During a year spent in Seattle as a Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy, Rhiannon Tudor Edwards was “overwhelmed” by the choices offered among coffee, TV channels, and health care options, she recounts in her essay, “Blind Faith and Choice” (Health Affairs, Nov./Dec. 2005). But when Edwards, a senior research fellow in health economics at the University of Wales, developed a...

In this reflection about mathematics I shall confine myself to arithmetic, the study of the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, . . . . Everyone has at least the feeling of familiarity with arithmetic, and the issues that concern the human search for truth in mathematics are already present in arithmetic. Here is an illustration of research in arithmetic. About 2500 years ago, the Pythagoreans defined a num...

Than it started – first surgery, then chemotherapy, then radiation, and all over again for several times. Although I was only 11, my mum and my dad explained to me what was going to happen, why my mum needed to remove her breast, why she was going to loose her hair, and why she might be sad from time to time. At first it was OK to deal with it because I was a kid and kids see everything with a ...

In the magical art of Steganography, there is nothing frivolous, nor contrary to the Gospels and the Catholic faith; nor have we taught superstitious beliefs. Everything is based on natural, lawful and honest principles; the mystery which veils the precepts of this art and the names of the spirits, requires a cultivated reader; to hide the secrets of this art, which could be harmful if made kno...

What discount rate should be applied to social investments? It is standard to use the market interest rate, thereby respecting private preferences. We show that application of this “revealed preference” criterion rests on faith, not logic. It is justified only if preferences over all choices, including past choices, are time invariant. The conditions for this to be true are stringent. Under mor...

A. Instruction to Pap Specific Sums. Having paid funeral expenses, debts and administrative expenses, the trustee is under a duty to distribute as directed by the instrument or by rules of law. Legatees must be paid within one year of the decedent's death, but if the corpus is insufficient to pay legacies they are subject to abatement and the trustee may recover excess already paid, in good fai...

Sin,?Tf is not only in the public houses where we should look for national income disappearing down the throat. I have had opportunities of studying Insurance Act prescriptions which lead me to think that a good deal of the money is wasted. Many of the prescriptions relate to drugs which are totally inactive when tested in the wards of a hospital; if they act at all it is only through the bless...

(Correspondence on all subjects is invited, but we cannot in any way be responsible for the opinions expressed by our correspondents. No communication can be entertained if the name and address of the correspondent are not given as a guarantee of good faith, buS not necessarily for publication. All correspondents should write on one side of the paper only, and we cannot find space for very long...

The relationship between ethnic and faith communities in the United States and domestic forces relating to a converging and diverging social contract on the one hand, and US foreign, security and military policies in national, regional and global contexts on the other hand, constitutes the key focus of this paper and the ongoing research upon which it is based. Theories related to American ethn...