The Future of Health Care Must Be Harm Reductionist—To Bring It About, We Need Moral Philosophy

In the United States, more than 100,000 people now die each year from drug overdose, but nearly all of these deaths are preventable. The purpose of this Article is to show that harm reduction interventions could go a long way towards saving these lives, but we don’t adopt many of these interventions, or fail to adopt them at the scale needed. Although it is often suggested by opponents of harm reduction that the interventions are unlikely to actually reduce harm, this Article argues that the empirical debate is largely over—decades of data demonstrate that harm reduction saves lives, promotes health, saves money, and even improves public order. Rather, this Article suggests opposition to harm reduction is actually often moral, stemming from the implicit moral philosophies that we all carry around. For this reason, this Article takes seriously some of the most powerful ethical arguments against harm reduction, and shows that the richest philosophy of harm reduction undermines these arguments by recognizing the value neutrality of drug use. This Article concludes that harm reduction is justified on a wide variety of moral philosophical grounds

Markov Decision Processes

The theory of Markov Decision Processes is the theory of controlled Markov chains. Its origins can be traced back to R. Bellman and L. Shapley in the 1950\u27s. During the decades of the last century this theory has grown dramatically. It has found applications in various areas like e.g. computer science, engineering, operations research, biology and economics. In this article we give a short introduction to parts of this theory. We treat Markov Decision Processes with finite and infinite time horizon where we will restrict the presentation to the so-called (generalized) negative case. Solution algorithms like Howard\u27s policy improvement and linear programming are also explained. Various examples show the application of the theory. We treat stochastic linear-quadratic control problems, bandit problems and dividend pay-out problems

Social infomediation of news on Twitter: a French case study

Social infomediation is an emerging phenomenon that sees growing numbers of Internet users share and comment on news items on Facebook and Twitter. This study analyses a large sample of French-speaking Twitter users over a period of two months. First, we study some general characteristics of our sample’s usage of Twitter, such as timescale, productivity, hashtag, and URL distribution. We then compare the French online media agenda to the most shared and discussed news items in our sample in order to highlight similarities and differences. Our findings show that even though they depend on mainstream media coverage, Twitter user preferences often push political and technological stories that have been overlooked or even ignored to the forefront

Scattering of rare-gas atoms at a metal surface: evidence of anticorrugation of the helium-atom potential-energy surface and the surface electron density

Recent measurements of the scattering of He and Ne atoms at Rh(110) suggest that these two rare-gas atoms measure a qualitatively different surface corrugation: While Ne atom scattering seemingly reflects the electron-density undulation of the substrate surface, the scattering potential of He atoms appears to be anticorrugated. An understanding of this perplexing result is lacking. In this paper we present density functional theory calculations of the interaction potentials of He and Ne with Rh(110). We find that, and explain why, the nature of the interaction of the two probe particles is qualitatively different, which implies that the topographies of their scattering potentials are indeed anticorrugated.Comment: RevTeX, 4 pages, 10 figure

Population Engineering and the Fight against Climate Change

Contrary to political and philosophical consensus, we argue that the threats posed by climate change justify population engineering, the intentional manipulation of the size and structure of human populations. Specifically, we defend three types of policies aimed at reducing fertility rates: choice enhancement, preference adjustment, and incentivization. While few object to the first type of policy, the latter two are generally rejected because of their potential for coercion or morally objectionable manipulation. We argue that forms of each policy type are pragmatically and morally justified tools for preventing the harms of global climate change

Snell's law for surface electrons: Refraction of an electron gas imaged in real space

On NaCl(100)/Cu(111) an interface state band is observed that descends from the surface-state band of the clean copper surface. This band exhibits a Moire-pattern-induced one-dimensional band gap, which is accompanied by strong standing-wave patterns, as revealed in low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy images. At NaCl island step edges, one can directly see the refraction of these standing waves, which obey Snell's refraction law.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Anomalous thermal conductivity and local temperature distribution on harmonic Fibonacci chains

The harmonic Fibonacci chain, which is one of a quasiperiodic chain constructed with a recursion relation, has a singular continuous frequency-spectrum and critical eigenstates. The validity of the Fourier law is examined for the harmonic Fibonacci chain with stochastic heat baths at both ends by investigating the system size N dependence of the heat current J and the local temperature distribution. It is shown that J asymptotically behaves as (ln N)^{-1} and the local temperature strongly oscillates along the chain. These results indicate that the Fourier law does not hold on the harmonic Fibonacci chain. Furthermore the local temperature exhibits two different distribution according to the generation of the Fibonacci chain, i.e., the local temperature distribution does not have a definite form in the thermodynamic limit. The relations between N-dependence of J and the frequency-spectrum, and between the local temperature and critical eigenstates are discussed.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, submitted to J. Phys.: Cond. Ma

Optimal control of piecewise deterministic Markov processes with finite time horizon

In this paper we study controlled Piecewise Deterministic Markov Processes with finite time horizon and unbounded rewards. Using an embedding procedure we reduce these problems to discrete-time Markov Decision Processes. Under some continuity and compactness conditions we establish the existence of an optimal policy and show that the value function is the unique solution of the Bellman equation. It is remarkable that this statement is true for unbounded rewards and without any contraction assumptions. Further conditions imply the existence of optimal nonrelaxed controls. We highlight our findings by two examples from financial mathematics