Gerotranscendence: components and spiritual roots in the second half of life.

According to gerotranscendence theory (Tornstam, 1989), aging persons gradually develop 'a shift in meta-perspective, from a materialistic and rational vision to a more cosmic and transcendent one'. The present study examined the structure of the construct of gerotranscendence, age differences in gerotranscendence, and relations between gerotranscendence and culturally determined meaning in life and death factors, such as levels of spirituality, religious beliefs, moral judgment, and death attitudes. Participants were 467 adults between 17 and 91 years old. Factor analysis of the Gerotranscendence Scale yielded three subscales, Transcendent Connection, Anxiety and Uncertainty, and Active Involvement. Transcendent Connection - the core component of gerotranscendence - was only weakly related to age. However, Transcendent Connection was positively related to spiritual views and practices, relativistic orientation to religious beliefs, moral consistency, higher stages of moral thinking, and negatively related to avoidance of death. Patterns of correlations with the scores on the other two scales were also explored. Together, the findings suggested that individuals' development with regard to issues of spirituality, religiosity, morality, and death attitudes is more fundamental for their development toward 'gero'-transcendence than the natural process of aging.

Topics in Atrial Fibrillation Management

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most frequently encountered arrhythmia in clinical practice. Physicians of almost all specialities have to deal with this arrhythmia and its consequences. The incidence of AF rises proportional with age. 75 % of patients with AF are older than 75 years. AF is not a benign disease. It can result in symptomatic palpitations, symptoms of pump failure, and above all an increase in the incidence of thrombo-embolic events like stroke. In the Framingham study it was shown that AF also independently increases mortality. In patients with heart failure the presence of AF further increases the risk of death. For a long time the only therapy available to the treating physician was digoxin. Today the therapeutic options are too numerous to cover in one thesis, however, they options are mentioned briefly in chapter one

Hyperreal delta functions as a new general tool for modeling physical states with infinitely high densities

This paper introduces the expanded real numbers as an ordered subring of the hyperreal number field that does not contain any infinitesimals, and defines the set of all integrable functions from the real numbers to the expanded real numbers. This allows to identify the Dirac delta with a special hyperreal-valued function of a real variable: the Dirac delta function thus defined is a general tool, applicable for the mathematical modeling of physical systems in which infinitely high densities occur.Comment: 6 pages, no figure

A pluralist view on theories

In philosophy of science, several views have been espoused on the meaning of the term 'theory'; among these are the syntactic view and the semantic view. But even after decades of debate, no consensus has been reached on an all-encompassing positively defined view on theories. Here we take that to mean that the outcome of the debate is that such an all-encompassing view is nonexisting. Correspondingly, the purpose of this paper is to present a pluralist view on theories: it is negatively defined, yet it may break the deadlock in the ongoing debate on the meaning of 'theory'