptimal. Structured training of end-of-life care needs to be integrated within curricula and in-service training. (shrink)

Background The use of lengthy, detailed, and complex informed consent forms is of paramount concern in biomedical research as it may not truly promote the rights and interests of research participants. The extent of information in ICFs has been the subject of debates for decades; however, no clear guidance is given. Thus, the objective of this study was to determine the perspectives of research participants about the type and extent of information they need when they are invited to participate in (...) biomedical research. Methods This multi-center, cross-sectional, descriptive survey was conducted at 54 study sites in seven Asia-Pacific countries. A modified Likert-scale questionnaire was used to determine the importance of each element in the ICF among research participants of a biomedical study, with an anchored rating scale from 1 to 5. Results Of the 2484 questionnaires distributed, 2113 were returned. The majority of respondents considered most elements required in the ICF to be ‘moderately important’ to ‘very important’ for their decision making. Major foreseeable risk, direct benefit, and common adverse effects of the intervention were considered to be of most concerned elements in the ICF. Conclusions Research participants would like to be informed of the ICF elements required by ethical guidelines and regulations; however, the importance of each element varied, e.g., risk and benefit associated with research participants were considered to be more important than the general nature or technical details of research. Using a participant-oriented approach by providing more details of the participant-interested elements while avoiding unnecessarily lengthy details of other less important elements would enhance the quality of the ICF. (shrink)

We extend some of the classical connections between automata and logic due to Büchi [5] and McNaughton and Papert [12] to languages of finitely varying functions or “signals”. In particular, we introduce a natural class of automata for generating finitely varying functions called ’s, and show that it coincides in terms of language definability with a natural monadic second-order logic interpreted over finitely varying functions Rabinovich [15]. We also identify a “counter-free” subclass of ’s which characterise the first-order definable languages (...) of finitely varying functions. Our proofs mainly factor through the classical results for word languages. These results have applications in automata characterisations for continuously interpreted real-time logics like Metric Temporal Logic Chevalier et al. [6] and [7]. (shrink)