Situating care in mainstream health economics: an ethical dilemma?

Standard health economics concentrates on the provision of care by medical professionals. Yet ‘care’ receives scant analysis; it is portrayed as a spillover effect or externality in the form of interdependent utility functions. In this context care can only be conceived as either acts of altruism or as social capital. Both conceptions are subject to considerable problems stemming from mainstream health economics’ reliance on a reductionist social model built around instrumental rationality and consequentialism. Subsequently, this implies a disregard for moral rules and duties and the compassionate aspects of behaviour. Care as an externality is a second-order concern relative to self-interested utility maximization, and is therefore crowded out by the parameters of the standard model. We outline an alternative relational approach to conceptualising care based on the social embeddedness of the individual that emphasises the ethical properties of care. The deontological dimension of care suggests that standard health economics is likely to undervalue the importance of care and caring in medicine

(WP 2019-02) A Road Not Taken? A Brief History of Care in Economic Thought

Care is central to the human experience and part of the social provisioning process. Adam Smith recognized this, associating care with sympathy. Later contributions in the political economy tradition also provide scope for an analysis of care, but none as developed as Smith’s. With the emergence of the current mainstream, care is marginalized. Kenneth Boulding’s analysis provides an opportunity to interrogate care in the economy, but he fails to explicitly acknowledge care. It is left to feminist economics to highlight the centrality of care. An implication is that it challenges the conventional rubric of economic organization predicated on self-interest

An Enhanced Bailout Protocol for Mixed Criticality Embedded Software

To move mixed criticality research into industrial practice requires models whose run-time behaviour is acceptable to systems engineers. Certain aspects of current models, such as abandoning lower criticality tasks when certain situations arise, do not give the robustness required in application domains such as the automotive and aerospace industries. In this paper a new bailout protocol is developed that still guarantees high criticality software but minimises the negative impact on lower criticality software via a timely return to normal operation. We show how the bailout protocol can be integrated with existing techniques, utilising both offline slack and online gain-time to further improve performance. Static analysis is provided for schedulability guarantees, while scenario-based evaluation via simulation is used to explore the effectiveness of the protocol

Analysis and Optimization of Message Acceptance Filter Configurations for Controller Area Network (CAN)

Many of the processors used in automotive Electronic Control Units (ECUs) are resource constrained due to the cost pressures of volume production; they have relatively low clock speeds and limited memory. Controller Area Network (CAN) is used to connect the various ECUs; however, the broadcast nature of CAN means that every message transmitted on the network can potentially cause additional processing load on the receiving nodes, whether the message is relevant to that ECU or not. Hardware filters can reduce or even eliminate this unnecessary load by filtering out messages that are not needed by the ECU. Filtering is done on the message IDs which are primarily used to identify the contents of the message and its priority. In this paper, we consider the problem of selecting filter configurations to minimize the load due to undesired messages. We show that the general problem is NP-complete. We therefore propose and evaluate an approach based on Simulated Annealing. We show that this approach nds near-optimal filter configurations for the interesting case where there are more desired messages than available filters

Polytopes of Absolutely Wigner Positive Spin States

We carry out the first investigation of the properties of spherical Wigner negativity over unitary orbits of mixed spin states, and completely characterize, in all finite dimensions, the set of absolutely Wigner-positive (AWP) states. Employing the Birkhoff-von Neumann theorem on doubly stochastic matrices, we describe this characterization via a set of linear eigenvalue constraints, which together define a polytope in the simplex of mixed spin-j states centred on the maximally mixed state. Such constraints naturally arise from the underlying structure of the SU(2)-covariant Wigner function. In each dimension, a Hilbert-Schmidt ball representing a tight, purity-based AWP sufficiency criterion is exactly determined, while another ball representing AWP necessity is conjectured. Comparisons are made to absolute symmetric state separability and spherical Glauber-Sudarshan positivity, with additional details given for low spin quantum numbers.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure

From Harry to Sir Henry : social mobility in the 17th century Caribbean

During the 17th Century, the Caribbean saw an explosion in seaborne raiding. The mostcommon targets of these raids were Spanish ships and coastal towns. Some of the men who wenton these raids experienced degrees of social and economic mobility that would not have beenpossible in continental Europe. This was because the 17th Century Caribbean created anenvironment where such mobility was possible. Among these was a Welshman was known to hiscompatriots as Harry Morgan. By the end of his life, Morgan would become one of the mostfamous buccaneers in history, a wealthy sugar planter, the Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, anda knight.No one is exactly sure of Morgan’s social status before he entered the Caribbean.Historians largely agree that he was born to a freeholding family in Wales, although somedissenters contend that Morgan entered the Caribbean as an indentured servant. From eitherposition, he experienced a high degree of social and economic mobility through his raids againstthe Spanish Empire and the conventional businesses that those raids funded. His life does not represent the way that social or economic mobility worked for a typical buccaneer. What it doesrepresent is the best case scenario for an individual who came to the Caribbean and engaged inbuccaneering. Morgan utilized his raiding as a means to fund more conventional businessinterests such as sugar planting. This paper argues that the Caribbean provided a unique political,economic, and military atmosphere for an individual to climb the social and economic ladderfrom Harry Morgan, a common buccaneer, to Sir Henry Morgan, Lieutenant Governor ofJamaica and Admiral of Buccaneers

Generating Utilization Vectors for the Systematic Evaluation of Schedulability Tests

—This paper introduces the Dirichlet-Rescale (DRS) algorithm. The DRS algorithm provides an efficient general-purpose method of generating n-dimensional vectors of components (e.g. task utilizations), where the components sum to a specified total, each component conforms to individual constraints on the maximum and minimum values that it can take, and the vectors are uniformly distributed over the valid region of the domain of all possible vectors, bounded by the constraints. The DRS algorithm can be used to improve the nuance and quality of empirical studies into the effectiveness of schedulability tests for real-time systems; potentially making them more realistic, and leading to new conclusions. It is efficient enough for use in large-scale studies where millions of task sets need to be generated. Further, the constraints on individual task utilizations can be used for fine-grained control of task set parameters enabling more detailed exploration of schedulability test behavior. Finally, the real power of the algorithm lies in the fact that it can be applied recursively, with one vector acting as a set of constraints for the next. This is particularly useful in task set generation for mixed criticality systems and multi-core systems, where task utilizations are either multi-valued or can be decomposed into multiple constituent part