▪ Abstract Well-being is a complex construct that concerns optimal experience and functioning. Current research on well-being has been derived from two general perspectives: the hedonic approach, which focuses on happiness and defines well-being in terms of pleasure attainment and pain avoidance; and the eudaimonic approach, which focuses on meaning and self-realization and defines well-being in terms of the degree to which a person is fully functioning. These two views have given rise to different research foci and a body of knowledge that is in some areas divergent and in others complementary. New methodological developments concerning multilevel modeling and construct comparisons are also allowing researchers to formulate new questions for the field. This review considers research from both perspectives concerning the nature of well-being, its antecedents, and its stability across time and culture.

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On Happiness and Human Potentials: A Review of Research on Hedonic and Eudaimonic Well-Being

https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(08)61690-6.pdf

Closing the gap in a generation: health equity through action on the social determinants of health

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

A doubling in global food demand projected for the next 50 years poses huge challenges for the sustainability both of food production and of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and the services they provide to society. Agriculturalists are the principal managers of global useable lands and will shape, perhaps irreversibly, the surface of the Earth in the coming decades. New incentives and policies for ensuring the sustainability of agriculture and ecosystem services will be crucial if we are to meet the demands of improving yields without compromising environmental integrity or public health.

/pdf/agricultural-sustainability-and-intensive-production-1h98l920tu.pdf

Agricultural sustainability and intensive production practices

We review in detail a number of approaches that have been adopted to try and explain the remarkable observation of our accelerating universe. In particular we discuss the arguments for and recent progress made towards understanding the nature of dark energy. We review the observational evidence for the current accelerated expansion of the universe and present a number of dark energy models in addition to the conventional cosmological constant, paying particular attention to scalar field models such as quintessence, K-essence, tachyon, phantom and dilatonic models. The importance of cosmological scaling solutions is emphasized when studying the dynamical system of scalar fields including coupled dark energy. We study the evolution of cosmological perturbations allowing us to confront them with the observation of the Cosmic Microwave Background and Large Scale Structure and demonstrate how it is possible in principle to reconstruct the equation of state of dark energy by also using Supernovae Ia observational data. We also discuss in detail the nature of tracking solutions in cosmology, particle physics and braneworld models of dark energy, the nature of possible future singularities, the effect of higher order curvature terms to avoid a Big Rip singularity, and approaches to modifying gravity which leads to a late-time accelerated expansion without recourse to a new form of dark energy.

Dynamics of dark energy

A recent investigation shows that a local gauge string with a phenomenological energy momentum tensor, as prescribed by Vilenkin, is inconsistent in Brans-Dicke theory. In this work it is shown that such a string is consistent in a more general scalar tensor theory where $\ensuremath{\omega}$ is a function of the scalar field. A set of solutions of full nonlinear Einstein equations for the interior region of such a string is presented.

Local cosmic string in generalized scalar tensor theory

Concepts of Poverty

Famines and Social Response

La retribution du merite et le concept meme du merite dependent de la maniere dont nous voyons la bonne societe et les criteres sur lesquels nous nous appuyons pour juger des succes et des echecs de cette societe. La « perspective incitative » sur le merite est en competition avec la perspective en termes de « propriete de l’action ». La presence d’inegalites, ou d’autres inconvenients, peut alors provoquer des tensions psychologiques, en particulier quand la retribution du merite n’est pas directement valorisee par l’approche incitative. Meme si les arguments en termes d’incitation ont tendance a etre, en principe, acceptes comme le principal registre de justification d’un systeme de recompenses, certains plaidoyers « meritocratiques » apparaissent inutiles et meme, quelquefois, en contradiction avec la perspective incitative. Les caracteristiques ajoutees communement sont : (1) le fait de confondre le merite d’une action avec celui de la personne (et potentiellement de tout un groupe d’individus) ; (2) de perdre de vue le caractere instrumental d’une argumentation en termes d’incitation et de considerer les recompenses comme intrinsequement dues ou meritees ; et (3) d’exclure arbitrairement les considerations distributives de la fonction de choix social a partir de laquelle est definie le merite.

Amartya Sen

Papers

Local cosmic string in generalized scalar tensor theory

Concepts of Poverty

Famines and Social Response

Mérite et justice

Violence and Civil Society