Monitoring substance use in prisons: Assessing the potential value of wastewater analysis

Prison substance use is a major concern for prison authorities and the wider community. Australia has responded to this problem by implementing the National Corrections Drug Strategy. Across Australia, the true extent of prison substance use cannot be determined. As a result, the effectiveness of the interventions employed as part of this strategy cannot be properly assessed. This has important implications for the allocation of corrective services resources and future policy development. This article explores the benefits and limitations, as well as the ethical and practical issues in using wastewater analysis (WWA) to measure levels of substance use in prisons. It reports results from the first application of WWA to an Australian prison, which supports the use of WWA in this context. Given the increasing concern for prescription misuse in prisons, we also highlight the novel use of WWA to measure the extent of prescription misuse by prisoners. The article concludes that as a result of its objectivity, sensitivity and cost-effectiveness, the use of WWA in prisons warrants further consideration in Australia.

Physical activity cost in children following an acquired brain injury : a comparative study

Background: Alterations in energy expenditure during activity post head injury has not been investigated due primarily to the difficulty of measurement. Objective: The aim of this study was to compare energy expenditure during activity and body composition of children following acquired brain injury (ABI) with data from a group of normal controls. Design: Energy expenditure was measured using the Cosmed K4b2 in a group of 15 children with ABI and a group of 67 normal children during rest and when walking and running. Mean number of steps taken per 3 min run was also recorded and body composition was measured. Results: The energy expended during walking was not significantly different between both groups. A significant difference was found between the two groups in the energy expended during running and also for the number of steps taken as children with ABI took significantly less steps than the normal controls during a 3 min run. Conclusions: Children with ABI exert more energy per activity than healthy controls when controlled for velocity or distance. However, they expend less energy to walk and run when they are free to choose their own desirable, comfortable pace than normal controls. © 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Cost effectiveness of bone density measurements

Objective. To assess the cost-effectiveness of bone density screening programmes for osteoporosis. Study design. Using published and locally available data regarding fracture rates and treatment costs, the overall costs per fracture prevented, cost per quality of life year (QALY) saved and cost per year of life gained were estimated for different bone density screening and osteoporosis treatment programmes. Main outcome measures. Cost per fracture prevented, cost per QALY saved, and cost per year of life gained. Results. In women over the age of 50 years, the costs per fracture prevented of treating all women with hormone replacement therapy, or treating only if osteoporosis is demonstrated on bone density screening were £32,594 or £23,867 respectively. For alendronate therapy for the same groups, the costs were £171,067 and £14,067 respectively. Once the background rate of treatment with alendronate reaches 18%, bone density screening becomes cost-saving. Costs estimates per QALY saved ranged from £1,514 to £39,076 for osteoporosis treatment with alendronate following bone density screening. Conclusions. For relatively expensive medications such as alendronate, treatment programmes with prior bone density screening are far more cost effective than those without, and in some circumstances become cost-saving. Costs per QALY of life saved and per year of life gained for osteoporosis treatment with prior bone density screening compare favourably with treatment of hypertension and hypercholesterolemia.

Communicating consequences with costs: A commentary on Corso et al's cost of injury

Estimating the economic burden of injuries is important for setting priorities, allocating scarce health resources and planning cost-effective prevention activities. As a metric of burden, costs account for multiple injury consequences—death, severity, disability, body region, nature of injury—in a single unit of measurement. In a 1989 landmark report to the US Congress, Rice et al1 estimated the lifetime costs of injuries in the USA in 1985. By 2000, the epidemiology and burden of injuries had changed enough that the US Congress mandated an update, resulting in a book on the incidence and economic burden of injury in the USA.2 To make these findings more accessible to the larger realm of scientists and practitioners and to provide a template for conducting the same economic burden analyses in other countries and settings, a summary3 was published in Injury Prevention. Corso et al reported that, between 1985 and 2000, injury rates declined roughly 15%. The estimated lifetime cost of these injuries declined 20%, totalling US$406 billion, including US$80 billion in medical costs and US$326 billion in lost productivity. While incidence reflects problem size, the relative burden of injury is better expressed using costs.

