The Kondo Resonance in Electron Spectroscopy

The Kondo resonance is the spectral manifestation of the Kondo properties of the impurity Anderson model, and also plays a central role in the dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) for correlated electron lattice systems. This article presents an overview of electron spectroscopy studies of the resonance for the 4f electrons of cerium compounds, and for the 3d electrons of V_2O_3, including beginning efforts at using angle resolved photoemission to determine the k-dependence of the resonance. The overview includes the comparison and analysis of spectroscopy data with theoretical spectra as calculated for the impurity model and as obtained by DMFT, and the Kondo volume collapse calculation of the cerium alpha-gamma phase transition boundary, with its spectroscopic underpinnings.Comment: 32 pages, 11 figures, 151 references; paper for special issue of J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. on "Kondo Effect--40 Years after the Discovery

On the relationship between individual and population health

The relationship between individual and population health is partially built on the broad dichotomization of medicine into clinical medicine and public health. Potential drawbacks of current views include seeing both individual and population health as absolute and independent concepts. I will argue that the relationship between individual and population health is largely relative and dynamic. Their interrelated dynamism derives from a causally defined life course perspective on health determination starting from an individual’s conception through growth, development and participation in the collective till death, all seen within the context of an adaptive society. Indeed, it will become clear that neither individual nor population health is identifiable or even definable without informative contextualization within the other. For instance, a person’s health cannot be seen in isolation but must be placed in the rich contextual web such as the socioeconomic circumstances and other health determinants of where they were conceived, born, bred, and how they shaped and were shaped by their environment and communities, especially given the prevailing population health exposures over their lifetime. We cannot discuss the “what” and “how much” of individual and population health until we know the cumulative trajectories of both, using appropriate causal language

The normative significance of social determinants of health

© 2018 Universitat Ramon Llull. All rights reserved. In this paper I critically discuss the normative significance of so-called social determinants of health and their use in public health policy. I will highlight certain possible and real misperceptions that are common in public health research and public health policy. After introducing the concept of the social determinants of health, the first issue I discuss concerns the confusion surrounding the notion of health in public health. Public health is mainly concerned with health dispositions or risks. This is different from a concern for people being unhealthy in the sense of suffering from a disease. The difference is important for the notion of health inequalities as well. In order to deem some people less healthy than others, a gradual concept of health is needed. Once the two concepts of health are confused, it is more difficult to acknowledge normative differences between being unhealthy and being less healthy. I submit that public health policies tend to exploit the common attitude towards diseases, namely that they ought to be treated and that they establish claims of justice. It is then another step of public health practitioners to campaign against social conditions that lead to certain health inequalities, which are deemed unjust. In other words, public health allows a normative argument, via the value of health, against specific social conditions. I reject this approach and allow only an indirect role for inequalities of health dispositions in an account of social justice. They might be regarded as symptoms of social ills, but they are not, according to my mind, as such unjust. Injustice in social conditions needs to be established in its own right, not mainly via its impact on health dispositions in specific populations. In the final section I hint towards an alternative, a noncomparative theory of social justice, which aims at enabling citizens to make healthy choices, but is not per se interested in comparative differences between people