Reduced and declining physical function in prevalent dialysis patients – identifying the vulnerable

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BOUNDING THE SMARANDACHE FUNCTION

The article illustrates the importance of being able to calculate the Smarandache function for prime powers. This paper will be considering that process

Biotechnological developments, socio-technical processes and materiality : the affordances and constraints of ‘social innovation'

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Executive authority, the personal vote, and budget discipline in Latin American and Carribean countries

Recent scholarship on the impact of fiscal institutions on budgeting outcomes in Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries indicates that political institutions impact the level of budget discipline. BuiIding upon this previous research, we argue that the principle problem that must be addressed to insure strong fiscal discipline is the common pool resource (CPR) problem. The source of the problem, as well as its solution, differ in the government and in the legislature. At the cabinet level, the CPR problem arises because ministers consider the spending and tax implications of decisions on their ministries (only) instead of on the general population. As Hallerberg and von Hagen (1999) indicate, the appropriate solution at the cabinet level depends upon the coalition structure of the government. Given that all LAC countries have either presidential or oneparty parliamentary systems, a strong central player like the finance minister can reduce the CPR problem at the cabinet level. A similar strengthening of the executive vis-à-vis the legislature, in contrast, does not necessarily lead to tighter fiscal discipline. The level of the CPR problem in the legislature depends upon the type of electoral system. If states have open list proportional representation systems, then increases in district magnitude increase the problem, while under closed lists increases in district magnitude decrease the problem. Using a data set of LAC countries for the period 1988-97 and following Carey and Shugart (1995), we create an index for the incentives for the personal vote. We find that executive power in the budget process is most effective in reducing budget deficits when the personal vote is high in the legislature, while strengthening the president (or prime minister) in countries where the personal vote is low in the legislature has no statistically significant effect. This finding has practical implications for the design of fiscal institutions in LAC countries—granting the executive a privileged position vis-à-vis the legislature has beneficial effects on the budget balance only when the CPR problem in the legislature is large. Moreover, an alternative institutional change is to reform a country’s electoral system. The second option may be more feasible in countries where legislators are unlikely to give the president more power, or where dictatorial pasts make populations wary of granting the executive too much authority on any policy area. --

Organizationally Sensible vs. Legal-Centric Approaches to Employment Decisions With Legal Implications

This article is intended to: 1) alert human resource (HR) professionals to the risk that they, and the managers they serve, are unnecessarily contributing to the impact of legal considerations on the management of employees as a result of “legal-centric decision making”; and 2) provide information and guidance that will assist HR professionals in promoting better informed, more organizationally sensible responses to employment issues that have potential legal implications. The “legal-centric decision making” construct is introduced and illustrated, a model of the primary factors contributing to legal-centric decision making is presented, and keys to avoiding legal-centric decision making are identified and discussed

Physical implementations of quantum absorption refrigerators

Absorption refrigerators are autonomous thermal machines that harness the spontaneous flow of heat from a hot bath into the environment in order to perform cooling. Here we discuss quantum realizations of absorption refrigerators in two different settings: namely, cavity and circuit quantum electrodynamics. We first provide a unified description of these machines in terms of the concept of virtual temperature. Next, we describe the two different physical setups in detail and compare their properties and performance. We conclude with an outlook on future work and open questions in this field of research.Comment: Patrick P. Potts was formerly known as Patrick P. Hofe

Leggett-Garg inequalities and the geometry of the cut polytope

The Bell and Leggett-Garg tests offer operational ways to demonstrate that non-classical behavior manifests itself in quantum systems, and experimentalists have implemented these protocols to show that classical worldviews such as local realism and macrorealism are false, respectively. Previous theoretical research has exposed important connections between more general Bell inequalities and polyhedral combinatorics. We show here that general Leggett-Garg inequalities are closely related to the cut polytope of the complete graph, a geometric object well-studied in combinatorics. Building on that connection, we offer a family of Leggett-Garg inequalities that are not trivial combinations of the most basic Leggett-Garg inequalities. We then show that violations of macrorealism can occur in surprising ways, by giving an example of a quantum system that violates the new "pentagon" Leggett-Garg inequality but does not violate any of the basic "triangle" Leggett-Garg inequalities.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

Learning Design and Service Oriented Architectures:a mutual dependency?

This paper looks at how the concept of reusability has gained currency in e-learning. Initial attention was focused on reuse of content, but recently attention has focused on reusable software tools and reusable activity structures. The former has led to the proposal of service-oriented architectures, and the latter has seen the development of the Learning Design specification. The authors suggest that there is a mutual dependency between the success of these two approaches, as complex Learning Designs require the ability to call on a range of tools, while remaining technology neutral. The paper describes a project at the UK Open University, SLeD, which sought to develop a Learning Design player that would utilise the service-oriented approach. This acted both as a means of exploring some of the issues implicit within both approaches and also provided a practical tool. The SLeD system was successfully implemented in a different university, Liverpool Hope, demonstrating some of the principles of re-use