Resource allocation, health mobility and adaptation to illness

The increased availability of panel data has made it possible to estimate and measure health mobility for population subgroups who may have systematically different levels of mobility. The objective of this paper is to stimulate discussion on what estimated differences across subgroups may mean for resource allocation. We use a straightforward hypothetical example to investigate the implications of different levels of health mobility on health outcomes, considering in addition the effects of adaptation to illness over time. We also discuss some of the ethical and political implications of health mobility

The effect of diatomaceous earth in live, attenuated infectious bronchitis vaccine, immune responses, and protection against challenge.

Live virus vaccines are commonly used in poultry production, particularly in broilers. Massive application and generation of a protective local mucosal and humoral immunity with no adverse effects is the main goal for this strategy. Live virus vaccines can be improved by adding adjuvants to boost mucosal innate and adaptive responses. In a previous study we showed that diatomaceous earth (DE) can be used as adjuvant in inactivated vaccines. The aim of this study was to test DE as adjuvant in an Ark-DPI live infectious bronchitis virus (IBV) vaccine after ocular or spray application. Titrating the virus alone or after addition of DE showed that DE had no detrimental effect on the vaccine virus. However, adding DE to the vaccine did not induce higher IgG titers in the serum and IgA titers in tears. It also did not affect the frequency of CD4+ T cells, CD8+ T cells and monocytes/macrophages in the blood and the spleen determined by flow cytometry. In addition, protection generated against IBV homologous challenges, measured by viral load in tears, respiratory signs and histopathology in tracheas, did not vary when DE was present in the vaccine formulation. Finally, we confirmed through our observations that Ark vaccines administered by hatchery spray cabinet elicit weaker immune responses and protection against an IBV homologous challenge compared to the same vaccine delivered via ocular route

New lambda Bootis stars with a shell

We publish here the second part of our spectroscopic survey at high dispersion of some known and suspected lambda Bootis stars with a view to detecting circumstellar shell features. Eight stars of our sample exhibit such features. These stars are fast rotators, a result which is in line with Holweger and Rentzsch-Holm's study (1995). The analysis of the photometric data has allowed us to confirm the exclusion of a few stars misclassified from the lambda Bootis group.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in A&A Suppl. Se

TU2^2FRG -- a scalable approach for truncated unity functional renormalization group in generic fermionic models

Describing the emergence of phases of condensed matter is one of the central challenges in physics. For this purpose many numerical and analytical methods have been developed, each with their own strengths and limitations. The functional renormalization group is one of these methods bridging between efficiency and accuracy. In this paper we derive a new truncated unity (TU) approach unifying real- and momentum space TU, called TU$^2$FRG. This formalism significantly improves the scaling compared to conventional momentum (TU)FRG when applied to large unit-cell models and models where the translational symmetry is broken.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure

Possible Stellar Metallicity Enhancements from the Accretion of Planets

A number of recently discovered extrasolar planet candidates have surprisingly small orbits, which may indicate that considerable orbital migration takes place in protoplanetary systems. A natural consequence of orbital migration is for a series of planets to be accreted, destroyed, and then thoroughly mixed into the convective envelope of the central star. We study the ramifications of planet accretion for the final main sequence metallicity of the star. If maximum disk lifetimes are on the order of 10 Myr, stars with masses near 1 solar mass are predicted to have virtually no metallicity enhancement. On the other hand, early F and late A type stars with masses of 1.5--2.0 solar masses can experience significant metallicity enhancements due to their considerably smaller convection zones during the first 10 Myr of pre-main-sequence evolution. We show that the metallicities of an aggregate of unevolved F stars are consistent with an average star accreting about 2 Jupiter-mass planets from a protoplanetary disk having a 10 Myr dispersal time.Comment: 14 pages, AAS LaTeX, 3 figures, accepted to ApJ Letter

Standard Clocks, Orbital Precession and the Cosmological Constant

We discuss the influence of the cosmological constant on the gravitomagnetic clock effect and the gravitational time delay of electromagnetic rays. Moreover, we consider the relative motion of a binary system to linear order in the cosmological constant $\Lambda$. The general expression for the effect of $\Lambda$ on pericenter precession is given for arbitrary orbital eccentricity

Strong Boundary and Trap Potential Effects on Emergent Physics in Ultra-Cold Fermionic Gases

The field of quantum simulations in ultra-cold atomic gases has been remarkably successful. In principle it allows for an exact treatment of a variety of highly relevant lattice models and their emergent phases of matter. But so far there is a lack in the theoretical literature concerning the systematic study of the effects of the trap potential as well as the finite size of the systems, as numerical studies of such non periodic, correlated fermionic lattices models are numerically demanding beyond one dimension. We use the recently introduced real-space truncated unity functional renormalization group to study these boundary and trap effects with a focus on their impact on the superconducting phase of the $2$D Hubbard model. We find that in the experiments not only lower temperatures need to be reached compared to current capabilities, but also system size and trap potential shape play a crucial role to simulate emergent phases of matter.Comment: 21 pages, 9 Figure

Social Psychological Studies of Latin American Cultures with Particular Reference to Brazil

This paper presents an English language translation of a book chapter that was originally published in Portuguese. It is reproduced here in full, by kind permission of the editors and publishers, in order to make it available to English language speakers. The paper first addresses ways of defining culture and the development of measures of cultural variation. Contrasts between the collectivism that defines East Asian culture and the collectivism of Latin America are then identified. Topics addressed include values, self-construal, life satisfaction, emotion, honour culture, social influence and the phenomenon of jeitinho. Although the text leads toward a consideration of research into Brazilian culture, it does so by way of discussing the distinctiveness of Latin American cultures more broadly. Details of comparative studies that have sampled further Latin American cultures have been added at the end.