Traditional disciplinary guidelines are inadequate to address some of the ethical dilemmas that emerge when conducting research on violence against women and girls. This article is organized according to the ethical principles of respect for persons, privacy and confidentiality, justice, beneficence, and nonmaleficence. In the article, I describe dilemmas involved in cross-cultural research, re...

Participants are often not informed by investigators who conduct randomised, placebo-controlled acupuncture trials that they may receive a sham acupuncture intervention. Instead, they are told that one or more forms of acupuncture are being compared in the study. This deceptive disclosure practice lacks a compelling methodological rationale and violates the ethical requirement to obtain informe...

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Informed consent is a foundational concept necessary for ethical conduct of clinical research and practice. It is a technical tool that shifts the autonomy to decide whether a medical procedure should be performed-from the doctor to the patient. However there is an ongoing discussion in bioethical circles on the level of comprehension of the informed consent process by the patients and research...

Often ethical concerns are limited to issues like informed consent, confidentiality patients rights etc. However ethical concern includes all areas of doctor-patient relationship? This paper will highlight ethical issues m everyday clinical practice. Clear-cut guidelines are not available in these areas but the purpose is to sensitise the profession of the need to carefully scrutinise very acti...

We propose a new protocol solving the fundamental problem of disseminating a piece of information to all members of a group of n players. It builds upon the classical randomized rumor spreading protocol and several extensions. The main achievements are the following: Our protocol spreads the rumor to all other nodes in the asymptotically optimal time of (1+ o(1)) log 2 n. The whole process can ...

Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes are usually decoded by running an iterative belief-propagation, or message-passing, algorithm over the factor graph of the code. The traditional message-passing schedule consists of updating all the variable nodes in the graph, using the same pre-update information, followed by updating all the check nodes of the graph, again, using the same pre-update info...