Delivering Diabetes Care in the Philippines and Vietnam: Policy and Practice Issues

The aim of this study is the comparison of 2 studies looking at the barriers to access of diabetes care and medicines in the Philippines and Vietnam. These studies used the Rapid Assessment Protocol for Insulin Access. Diabetes care is provided in specialized facilities and appropriate referral systems are lacking. In Vietnam, no problems were reported with regard to diagnostic tools, whereas this was a concern in the public sector in the Philippines. Both countries had high prices for medicines in comparison to international standards. Availability of medicines was better in Vietnam than in the Philippines, especially with regard to insulin. This affected adherence as did a lack of patient education. As countries aim to provide health care to the majority of their populations through universal coverage, the challenge of diabetes cannot be neglected. Trying to achieve universal coverage in parallel to decentralization, national and local governments need adapted guidance for this

Group Averaging and Refined Algebraic Quantization

We review the framework of Refined Algebraic Quantization and the method of Group Averaging for quantizing systems with first-class constraints. Aspects and results concerning the generality, limitations, and uniqueness of these methods are discussed.Comment: 4 pages, LaTeX 2.09 using espcrc2.sty. To appear in the proceedings of the third "Meeting on Constrained Dynamics and Quantum Gravity", Nucl. Phys. B (Proc. Suppl.

Do static sources outside a Schwarzschild black hole radiate?

We show that static sources coupled to a massless scalar field in Schwarzschild spacetime give rise to emission and absorption of zero-energy particles due to the presence of Hawking radiation. This is in complete analogy with the description of the bremsstrahlung by a uniformly accelerated charge from the coaccelerated observers' point of view. The response rate of the source is found to coincide with that in Minkowski spacetime as a function of its proper acceleration. This result may be viewed as restoration of the equivalence principle by the Hawking effect.Comment: 13 page

Bi-directional, buried-wire skin-friction gage

A compact, nonobtrusive, bi-directional, skin-friction gage was developed to measure the mean shear stress beneath a three-dimensional boundary layer. The gage works by measuring the heat flux from two orthogonal wires embedded in the surface. Such a gage was constructed and its characteristics were determined for different angles of yaw in a calibration experiment in subsonic flow with a Preston tube used as a standard. Sample gages were then used in a fully three-dimensional turbulent boundary layer on a circular cone at high relative incidence, where there were regimes of favorable and adverse pressure gradients and three-dimensional separation. Both the direction and magnitude of skin friction were then obtained on the cone surface

SO(4) Invariant States in Quantum Cosmology

The phenomenon of linearisation instability is identified in models of quantum cosmology that are perturbations of mini-superspace models. In particular, constraints that are second order in the perturbations must be imposed on wave functions calculated in such models. It is shown explicitly that in the case of a model which is a perturbation of the mini-superspace which has $S^3$ spatial sections these constraints imply that any wave functions calculated in this model must be SO(4) invariant. (This replaces the previous corrupted version.)Comment: 15 page

Group Averaging for de Sitter free fields

Perturbative gravity about global de Sitter space is subject to linearization-stability constraints. Such constraints imply that quantum states of matter fields couple consistently to gravity {\it only} if the matter state has vanishing de Sitter charges; i.e., only if the state is invariant under the symmetries of de Sitter space. As noted by Higuchi, the usual Fock spaces for matter fields contain no de Sitter-invariant states except the vacuum, though a new Hilbert space of de Sitter invariant states can be constructed via so-called group-averaging techniques. We study this construction for free scalar fields of arbitrary positive mass in any dimension, and for linear vector and tensor gauge fields in any dimension. Our main result is to show in each case that group averaging converges for states containing a sufficient number of particles. We consider general $N$-particle states with smooth wavefunctions, though we obtain somewhat stronger results when the wavefunctions are finite linear combinations of de Sitter harmonics. Along the way we obtain explicit expressions for general boost matrix elements in a familiar basis.Comment: 33 pages, 2 figure

Decay of the free-theory vacuum of scalar field theory in de Sitter spacetime in the interaction picture

A free-theory vacuum state of an interacting field theory, e.g. quantum gravity, is unstable at tree level in general due to spontaneous emission of Fock-space particles in any spacetime with no global timelike Killing vectors, such as de Sitter spacetime, in the interaction picture. As an example, the rate of spontaneous emission of Fock-space particles is calculated in phi^4 theory in de Sitter spacetime. It is possible that this apparent spontaneous emission does not correspond to any physical processes because the states are not evolved by the true Hamiltonian in the interaction picture. Nevertheless, the constant spontaneous emission of Fock-space particles in the interaction picture clearly demonstrates that the in- and out-vacuum states are orthogonal to each other as emphasized by Polyakov and that the in-out perturbation theory, which presupposes some overlap between these two vacuum states, is inadequate. Other possible implications of apparent vacuum instability of this kind in the interaction picture are also discussed.Comment: title changed, 7 page