_index.org

Medical Ethics Index

Last edited: January 1, 2026

Harm Principle in Pediatric Ethics

Only intervene when there’s significant harm.

four pillars of medical ethics

  • beneficence: act in the best interest of the patient
  • non-maleficence: do no harm
  • autonomy: respect the right of people to make decisions for themselves
  • justice: seek fairness with what we do

…on children

  • autonomy is very adult centric… “substituted judgment is hard”
  • altruistic surrogacy: act in the children’ best interest
  • altruism: doesn’t require the consent / knowledge of others + doing something for someone else

SU-EALC110 JAN202025

Last edited: January 1, 2026

Legends in Classical Chinese

Story of Ch’un-hyang is in essence a story of marvel; i.e. a 传奇—a “legend”. Confucian scholar-officials shun this type of work as a function of it talking about fantastical scenes.

In some sense similar to the online novel scene now: reasonably interesting but not analyzed in serious scholarship.

Joseon period social liberality was largely destroyed by Japanese colonial invasion.

Consider

  • who is the narrator?
  • when does the narrator sing a song
  • what are the function of excessive details?
  • where are the puns and why?

convex problem

Last edited: January 1, 2026

Recall optimization (math). An optimization (math) problem is convex if:

  1. the objective is convex function
  2. inequality constrains’ functions are convex
  3. equality constrains are affine

Special convex problems

Optimality Criterion for Differentiable Objective

\(x\) is optimal IFF its feasible and

\begin{equation} \nabla f_{0} \qty(x)^{T} \qty(y-x) \geq 0 \end{equation}

for all feasible \(y\).

examples

  • unconstrained problem: \(x\) minimizes \(f_{0}\qty(x)\) IFF \(\nabla f_{0}\qty(x) = 0\)
  • equality constrained problem: \(x\) minimizes \(f_{0}\qty(x)\) subject to \(Ax = b\) IFF there is a \(v\) such that \(Ax = b\), \(\nabla f_{0}\qty(x) + A^{T}v = 0\)

Local and Global Optima

Any locally optimal point of a convex problem is globally optimal.

Convex Problem Hiearchy

Last edited: January 1, 2026

A Linear Program is equivalent to an SDP

And SOCP has an equivalent of SDP

cornucopia of analysis

Last edited: January 1, 2026

Pythagorean Theorem

\begin{equation} \|u + v\|^{2} = \|u \|^{2} + \|v\|^{2} \end{equation}

if \(v\) and \(u\) are orthogonal vectors.

Proof:

An Useful Orthogonal Decomposition

Suppose we have a vector \(u\), and another \(v\), both belonging to \(V\). We can decompose \(u\) as a sum of two vectors given a choice of \(v\): one a scalar multiple of \(v\), and another orthogonal to \(v\).

That is: we can write \(u = cv + w\), where \(c \in \mathbb{F}\) and \(w \in V\), such that \(\langle w,v \rangle = 0\).