Evidence based practice: What is it? and why does it matter

The terms `evidence' and 'evidence-based practice' are now common place in health care literature. Government reports make increasing use of these terms and seek to encourage all health professionals to base their practice on sound evidence (Department of Health (DOH) 1996, 1997, 1998; Scottish Office, 1997, 1998, 1998b). So what exactly is `evidence based practice' and where did the term come from

Descent Construction for Gspin Groups: Main Results and Applications

The purpose of this note is to announce an extension of the descent method of Ginzburg, Rallis and Soudry to the setting of essentially self dual representations. This extension of the descent construction provides a complement to recent work of Asgari and Shahidi on the generic transfer for general Spin groups as well as to the work of Asgari and Raghuram on cuspidality of the exterior square lift for representations of GL4. Complete proofs of the results announced in the present note will appear in our forthcoming articles.Comment: The statement of the main results has been corrected to include the assumption that the cuspidal representations in the isobaric sums must be distinc