Effect of shoes' heel height on the energy cost during jogging

The purpose of this study is to examine the changes of energy cost during a high-heeled continuous jogging.Thirteen healthy female volunteers jointed in this study with heel height of the shoes varied from 1, 4.5 and 7 cm, respectively. Each subjects jogged on the treadmill with K4b2 portable gas analysis system. The results of this study showed that ventilnation, relative oxygen consumption and energy expenditure increased with the increase of heel height and these values shows significantly larger when the heel height reached to 7 cm. Present study suggest that wearing high heel shoes jogging could directly increase energy consumption, causing neuromuscular fatigue.

Deriving optimal fishing effort for managing Australia's Moreton Bay multispecies trawl fishery with aggregated effort data

Deriving an estimate of optimal fishing effort or even an approximate estimate is very valuable for managing fisheries with multiple target species. The most challenging task associated with this is allocating effort to individual species when only the total effort is recorded. Spatial information on the distribution of each species within a fishery can be used to justify the allocations, but often such information is not available. To determine the long-term overall effort required to achieve maximum sustainable yield (MSY) and maximum economic yield (MEY), we consider three methods for allocating effort: (i) optimal allocation, which optimally allocates effort among target species; (ii) fixed proportions, which chooses proportions based on past catch data; and (iii) economic allocation, which splits effort based on the expected catch value of each species. Determining the overall fishing effort required to achieve these management objectives is a maximizing problem subject to constraints due to economic and social considerations. We illustrated the approaches using a case study of the Moreton Bay Prawn Trawl Fishery in Queensland (Australia). The results were consistent across the three methods. Importantly, our analysis demonstrated the optimal total effort was very sensitive to daily fishing costs-the effort ranged from 9500-11 500 to 6000-7000, 4000 and 2500 boat-days, using daily cost estimates of $0, $500, $750, and $950, respectively. The zero daily cost corresponds to the MSY, while a daily cost of $750 most closely represents the actual present fishing cost. Given the recent debate on which costs should be factored into the analyses for deriving MEY, our findings highlight the importance of including an appropriate cost function for practical management advice. The approaches developed here could be applied to other multispecies fisheries where only aggregated fishing effort data are recorded, as the literature on this type of modelling is sparse.

General ranked set sampling with cost considerations

Nahhas, Wolfe, and Chen (2002, Biometrics 58, 964-971) considered optimal set size for ranked set sampling (RSS) with fixed operational costs. This framework can be very useful in practice to determine whether RSS is beneficial and to obtain the optimal set size that minimizes the variance of the population estimator for a fixed total cost. In this article, we propose a scheme of general RSS in which more than one observation can be taken from each ranked set. This is shown to be more cost-effective in some cases when the cost of ranking is not so small. We demonstrate using the example in Nahhas, Wolfe, and Chen (2002, Biometrics 58, 964-971), by taking two or more observations from one set even with the optimal set size from the RSS design can be more beneficial.

The Learning Component of Dynamic Allocation Indices

For a multiarmed bandit problem with exponential discounting the optimal allocation rule is defined by a dynamic allocation index defined for each arm on its space. The index for an arm is equal to the expected immediate reward from the arm, with an upward adjustment reflecting any uncertainty about the prospects of obtaining rewards from the arm, and the possibilities of resolving those uncertainties by selecting that arm. Thus the learning component of the index is defined to be the difference between the index and the expected immediate reward. For two arms with the same expected immediate reward the learning component should be larger for the arm for which the reward rate is more uncertain. This is shown to be true for arms based on independent samples from a fixed distribution with an unknown parameter in the cases of Bernoulli and normal distributions, and similar results are obtained in other cases.

Sequential allocation in clinical trials

Suppose two treatments with binary responses are available for patients with some disease and that each patient will receive one of the two treatments. In this paper we consider the interests of patients both within and outside a trial using a Bayesian bandit approach and conclude that equal allocation is not appropriate for either group of patients. It is suggested that Gittins indices should be used (using an approach called dynamic discounting by choosing the discount rate based on the number of future patients in the trial) if the disease is rare, and the least failures rule if the disease is common. Some analytical and simulation results are provided.

Gittins indices and constrained allocation in clinical trials

We explore the use of Gittins indices to search for near optimality in sequential clinical trials. Some adaptive allocation rules are proposed to achieve the following two objectives as far as possible: (i) to reduce the expected successes lost, (ii) to minimize the error probability at the end. Simulation results indicate the merits of the rules based on Gittins indices for small trial sizes. The rules are generalized to the case when neither of the response densities is known. Asymptotic optimality is derived for the constrained rules. A simple allocation rule is recommended for one-stage models. The simulation results indicate that it works better than both equal allocation and Bather's randomized allocation. We conclude with a discussion of possible further developments.

