Walk in centres: lessons from Canada

The current reforms of the United Kingdom's primary healthcare sector intend to improve accessibility to health care. One of the proposals is to introduce "walk-in" primary care centres. The intention is to pilot "a series of nurse led centres which can be used on a `drop in' basis, providing minor treatment, health information and self help advice." The Canadian medical system has many similarities to the British system. Canada's health system is funded through general taxation (and Medicare premiums), and its general practitioners (family physicians) have a gatekeeper role to secondary care in most provinces. Canada has had walk-in centres for over 20 years. However, these centres are a doctor led service. The lessons learnt in Canada about walk-in centres may be relevant to the NHS. In this article I review the available literature about Canadian walk-in centres

Paintings and their implicit presuppositions : a preliminary report

In a series of earlier papers (Social Science Working Papers 350, 355. 357) we have studied the ways in which differences in "implicit presupposi tions" (i. e •• differences in world views) cause scientists and historians to reach differing conclusions from a consideration of the same evidence. In this paper we show that paintings are characterized by implicit presuppositions similar to those that characterize the written materials -- essays, letters, scientific papers -- we have already studied

Paintings and their implicit presuppositions: High Renaissance and Mannerism

All art historians who are interested in questions of "styles" or "schools" agree in identifying a High Renaissance school of Italian painting. There is, however, a disagreement, which has seemed nonterminating, regarding Mannerism: Is it another distinct school or is it merely a late development of the Renaissance school? We believe that this disagreement can be terminated by distinguishing questions of fact about paintings from questions about the definitions of schools. To this end we have had two representative subsets of paintings--one earlier, one later--rated on four of the dimensions of implicit presuppositions that we have introduced in other Working Papers. When the paintings are scaled in this way a very distinct profile emerges for the earlier, or Renaissance, paintings. In contrast, the later, or Mannerist, paintings are so heterogeneous that we conclude that they are best described as deviations from the Renaissance profile, rather than a separate school. These results are not unimportant--at least for art historians. But they are more important methodologically inasmuch as the procedures applied here can be used in classifying and distinguishing from one another all kind of cultural products

On a class of distributions with simple exponential tails

A simple general construction is put forward which covers many unimodal univariate distributions with simple exponentially decaying tails (e.g. asymmetric Laplace, log F and hyperbolic distributions as well as many new models). The proposed family is a special subset of a regular exponential family, and many properties flow therefrom. Two main practical points are made in the context of maximum likelihood fitting of these distributions to data. The first of these is that three, rather than an apparent four, parameters of the distributions suffice. The second is that maximum likelihood estimation of location in the new distributions is precisely equivalent to a standard form of kernel quantile estimation, choice of kernel being equivalent to specific choice of model within the class. This leads to a maximum likelihood method for bandwidth selection in kernel quantile estimation, but its practical performance is shown to be somewhat mixed. Further distribution theoretical aspects are also pursued, particularly distributions related to the main construction as special cases, limiting cases or by simple transformation

Recent work on French rural history.

The purpose of this review is to take stock as the historiography of rural France pauses for breath following the headlong expansion of the post-Second World War decades.It examines some of the themes that continue to exert an attraction on scholars,and also some of the most recent attempts to challenge and reformulate the research agendas inherited from the Annales historians.The works discussed below raise questions concerning growth and stagnation in the rural economy,the basic characteristics of the rural community,and the role of quantification in rural history

Mexican Bean Beetle

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