Managing evidence on palliative care: are realist reviews feasible?

C

Can nurses be trained as facilitators for physicians’ learning?

C

Researching ‘‘Grand Challenges’’ - A ‘‘Grand Challenge’’

Attempts have been made to identify the grand challenges (GC) in quite different disciplines including Computer Science. These major problems should be solved within one or two generations and the solution would have great societal and economic impact. GCs are to be distinguished from the improvement of methods where the basic problem has already been solved (“emerging fields”). Among other purposes, a common understanding of GCs within a community helps to focus efforts and resources and to create a climate of competition. With our study we try to gain an impression whether a certain consensus is within reach in Business and Information Systems Engineering (BISE; Wirtschaftsinformatik, WI) in the German speaking area. We used a multi-staged opinion survey among scientists and practitioners of WI and could establish an order of precedence concerning the most important GCs. At the top ranks the item “Control of systemic risks in global networks”, followed by “Humanlike Information Systems in business context”, “Determining the influences on the degree of automation und integration”, “Influence of WI on the solution of semantic data processing problems”, and “Overcoming of communication barriers in inter-company integration”. We discuss drawbacks of the GC concept as well as attempts to improve the method. One main problem is to distinguish the terms “grand challenges” (GC), “emerging fields” (EF), and “new research goals” (NR)

Type II/F-theory Superpotentials with Several Deformations and N=1 Mirror Symmetry

We present a detailed study of D-brane superpotentials depending on several open and closed-string deformations. The relative cohomology group associated with the brane defines a generalized hypergeometric GKZ system which determines the off-shell superpotential and its analytic properties under deformation. Explicit expressions for the N=1 superpotential for families of type II/F-theory compactifications are obtained for a list of multi-parameter examples. Using the Hodge theoretic approach to open-string mirror symmetry, we obtain new predictions for integral disc invariants in the A model instanton expansion. We study the behavior of the brane vacua under extremal transitions between different Calabi-Yau spaces and observe that the web of Calabi-Yau vacua remains connected for a particular class of branes.Comment: 62 pages; v2: typos corrected and references adde