948 research outputs found
Comprehensive Health Care Reform and Biomedical Innovation
Considers ways to control the costs of development, adoption, and diffusion of new technologies as part of comprehensive healthcare reform. Discusses how cost control interventions might affect coverage, physician payments, and care processes
The Obligation to Participate in Biomedical Research
The current prevailing view is that participation in biomedical research is
above and beyond the call of duty. While some commentators have offered
reasons against this, we propose a novel public goods argument for an obligation
to participate in biomedical research. Biomedical knowledge is a public
good, available to any individual even if that individual does not contribute
to it. Participation in research is a critical way to support an important
public good. Consequently, all have a duty to participate. The current social
norm is that individuals participate only if they have a good reason to do so.
The public goods argument implies that individuals should participate unless
they have a good reason not to. Such a shift would be of great aid to the
progress of biomedical research, eventually making society significantly
healthier and longer lived
Analytical and experimental investigations of low level acceleration measurement techniques
Construction techniques for accelerometer with low level threshold sensitivit
Parallelizing Deadlock Resolution in Symbolic Synthesis of Distributed Programs
Previous work has shown that there are two major complexity barriers in the
synthesis of fault-tolerant distributed programs: (1) generation of fault-span,
the set of states reachable in the presence of faults, and (2) resolving
deadlock states, from where the program has no outgoing transitions. Of these,
the former closely resembles with model checking and, hence, techniques for
efficient verification are directly applicable to it. Hence, we focus on
expediting the latter with the use of multi-core technology.
We present two approaches for parallelization by considering different design
choices. The first approach is based on the computation of equivalence classes
of program transitions (called group computation) that are needed due to the
issue of distribution (i.e., inability of processes to atomically read and
write all program variables). We show that in most cases the speedup of this
approach is close to the ideal speedup and in some cases it is superlinear. The
second approach uses traditional technique of partitioning deadlock states
among multiple threads. However, our experiments show that the speedup for this
approach is small. Consequently, our analysis demonstrates that a simple
approach of parallelizing the group computation is likely to be the effective
method for using multi-core computing in the context of deadlock resolution
The ethics of expanding access to cheaper, less effective treatments
This article examines a fundamental question of justice in global health. Is it ethically preferable to provide a larger number of people with cheaper treatments that are less effective (or more toxic), or to restrict treatments to a smaller group to provide a more expensive but more effective or less toxic alternative? We argue that choosing to provide less effective or more toxic interventions to a larger number of people is favored by the principles of utility, equality, and priority for those worst-off. Advocates are mistaken to demand that medical care provided in low-income and middle-income countries should be the same as in high-income countries
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