Clinical judgement, expertise and skilled coping

Medicine involves specific practical expertise as well as more general context-independent medical knowledge. This raises the question, what is the nature of the expertise involved? Is there a model of clinical judgement or understanding that can accommodate both elements? This paper begins with a summary of a published account of the kinds of situation-specific skill found in anaesthesia. It authors claim that such skills are often neglected because of a prejudice in favour of the ‘technical rationality’ exemplified in evidence-based medicine but they do not themselves offer a general account of the relation of practical expertise and general medical knowledge. The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus provides one model of the relation of general knowledge to situation-specific skilled coping. He claims that the former logically depends on the latter and provides two arguments, which I articulate in the second section, for this. But he mars those arguments by building in the further assumption that such situation-specific responses must be understood as concept-free and thus mindless. That assumption is held in place by three arguments all of which I criticize in the next section to give a unified account of clinical judgement as both practical and conceptually structured and thus justified in the face of a prejudice in favour of ‘technical rationality’

A density theorem for parameterized differential Galois theory

We study parameterized linear differential equations with coefficients depending meromorphically upon the parameters. As a main result, analogously to the unparameterized density theorem of Ramis, we show that the parameterized monodromy, the parameterized exponential torus and the parameterized Stokes operators are topological generators in Kolchin topology, for the parameterized differential Galois group introduced by Cassidy and Singer. We prove an analogous result for the global parameterized differential Galois group, which generalizes a result by Mitschi and Singer. These authors give also a necessary condition on a group for being a global parameterized differential Galois group; as a corollary of the density theorem, we prove that their condition is also sufficient. As an application, we give a characterization of completely integrable equations, and we give a partial answer to a question of Sibuya about the transcendence properties of a given Stokes matrix. Moreover, using a parameterized Hukuhara-Turrittin theorem, we show that the Galois group descends to a smaller field, whose field of constants is not differentially closed.Comment: To appear in Pacific Journal of Mathematic

Real difference Galois theory

In this paper, we develop a difference Galois theory in the setting of real fields. After proving the existence and uniqueness of the real Picard-Vessiot extension, we define the real difference Galois group and prove a Galois correspondence.Comment: Final versio

Confluence of meromorphic solutions of q-difference equations

In this paper, we consider a q-analogue of the Borel-Laplace summation where q>1 is a real parameter. In particular, we show that the Borel-Laplace summation of a divergent power series solution of a linear differential equation can be uniformly approximated on a convenient sector, by a meromorphic solution of a corresponding family of linear q-difference equations. We perform the computations for the basic hypergeometric series. Following J. Sauloy, we prove how a fundamental set of solutions of a linear differential equation can be uniformly approximated on a convenient domain by a fundamental set of solutions of a corresponding family of linear q-difference equations. This leads us to the approximations of Stokes matrices and monodromy matrices of the linear differential equation by matrices with entries that are invariants by the multiplication by q

Wedge immersed thermistor bolometers

An immersed thermistor bolometer for the detection of ultraviolet, visible, and infrared radiation is described. Two types of immersed bolometers are discussed. The immersion of thermistor flakes in a lens, or half immersed by optical contact on a lens, is examined. Lens materials are evaluated for optimum immersion including fused aluminum oxide, beryllium oxide, and germanium. The application of the bolometer to instruments in which the entrance pupil of the immersion optics has a high aspect ratio is considered

Splendid and perverse equivalences

Inspired by the works of Rickard on splendid equivalences and of Chuang and Rouquier on perverse equivalences, we are here interested in the combination of both, a splendid perverse equivalence. This is naturally the right framework to understand the relations between global and local perverse equivalences between blocks of finite groups, as a splendid equivalence induces local derived equivalences via the Brauer functor. We prove that under certain conditions, we have an equivalence between a perverse equivalence between the homotopy category of p-permutation modules and local derived perverse equivalences, in the case of abelian defect group.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure

Wedge immersed thermistor bolometer measures infrared radiation

Wedge immersed-thermistor bolometer measures infrared radiation in the atmosphere. The thermistor flakes are immersed by optical contact on a wedge-shaped germanium lens whose narrow dimension is clamped between two complementary wedge-shaped germanium blocks bonded with a suitable adhesive