Physiological monitoring in the complex multimorbid heart failure patient - Conclusions.

Comorbidities are increasingly recognized as crucial components of the heart failure syndrome. Main specific challenges are polypharmacy, poor adherence to treatments, psychological aspects, and the need of monitoring after discharge. The chronic multimorbid patient therefore represents a specific heart failure phenotype that needs an appropriate and continuous management over time. This supplement issue covers the key points of a series of meeting coordinated by the Heart Failure Association of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), that have discussed the issues surrounding the effective monitoring of our ever more complex and multimorbid heart failure patients. Here, we present an overview of the complex issues from a healthcare delivery perspective

La Dimensió internacional de l'euro

The euro will give Europe the political and economic weight it merits. The Maastricht summit of 1992 decided on the monetary and economic union and the name of the currency was chosen in Madrid in 1995. Jean Monnet had wanted to introduce a common currency from early on as it process of small steps. The currency will have taken 50 years to come into being. The optimistic Werner Report had already wanted a single currency in 1980. In 1979 Roy Jenkings established the European Monetary System. But the eighties were a difficult period with an identity crisis which was overcome with the new democratically elected European Parliament. The pressure of European multinationals grouped in the European Round Table and the 1982 crisis convinced politicians of the need to reinforce the European Union. The collapse of communism, symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, gives a new and ambitious dimension to Europe. The Delors Plan is the old Monnet dream. The euro wants to be a stable currency and even savings of 0.3% of GNP are important, given a European Budget which is only 1.3% of European GNP. Now is the moment of truth. As Helmut Kohl said of Germany, the objective is a European Germany, not it Germanised Europe. The ceeding of sovereignty will produce a European political dimension in the next century. But the situation is not as favourable today us when the single currency was decided. Without economic growth it will be difficult to move forward. The European Union is not a free trade zone but a political project. We are a small part of the world with a considerable weight. By 2010 Europe will be a single community with a comparable weight to the USA. The post-Wall world wants peace, prosperity and growth, in democracy and a free market

La Dimensió internacional de l'euro

The euro will give Europe the political and economic weight it merits. The Maastricht summit of 1992 decided on the monetary and economic union and the name of the currency was chosen in Madrid in 1995. Jean Monnet had wanted to introduce a common currency from early on as it process of small steps. The currency will have taken 50 years to come into being. The optimistic Werner Report had already wanted a single currency in 1980. In 1979 Roy Jenkings established the European Monetary System. But the eighties were a difficult period with an identity crisis which was overcome with the new democratically elected European Parliament. The pressure of European multinationals grouped in the European Round Table and the 1982 crisis convinced politicians of the need to reinforce the European Union. The collapse of communism, symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, gives a new and ambitious dimension to Europe. The Delors Plan is the old Monnet dream. The euro wants to be a stable currency and even savings of 0.3% of GNP are important, given a European Budget which is only 1.3% of European GNP. Now is the moment of truth. As Helmut Kohl said of Germany, the objective is a European Germany, not it Germanised Europe. The ceeding of sovereignty will produce a European political dimension in the next century. But the situation is not as favourable today us when the single currency was decided. Without economic growth it will be difficult to move forward. The European Union is not a free trade zone but a political project. We are a small part of the world with a considerable weight. By 2010 Europe will be a single community with a comparable weight to the USA. The post-Wall world wants peace, prosperity and growth, in democracy and a free market

Bending our ethics code: Avoidable deception and its justification in psychological research

Deception of research participants has long been and remains a hot-button issue in the behavioral sciences. At the same time, the field of psychology is fortunate to have an ethics code to rely on in determining whether and how to use and report on deception of participants. Despite ongoing normative controversies, the smallest common denominator among psychologists is that deception ought to be a last resort – to be used only when there is no other defensible way to study a question or phenomenon. Going beyond previous normative discussions or inquiries into the mere prevalence of deception, we ask the fundamental question whether common practice is compatible with this interpretation of our field’s ethical standards. Findings from an empirical literature review – focusing on the feasibility of nondeceptive alternative procedures and the presence of explicit justifications for the use of deception – demonstrate that there is a notable gap between the last resort interpretation of our ethical standards and common practice in psychological research. The findings are discussed with the aim of identifying viable ways in which researchers, journal editors, and the scientific associations crafting our ethics codes may narrow this gap

Economic games: An introduction and guide for research

Prosocial behaviors constitute vital ingredients for all types of social interactions and relationships as well as for society at large. Corresponding to this significance, the study of prosocial behaviors has received considerable attention across scientific disciplines. A striking feature of this research is that most disciplines rely on economic games to measure actual prosocial behavior in controlled experimental settings. However, empirical research often fails to fully exploit the richness of this class of paradigms. The current work aims to overcome this issue by providing a theory-driven overview of and introduction to the variety of economic games for researchers in psychology and beyond. Specifically, we introduce prominent theories of games (Game Theory and Interdependence Theory) and show how the concepts from these theories can be integrated in a unifying theoretical framework considering games as providing specific situational affordances for behavior. Additionally, we describe several games in detail, including their structural features, the affordances they involve, the social motives that may guide behavior, the flexibility they entail to manipulate specific situational aspects and, thus, affordances, and typical research findings. We conclude that tailored selection and combination of games and game variants allows to obtain a unique understanding of the underlying psychological processes involved in prosocial behavior. As a practical tool for researchers, we also provide standardized game instructions and guidelines for the implementation of games in future research. Ultimately, the review can foster optimal use of economic games in future work and thereby set the stage for high-class, replicable, and innovative research on human prosociality

QED Radiative Corrections in Processes of Exclusive Pion Electroproduction

Formalism for radiative correction (RC) calculation in exclusive pion electroproduction on the proton is presented. A FORTRAN code EXCLURAD is developed for the RC procedure. The numerical analysis is done in the kinematics of current Jefferson Lab experiments.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures; requires RevTeX

A Simple Approximation of the One-Loop Corrected Cross Section for e+e−→W+W−e^+e^-\to W^+W^- at LEP 2

Using the SU(2) gauge coupling, $g_{W^\pm} (M^2_{W^\pm})$, at the high-energy scale of $M_{W^\pm}$, defined by the (theoretical value of the) leptonic W-width, rather than using the low-energy value, defined via the Fermi coupling, $G_\mu$, in the Born approximation, and supplementing with Coulomb corrections and initial state radiation, errors with respect to the exact one-loop results for the differential cross section of $e^+e^-\to W^+W^-$ are below 1% at LEP 2 energies at all $W^+W^-$ production angles. A similar procedure is suggested to incorporate leading bosonic loop effects into four-fermion production in the fermion-loop scheme. The resulting accuracy below 1% is sufficient for LEP 2 experiments.Comment: 12 pages, LaTeX including 1 postscript figure, submitted to Phys. Lett.