Britain's alcohol problem and what the UK government is (and is not) doing about it

Britain is currently experiencing a serious alcohol problem, as shown particularly by a steep increase in rates of liver cirrhosis mortality and by widespread alcohol-related disorder and harm among young people. The UK government introduced two major initiatives in 2004 - radical changes to the licensing laws regulating the sale of alcoholic beverages and an Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy for England – and these are described and criticised. In the opinion of most UK experts in the alcohol field and in a significant body of public opinion, neither of these developments is likely to lead to a reduction of alcohol-related harm. The UK government appears more concerned to support the welfare of the alcohol industry than to introduce effective measures to limit the damage caused by its products. However, it is speculated in conclusion that reactions to another "long wave" of alcohol consumption and problems may force the government to revise its alcohol policies

Controlled drinking, harm reduction and their roles in the response to alcohol-related problems

This article first distinguishes three meanings of the term ‘harm reduction’ in the literature on alcohol problems: a European sense in which a change in drinking is not necessarily required; an American sense which includes the controlled drinking (CD) goal of treatment; and a government policy sense in which it is seen as an alternative to whole population alcohol policies. The article then goes on to consider the roles of the CD goal and the harm reduction philosophy in response to three groups of people with alcohol problems or increased risk of such problems: the non-treatment-seeking population of hazardous and harmful drinkers; the population of socio-economically disadvantaged street drinkers or others who are thought unlikely to make radical changes in drinking behaviour; and the regular population of treatment-seeking problem drinkers. It is concluded, inter alia, that the equation of harm reduction and the CD goal in the American sense of harm reduction is confusing and may have had a detrimental effect of the practice of CD treatment. The CD goal should imply an aim of harm-free drinking

Conditions for interoperability

Interoperability for information systems remains a challenge both at the semantic and organisational levels. The original three-level architecture for local databases needs to be replaced by a categorical four-level one based on concepts, constructions, schema types and data together with the mappings between them. Such an architecture provides natural closure as further levels are superfluous even in a global environment. The architecture is traversed by means of the Godement calculus: arrows may be composed at any level as well as across levles. The necessary and sufficient conditions for interoperability are satisfied by composable (formal) diagrams both for intension and extension in categories that are cartesian closed and locally cartesian closed. Methods like partial categories and sketches in schema design can benefit from Freyd’s punctured diagrams to identify precisely type-forcing natural transformations. Closure is better achieved in standard full categories. Global interoperability of extension can be achieved through semantic annotation but only if applied at run time

Process categories: the metaphysics, methodology & mathematics, philosophy of nature and process philosophy

To apply the metaphysical methodology of mathematics to the logic and form of process in natural philosophy requires a metaphysics above modelling, a methodology more than method and a mathematics beyond the set based topics of arithmetic, algebra, geometry and topology. At the start of the twentieth century Alfred North Whitehead together with his former student Bertrand Russell was able to expound the form and logic of the mathematics of his day by the extensive treatment of axioms and theorems. The technical quality of this work found world acclaim and became the foundation for the advancement of science by the application of models still with us today

Anticipation as prediction in the predication of data types

Every object in existence has its type. Every subject in language has its predicate. Every intension in logic has its extension. Each therefore has two levels but with the fundamental problem of the relationship between the two. The formalism of set theory cannot guarantee the two are co-extensive. That has to be imposed by the axiom of extensibility, which is inadequate for types as shown by Bertrand Russell's rami ed type theory, for language as by Henri Poincar e's impredication and for intension unless satisfying Port Royal's de nitive concept. An anticipatory system is usually de ned to contain its own future state. What is its type? What is its predicate? What is its extension? Set theory can well represent formally the weak anticipatory system, that is in a model of itself. However we have previously shown that the metaphysics of process category theory is needed to represent strong anticipation. Time belongs to extension not intension. The apparent prediction of strong anticipation is really in the structure of its predication. The typing of anticipation arises from a combination of and | respectively (co) multiplication of the (co)monad induced by adjointness of the system's own process. As a property of cartesian closed categories this predication has signi cance for all typing in general systems theory including even in the de nition of time itself

A new process foundation for the applied topos

The world is in turmoil for want of sound reasoning. Economics and the environment are but two of many areas of human endeavour badly betrayed through a failed combination of physical and information science and the rule of law. Logic is the fabric of pure mathematics as the foundation of applied mathematics on which all science is based from the physical through biological and medical to the social sciences. However the symbolic logic of today seems of scarce more use than the syllogisms of Aristotle as observed by Francis Bacon nearly 400 years ago: The logic now in use serves rather to fix and give stability to the errors which have their foundation in commonly received notions than to help the search after truth. So it does more harm than good [Novum Organon Aphorism XII, 1620]

Adjoint exactness

Plato's ideas and Aristotle's real types from the classical age, Nominalism and Realism of the mediaeval period and Whitehead's modern view of the world as pro- cess all come together in the formal representation by category theory of exactness in adjointness (a). Concepts of exactness and co-exactness arise naturally from ad- jointness and are needed in current global problems of science. If a right co-exact valued left-adjoint functor ( ) in a cartesian closed category has a right-adjoint left- exact functor ( ), then physical stability is satis ed if itself is also a right co-exact left-adjoint functor for the right-adjoint left exact functor ( ): a a . These concepts are discussed here with examples in nuclear fusion, in database interroga- tion and in the cosmological ne structure constant by the Frederick construction