Rationing in Medicine: A Presupposition for Humanity and Justice

Limited resources are the permanent condition in health care. Rationing, according to H. Kliemt, is the distribution of limited resources below market prices to all people in need for these resources. Therefore, rationing is a basic component of every kind of human health care system. However, the crucial problem is how to find just and fair rules for this distribution under the premise, that every patient should have the same chance. The allocation of organs for transplant can serve as a paradigmatic example for studying rationing problems, as shortage of organs cannot be denied nor abolished. H. Kliemt compared the situation with the classic decathlon. The selection of factors and the combination and weighing of these factors for 'winning a donor organ' should strictly be related to individuals. Non-medical criteria should generally be accepted and authorized as far as they are relevant to the question of justice and fairness. In this paper the so-called 'solidarity model', an example of joint research with Hartmut Kliemt, is introduced as an allocation system with the power to enhance justice and fairness.health care, health ethics, rationing in medicine, fairness, allocation criteria, distributive justice, scarce resources

A photograph of four orientalists (Bombay, 1885): knowledge production, religious identities, and the negotiation of invisible conflicts

Abstract By analyzing the history of a photograph taken in a Bombay photo studio in 1885, this article explores notions of the production of knowledge on India and cultural dialogues, encounters, appropriations, and conflicts in colonial British India in the late nineteenth century. The photograph was taken after a Hindu religious ceremony in honour of the Italian Sanskritist Angelo de Gubernatis. Dressed as a Hindu Brahman, he is the only European photographed next to three Indian scholars, but what the image suggests of encounter and hybridity was challenged by the many written texts that reveal the conflicting dialogues that took place before and after the portrait was taken. Several factors were examined in order to decide who should and who should not be in the photograph: religion, cast, and even gender were successively discussed, before the category of “knowledge” became the bond that unified the four men who studied, taught, and wrote on India

Quantum Simulations of Physics Problems

If a large Quantum Computer (QC) existed today, what type of physical problems could we efficiently simulate on it that we could not simulate on a classical Turing machine? In this paper we argue that a QC could solve some relevant physical "questions" more efficiently. The existence of one-to-one mappings between different algebras of observables or between different Hilbert spaces allow us to represent and imitate any physical system by any other one (e.g., a bosonic system by a spin-1/2 system). We explain how these mappings can be performed showing quantum networks useful for the efficient evaluation of some physical properties, such as correlation functions and energy spectra.Comment: 12 pages and 6 ps figures. Submitted to SPIE Aerosense 200

Elastic Wave Scattering Calculations and the Matrix Variational Padé Approximant Method

The matrix variational Padé approximant and its generalization to elastic wave scattering are discussed. Predictions of the method for the scattering of a longitudinal plane wave are compared with the exact scattering from spherical voids and inclusions. Its predictions are also compared to those of the first and second Born approximations and to the standard matrix Padé approximant based on these Born approximations