1,901,125 research outputs found
EU Cohesion policy: some fundamental questions
Indhira Santos analyses the impact of the European Unionâ??s cohesion policy both in terms of economic efficiency and redistribution to needy areas of the EU. She illustrates with data the confusion created by the multiple objectives of current EU cohesion policy and by the political horse-trading over levels of aid granted to different member states and regions. Finally, sh shows how a significant part of EU structural funds involves Â? ine net economic terms Â? simply transferring funds between individuals within one and the same region.
Fundamental Questions in Biology
The pace of our understanding of biology has engendered increasing specialization but there are still common fundamental challenges that unify biology and should form the core of future research
Fundamental questions for psychology
This paper argues that the mainstream of psychology is misconceived in ways which
make it largely unsuitable as a basis for clinical interventions.
Why do we need a new way of thinking about work with distressed individuals?
What is wrong with the many different styles of therapy and intervention already in
use
Effective Field Theory For Nuclei: Confronting Fundamental Questions in Astrophysics
Fundamental issues involving nuclei in the celebrated solar neutrino problem
are discussed in terms of an effective field theory adapted to nuclear few-body
systems, with a focus on the proton fusion process and the hep process. Our
strategy in addressing these questions is to combine chiral perturbation theory
-- an effective field theory of QCD -- with an accurate nuclear physics
approach to arrive at a more effective effective field theory that reveals and
exploits a subtle role of the chiral-symmetry scale in short-distance effects
encoded in short-range nuclear correlations. Our key argument is drawn from the
close analogy of the principal weak matrix element figuring in the hep process
to the suppressed matrix elements in the polarized neutron-proton capture at
threshold currently being measured in the laboratories.Comment: 11 pages. Invited talk given by MR at the International Conference on
Few-Body Problems, Taipei, Taiwan, 6-10 March 200
Fundamental research questions in subterranean biology
Five decades ago, a landmark paper inSciencetitledThe Cave Environmentheralded caves as ideal natural experimental laboratories in which to develop and address general questions in geology, ecology, biogeography, and evolutionary biology. Although the 'caves as laboratory' paradigm has since been advocated by subterranean biologists, there are few examples of studies that successfully translated their results into general principles. The contemporary era of big data, modelling tools, and revolutionary advances in genetics and (meta)genomics provides an opportunity to revisit unresolved questions and challenges, as well as examine promising new avenues of research in subterranean biology. Accordingly, we have developed a roadmap to guide future research endeavours in subterranean biology by adapting a well-established methodology of 'horizon scanning' to identify the highest priority research questions across six subject areas. Based on the expert opinion of 30 scientists from around the globe with complementary expertise and of different academic ages, we assembled an initial list of 258 fundamental questions concentrating on macroecology and microbial ecology, adaptation, evolution, and conservation. Subsequently, through online surveys, 130 subterranean biologists with various backgrounds assisted us in reducing our list to 50 top-priority questions. These research questions are broad in scope and ready to be addressed in the next decade. We believe this exercise will stimulate research towards a deeper understanding of subterranean biology and foster hypothesis-driven studies likely to resonate broadly from the traditional boundaries of this field.Peer reviewe
Five Fundamental Questions on Central Counterparties
Central counterparties (CCPs) are designed to reduce aggregate counterparty credit risk and function as market infrastructures for capital markets in securities and derivatives. Although CCPs, also known as clearing houses, exist for well over a century, they have gained prominence since they became the main international public policy response to the Lehman crisis of making over-the-counter derivative transactions safer. This G20's response to the Lehman crisis of making central clearing mandatory for standardized over-the-counter derivative transactions has been translated into law, Dodd-Frank for the US and EMIR for the EU. However, CCPs remain to some extent controversial with adversaries claiming that they potentially increase systemic risk and proponents viewing them as systemic risk reducing when properly designed and maintained. In this article I review the booming literature on CCPs, of which about 60% is published in the last five years, by asking five fundamental questions about CCPs. The aim is to construct a broad, academically substantiated, synthesis about CCPs and to propose directions for future research in what can be considered as the most important niche of financial economics
Near-Death Experiences and Immortality from the Perspective of an Informational Modeling of Consciousness
The questions concerning “who we are”, “where we go to”,
and “where we come from”, preoccupied the humanity from
immemorial times. During the last few decades, with the accelerated
improvement of the investigation methods and of the advanced
successful interventions allowing the life salvation, there have been
reported some attempts to correlate the psychic phenomena with
the body status by the recuperation, analysis and explanation of
the symptoms recorded during the near-death experiences. Such
special situations, in which the heart and the brain, the support of
mental activities, cease their activity, has become a fundamental
tool to investigate the consciousness associated phenomena
during the arrest status of the fundamental processes of the life.
The fundamental question actually is whether consciousness
really continues to exist even if the body has ceased its function by
stopping the heartbeat and brain support activities [1,2].
An answer to such a question goes toward even further
questions: can there be “life” beyond the death [3]? This exciting
question includes also several aspects: what is consciousness and
which is its nature [4]? Could consciousness exist as a disembodied
entity? To answer these fundamental questions of existence, the
collaboration of several disciplines such as neurology, psychology,
medicine, biology, pharmacology and also physics, to call only the
most important of them, is necessary, the geriatrics finding suitable
responses within the multidisciplinary researches to its various
questions related to the life prolongation and the improvement of
the life quality. Within such a context, it was recently developed an
informational model of consciousness, which can offer response to
the above questions, based on the last discoveries of the quantum
physics and cosmology [4,5]
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