We affirm the dynamical systems approach taken by Feldman and Levin, but argue that a more mathematically rigorous and standard exposition of the model according to dynamical systems theory would greatly increase readability and testability. Such an explication would also have heuristic value, suggesting new variations of the model. We present one such variant, a new solution to the redundancy problem.

Priority setting in health care means making distributional decisions, which inherently involves limiting access to some health services. Public health ethics involves many ethical principles like efficiency, equity and individual choice, which are frequently appealed to but rarely analysed. How these concepts are understood and applied impacts on healthcare planning and delivery policies. This article discusses findings of a research study undertaken in the context of the Iranian health system in which two main ethical values appear to be operating: equity (...) and personal choice. It asserts that the pro-market perspective, driven by individual choice appears to be dominant as it is influenced by the powerful medical profession. This is despite egalitarian intentions proclaimed in the Constitution and the majority of national laws. The study argues that the market influence in healthcare priority setting is unlikely to diminish because of weak implementation of existing laws. In conclusion, the article suggests that the private health sector could help to achieve the state’s proclaimed egalitarian goals only if new regulatory systems and new systems of governance are implemented. Such measures should be aimed at monitoring and controlling the performance of the private sector, to better manage and harness its capacities. (shrink)

The plan for this volume emerged during the international Leipzig conference commemorating the centenary of the death of Gustav Fechner.

In a comparison of the principles of special relativity and of quantum mechanics, the former theory is marked by its relative economy and apparent explanatory simplicity. A number of theorists have thus been led to search for a small number of postulates - essentially information theoretic in nature - that would play the role in quantum mechanics that the relativity principle and the light postulate jointly play in Einstein's 1905 special relativity theory. The purpose of the present paper is to (...) resist this idea, at least in so far as it is supposed to reveal the fundamental form of the theory. It is argued that the methodology of Einstein's 1905 theory represents a victory of pragmatism over explanatory depth; and that its adoption only made sense in the context of the chaotic state state of physics at the start of the 20th century - as Einstein well knew. (shrink)

Heisenberg'sgendanken experiments in quantum mechanics have given rise to a widespread belief that the indeterminacy relations holding for the variables of a quantal system can be explained quasiclassically in terms of a disturbance suffered by the system in interaction with a quantal measurement, or state preparation, agent. There are a number of criticisms of this doctrine in the literature, which are critically examined in this article and found to be ininconclusive, the chief error being the conflation of this disturbance with (...) the projection postulate. We present a critique of the disturbance theory based on the fact that the required disturbance will in general depend on the interaction time of the system and state-preparer. This point is exploited in the construction of a spin-interaction model which acts as a counterexample to the disturbance doctrine, while remaining faithful to the spirit of Heisenberg'sgedanken experiments. Several consequences of this result are discussed. (shrink)

Poor ethical decision–making costs industry billions of dollars a year and damages the images of corporations. Thus, by answering the question ‘Why do individuals behave as they do when confronted with ethical issues?’ ethical theory can provide businesses with a means to create a more ethical climate and a more successful operation. This study tested the Ethical Decision–Making Model with accountability (Beu & Buckley 2001), which uses theory that suggests that ethical behavior is influenced by the individual, the issue, social (...) relationships (accountability), and the organization in which the employee is embedded (Brass, Butterfield & Skaggs 1988; Frink & Klimoski 1998). The results showed that individuals’ thought processes (cognitive moral development), personalities (locus of control, hostility and aggression, Machiavellianism), and gender influence how they respond to ethical dilemmas, as well as the salience of the moral issue (moral intensity) and the environmental context (work/school). (shrink)

We study the formalization within sybsystems of second-order arithmetic of theorems concerning periodic points in dynamical systems on the real line. We show that Sharkovsky's theorem is provable in WKL0. We show that, with an additional assumption, Sharkovsky's theorem is provable in RCA0. We show that the existence for all n of n-fold iterates of continuous mappings of the closed unit interval into itself is equivalent to the disjunction of Σ02 induction and weak König's lemma.