the socioeconomic (se) status is considered tobe one of the most important health risk factorsnowadays. a simple search showed that onlyin 2011, more than 1100 articles were cited inpubmed about the relationship of health and sestatus. however, there are many inquiries aboutthis association. the se status is a complex andmultidimensional issue, and there is no goldstandard method to measure it,...

efforts to achieve effective and meaningful patient and public involvement (ppi) in healthcare have existed for nearly a century, albeit with limited success. this brief commentary discusses a recent paper by carter and martin exploring the “challenges facing healthwatch, a new consumer champion in england,” and places these challenges in the context of the broader struggle to give a voice to h...

An efficient N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC) catalyzed sulfenylation reaction of α,β-unsaturated aldehydes with N-(arylthio)phthalimide has been developed. A wide variety of α-thioenals can be obtained with good to excellent yields and excellent Z-configuration.

In this paper we construct a q-deformation of the Witt-Burnside ring of a profinite group over a commutative ring, where q ranges over the ring of integers. When q = 1, this coincides with the Witt-Burnside ring introduced by A. To achieve our goal we show that there exists a q-deformation of the necklace ring of a profinite group over a commutative ring. As in the classical case, i.e., the cas...

The following result is proved: Let R be a 2-torsion free semiprime ring, and let T : R → R be an additive mapping, related to a surjective homomorphism θ : R → R, such that 2T (x2) = T (x)θ(x) + θ(x)T (x) for all x ∈ R. Then T is both a left and a right θ-centralizer.

In the light of increasing public mistrust, there is an urgent need to clarify the moral status of the medical profession and of the relationship of the clinician to his/her patients. In addressing this question, I first establish the coherence, within moral philosophy generally, of the concept of supererogation (the doing of more than one’s duty). I adopt the notion of an act of “unqualified” ...

In this paper we describe a system that uses patterns of eye blinks as a biometric. Each user chooses a personal blink pattern based on a song (for example “Jingle Bells”). To establish their identity, the user looks at the system’s camera and blinks to the cadence of their chosen song. Computer vision is used to detect the blinks and to compare the blinked cadence to a database of stored blink...