50,466 research outputs found

    London Lea Valley College: review for educational oversight by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education

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    Perceptions of an older patient on the role of the family doctor in health promotion : a qualitative case study

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    Introduction: Health promotion and disease prevention are important aspects of primary health care. However, limited data are available concerning the opinions of older patients towards the respective services offered by family doctors. The aim of the present study was to evaluate an older patient's perception of the role of the family doctor in promoting his health, and identify those components that are difficult to examine in quantitative research. Methods: A qualitative case study of an 80-year-old man using an in-depth interview was carried out. The interview transcript was analyzed thematically. Our patient was an 80-year-old university-educated man, with stable social and financial circumstances, living with his wife. He had retired early on grounds of ill health (tuberculosis) and had received a disability pension prior to formal retirement. At the time of the interview, his medical problems included mild prostatic hypertrophy, scoliosis and hypertension. He considered his health status to be satisfactory. He had changed family doctor five years prior to the interview, as he had been dissatisfied with the care provided. Results: We found that our patient expected the family doctor to be aware of, and to discuss, the following issues: physical activity, diet, management of stress and mental health, use of alcohol and tobacco, personal hygiene, health screening, use of medication, and social activity. At the same time, our patient perceived the doctor's role as supplementary to his own in terms of the appraisal and maintenance of his health. Conclusions: Our findings provide evidence of what is important in the promotion of health among older people

    Unemployment as a Disequilibrium Phenomenon: the economics of Keynes and how to go ahead from Patinkin, Leijonhufvud and Hicks

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    Keynes' theory can be interpreted as dealing with unemployment as a disequilibrium phenomenon in an essentially dynamic context. In this perspective, it is much more important to explain why unemployment changes than to identify a presumed level of equilibrium for this variable. Patinkin, an artisan of the so-called neo-classical synthesis, had the same intuition when maintaining that price and wage flexibility is not a cure for unemployment, and hence there is no unemployment equilibrium. However, two essential aspects of a thorough sequential analysis are missing in both authors: co-ordination failures and time. Leijonhufvud takes co-ordination failures due to imperfect knowledge into account by focussing on financial markets incapable of providing for the consistency of long-term production and consumption plans. The time dimension in the real side of the economy is introduced by Hicks who maintains that productive capacity must be built up before being used, and hence, by fossilising past events, appears as a factor of propagation of disequilibria. Coupling this time dimension of production with the imperfect knowledge that engenders co-ordination issues allows building-up a true dynamic analysis, which appears as the prolongation or the complement of Keynes' analysis. Within such an analytical framework, it becomes evident, that a fall not only in money wages but also in real wages, far from re-establishing full employment, is a source of global instability and threats the viability of the economy. And above all, it becomes evident that understanding the role of money and financial behaviours is essential for explaining the ongoing crisis as the previous ones.co-ordination, disequilibrium, money, production, time, unemployment, wage

    A global database for metacommunity ecology, integrating species, traits, environment and space

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    The use of functional information in the form of species traits plays an important role in explaining biodiversity patterns and responses to environmental changes. Although relationships between species composition, their traits, and the environment have been extensively studied on a case-by-case basis, results are variable, and it remains unclear how generalizable these relationships are across ecosystems, taxa and spatial scales. To address this gap, we collated 80 datasets from trait-based studies into a global database for metaCommunity Ecology: Species, Traits, Environment and Space; “CESTES”. Each dataset includes four matrices: species community abundances or presences/absences across multiple sites, species trait information, environmental variables and spatial coordinates of the sampling sites. The CESTES database is a live database: it will be maintained and expanded in the future as new datasets become available. By its harmonized structure, and the diversity of ecosystem types, taxonomic groups, and spatial scales it covers, the CESTES database provides an important opportunity for synthetic trait-based research in community ecology

    A Faster Tableau for CTL*

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    There have been several recent suggestions for tableau systems for deciding satisfiability in the practically important branching time temporal logic known as CTL*. In this paper we present a streamlined and more traditional tableau approach built upon the author's earlier theoretical work. Soundness and completeness results are proved. A prototype implementation demonstrates the significantly improved performance of the new approach on a range of test formulas. We also see that it compares favourably to state of the art, game and automata based decision procedures.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2013, arXiv:1307.416

    Where do statistical models come from? Revisiting the problem of specification

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    R. A. Fisher founded modern statistical inference in 1922 and identified its fundamental problems to be: specification, estimation and distribution. Since then the problem of statistical model specification has received scant attention in the statistics literature. The paper traces the history of statistical model specification, focusing primarily on pioneers like Fisher, Neyman, and more recently Lehmann and Cox, and attempts a synthesis of their views in the context of the Probabilistic Reduction (PR) approach. As argued by Lehmann [11], a major stumbling block for a general approach to statistical model specification has been the delineation of the appropriate role for substantive subject matter information. The PR approach demarcates the interrelated but complemenatry roles of substantive and statistical information summarized ab initio in the form of a structural and a statistical model, respectively. In an attempt to preserve the integrity of both sources of information, as well as to ensure the reliability of their fusing, a purely probabilistic construal of statistical models is advocated. This probabilistic construal is then used to shed light on a number of issues relating to specification, including the role of preliminary data analysis, structural vs. statistical models, model specification vs. model selection, statistical vs. substantive adequacy and model validation.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/074921706000000419 in the IMS Lecture Notes--Monograph Series (http://www.imstat.org/publications/lecnotes.htm) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

    Incompleteness of States w.r.t. Traces in Model Checking

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    Cousot and Cousot introduced and studied a general past/future-time specification language, called mu*-calculus, featuring a natural time-symmetric trace-based semantics. The standard state-based semantics of the mu*-calculus is an abstract interpretation of its trace-based semantics, which turns out to be incomplete (i.e., trace-incomplete), even for finite systems. As a consequence, standard state-based model checking of the mu*-calculus is incomplete w.r.t. trace-based model checking. This paper shows that any refinement or abstraction of the domain of sets of states induces a corresponding semantics which is still trace-incomplete for any propositional fragment of the mu*-calculus. This derives from a number of results, one for each incomplete logical/temporal connective of the mu*-calculus, that characterize the structure of models, i.e. transition systems, whose corresponding state-based semantics of the mu*-calculus is trace-complete
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