50,466 research outputs found
Perceptions of an older patient on the role of the family doctor in health promotion : a qualitative case study
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
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
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; âCESTESâ. 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*
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
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
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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