Post-sternotomy pain syndrome following cardiac surgery. case report

Over 2 million people undergo sternotomy worldwide for heart surgery each year, and many develop post-sternotomy pain syndrome (PSPS) which persists in the anterior thorax. In some patients, PSPS lasts for many years or suddenly reappears a long time after the sternotomy. The exact etiology of PSPS is unknown. This article presents a case report of a patient with a diagnosis of PSPS (after cardiac surgery 4 years prior) for whom an osteopathic approach was used, which successfully eliminated the pain. In a previous study, we demonstrated that this osteopathic procedure could reduce sternal pain associated with a recent surgical wound. Further efforts are needed to understand the reasons for PSPS. In light of new scientific data, these osteopathic techniques could contribute to a multidisciplinary approach to solve the proble

Duality Rotations in Nonlinear Electrodynamics and in Extended Supergravity

We review the general theory of duality rotations which, in four dimensions, exchange electric with magnetic fields. Necessary and sufficient conditions in order for a theory to have duality symmetry are established. A nontrivial example is Born-Infeld theory with n abelian gauge fields and with Sp(2n,R) self-duality. We then review duality symmetry in supergravity theories. In the case of N=2 supergravity duality rotations are in general not a symmetry of the theory but a key ingredient in order to formulate the theory itself. This is due to the beautiful relation between the geometry of special Kaehler manifolds and duality rotations.Comment: Invited contribution to Rivista del Nuovo Cimento in occasion of the 2005 Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society. 96 pages, corrected typo

World Heritage: Where are we? An empirical analysis

A statistical analysis of the UNESCO World Heritage List is presented. The World Heritage Convention intends to protect global heritage of outstanding value to mankind, but there has been great concern about the missing representativity of the member countries. There is a strongly biased distribution of Sites according to a country’s population, area or per capita income. The paper reveals the facts but refrains from judging whether the existing distribution is appropriate or not. This task must be left to the discussion in the World Heritage Convention.Global public goods, world heritage, international organizations, international political economy, culture, UNESCO

Making World Heritage Truly Global: The Culture Certificate Scheme

Culture has attributes of a global public good that needs to be preserved for mankind as a whole. World Culture Certificates are proposed to efficiently preserve World Heritage. The community of nations has to agree on the Global Heritage List and how much each nation is to contribute to that purpose. Each World Heritage site conserved is acknowledged through the issuance of a tradable Certificate. Countries and private firms are induced to seek sites where financial resources can be spent most productively. This leads to an efficient allocation of resources to preserve World Heritage.global public good, World Heritage, Cultural Certificates, monuments, UNESCO

World Heritage: Where Are We? An Empirical Analysis

An empirical overview of the UNESCO World Heritage List according to various characteristics is presented. The officially stated intention of the World Heritage List is to protect global heritage. Our focus is on the imbalance of the existing List according to countries and continents. The existing distribution is compared to hypothetical distributions considered “balanced” from different points of view. It turns out that the World Heritage List is unbalanced with respect to a distribution of Sites according to population, area or per capita income. This paper wants to reveal facts about the existing distribution, and is designed to help a reasoned discussion to emerge.

An exact transverse Helmholtz equation

We derive an exact equation for the transverse component of the electric field propagating along a given longitudinal z direction in the presence of an isotropic refractive-index distribution n(x,y)

What determines the World Heritage List? An econometric analysis

The official intention of the UNESCO World Heritage List is to protect the global heritage. However, the existing List is highly imbalanced according to countries and continents. Historical reasons, such as historical GDP, population, and number of years of high civilization, have a significant impact on being included on the List. In addition, economic and political factors unrelated to the value of heritage, such as rent seeking by bureaucrats and politicians, the size of the tourist sector, the importance of media, the degree of federalism, and membership in the UN Security Council, influence the composition of the List.Global public goods, world heritage, international organizations, international political economy, culture

The case of the oscillating party balloon: A simple toy experiment requiring a not-so-simple interpretation

The intriguing midair oscillations of a party balloon, which occur once its buoyancy is no longer capable of keeping it against the ceiling, is shown to require a rather sophisticated explanation in terms of variable-mass dynamics. The ubiquity of this phenomenon, the accessibility of its actual observation, and the subtlety of its analytic description provide a good opportunity for an interesting zero-cost classroom demonstration

Vectorial nonparaxial propagation equation in the presence of a tensorial refractive-index perturbation

The standard scalar paraxial parabolic (FockLeontovich) propagation equation is generalized to include all-order nonparaxial corrections in the significant case of a tensorial refractive-index perturbation on a homogeneous isotropic background. In the resultant equation, each higher-order nonparaxial term (associated with diffraction in homogeneous space and scaling as the ratio between beam waist and diffraction length) possesses a counterpart (associated with the refractive-index perturbation) that allows one to preserve the vectorial nature of the problem (∇∇· E ≠ 0). The tensorial character of the refractive-index variation is shown to play a particularly relevant role whenever the tensor elements δnxz and δnyz (z is the propagation direction) are not negligible. For this case, an application to elasto-optically induced optical activity and to nonlinear propagation in the presence of the optical Kerr effect is presented