Autoerotic death: incidence and age of victims--a population-based study

Review of the Australian National Coronial Information System and the Swedish National Forensic Database was undertaken over a 7-year period from 2001 to 2007 for all cases where death had been attributed to autoerotic death or sexual asphyxia. In Australia, there were 44 cases (M:F = 42:2) with the majority of victims aged >30 years (77%)-a yearly national rate of approximately 0.3/million. In Sweden, there were nine cases (M:F = 9:0) with the majority of cases aged <30 years (55%)-a yearly national rate of approximately 0.14/million. The usual male predominance was present in both populations, although the Australian victims were older than is usually reported. Lethal sexual asphyxia is uncommon in both the Australian and Swedish populations, with a lower rate than has been cited for North America. Whether this is because of different kinds of paraphilic activities in different populations or of differences in methods of central data collection is uncertain.     

How reliable is cloudsourcing? A review of articles in the technical media 2005–11

A review of articles in the technical media between 2005 and 3Q 2011 disclosed reports on 49 outages involving 20 cloudsourcing providers. Several of these were major events. Many caused difficulties for user-organisations’ staff. Some caused lengthy suspension of services by user-organisations to their customers. A number of them involved irretrievable loss of data. Many user-organisations have failed to risk-assess their use of cloudsourcing, and are exposing their businesses to unmanaged risks.     

After Columbia: The Space Shuttle Program and the Crisis in Space Access

The loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia on 1 February 2003 brought to the fore the sad history of the Space Shuttle's origins, evolution, operation, and the continuing challenge of space access. The crisis that emerged in human access to space because of the accident was greater than any experienced since the end of the Apollo program more than thirty years earlier. This essay explores the origins and operations of the Space Shuttle, the varied efforts to build a successor vehicle versus upgrading the shuttle fleet, and suggests that the first decade of the twenty-first century promises to offer both serious challenges and enormous potential for the development of new launch vehicles that may finally achieve the long-held dream of reliable, affordable access to space. The essay ends by asking whether or not the half-hearted quest for a shuttle replacement might not portend the demise human spaceflight for the United States.