According to reductionism, every complex phenomenon can and should be explained in terms of the simplest possible entities and mechanisms. The parts determine the whole. This approach has been an outstanding success in science, but this essay will point out ways in which it could nevertheless be giving us wrong ideas and holding back progress. For example, it may be impossible to understand key...

OBJECTIVE To assess the knowledge of four groups of individuals regarding who is legally authorised to consent to health care or research involving older patients. DESIGN A provincewide postal survey. SETTING Province of Quebec, Canada. PARTICIPANTS Three hundred older adults, 434 informal caregivers of cognitively impaired individuals, 98 researchers in aging and 136 members of research ...

A lot of confusion and misunderstanding has been created by several commentators on the issue of non-performing loans (NPLs) of banking system. They take the absolute amount of such loans at the current point of time and compare it with the quantum of such loans in October 1999 and make a hue and cry that the situation has deteriorated because the quantum of NPLs has gone up. Such a simplistic ...

In this paper we study the financial repercussions of the destruction of two fully armed and operational moon-sized battle stations (“Death Stars”) in a 4-year period and the dissolution of the galactic government in Star Wars. The emphasis of this work is to calibrate and simulate a model of the banking and financial systems within the galaxy. Along these lines, we measure the level of systemi...