Using global formulary apportionment for international profit allocation: The case of Indonesia's mining industry

My thesis examined an alternative approach, referred to as the unitary taxation approach to the allocation of profit, which arises from the notion that as a multinational group exists as a single economic entity, it should be taxed as one taxable unit. The plausibility of a unitary taxation regime achieving international acceptance and agreement is highly contestable due to its implementation issues, and economic and political feasibility. Using a case-study approach focusing on Freeport-McMoRan and Rio Tinto's mining operations in Indonesia, this thesis compares both tax regimes against the criteria for a good tax system - equity, efficiency, neutrality and simplicity. This thesis evaluates key issues that arise when implementing a unitary taxation approach with formulary apportionment based on the context of mining multinational firms in Indonesia.

Counting the cost of fast fashion

There’s a polyester mullet skirt gracing a derrière near you. It’s short at the front, long at the back, and it’s also known as the hi-lo skirt. Like fads that preceded it, the mullet skirt has a short fashion life, and although it will remain potentially wearable for years, it’s likely to soon be heading to the charity shop or to landfill...

Heavy haul sleeper design: A rational cost-saving method

Heavy haul railway lines are important and expensive items of infrastructure operating in an environment which is increasingly focussed on risk-based management and constrained profit margins. It is vital that costs are minimised but also that infrastructure satisfies failure criteria and standards of reliability which account for the random nature of wheel-rail forces and of the properties of the materials in the track. In Australia and the USA, concrete railway sleepers/ties are still designed using methods which the rest of the civil engineering world discarded decades ago in favour of the more rational, more economical and probabilistically based, limit states design (LSD) concept. This paper describes a LSD method for concrete sleepers which is based on (a) billions of measurements over many years of the real, random wheel-rail forces on heavy haul lines, and (b) the true capacity of sleepers. The essential principles on which the new method is based are similar to current, widely used LSD-based standards for concrete structures. The paper proposes and describes four limit states which a sleeper must satisfy, namely: strength; operations; serviceability; and fatigue. The method has been applied commercially to two new major heavy haul lines in Australia, where it has saved clients millions of dollars in capital expenditure.

Overcoming the challenges of building heritage projects: Improvements to time, scope and cost performance

This research was undertaken to encompass and identify challenges and impact factors that affect the successful outcomes of heritage building projects, especially those related to finding major causes of delays and cost overruns across projects in all Australian states. This project determined and analysed the causes of such delays and programme issues emanating from the planning and execution phases, whilst also analysing the requirements for management of multiple stakeholder relationships and the influence of unforeseen technical factors. The research proposes "call for action" guidance and was validated by experienced experts in heritage building projects in Australia. The proposed guidance is designed to ensure that realistic cost targets and delivery timeframes are set in future heritage projects, and necessary interventions made at appropriate project stages to ensure decisions are made that will help to prevent overtime and cost overuns.

Drivers of the accuracy of developers' early stage cost estimates in residential construction

Purpose – Preliminary cost estimates for construction projects are often the basis of financial feasibility and budgeting decisions in the early stages of planning and for effective project control, monitoring and execution. The purpose of this paper is to identify and better understand the cost drivers and factors that contribute to the accuracy of estimates in residential construction projects from the developers’ perspective. Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses a literature review to determine the drivers that affect the accuracy of developers’ early stage cost estimates and the factors influencing the construction costs of residential construction projects. It used cost variance data and other supporting documentation collected from two case study projects in South East Queensland, Australia, along with semi-structured interviews conducted with the practitioners involved. Findings – It is found that many cost drivers or factors of cost uncertainty identified in the literature for large-scale projects are not as apparent and relevant for developers’ small-scale residential construction projects. Specifically, the certainty and completeness of project-specific information, suitability of historical cost data, contingency allowances, methods of estimating and the estimator’s level of experience significantly affect the accuracy of cost estimates. Developers of small-scale residential projects use pre-established and suitably priced bills of quantities as the prime estimating method, which is considered to be the most efficient and accurate method for standard house designs. However, this method needs to be backed with the expertise and experience of the estimator. Originality/value – There is a lack of research on the accuracy of developers’ early stage cost estimates and the relevance and applicability of cost drivers and factors in the residential construction projects. This research has practical significance for improving the accuracy of such preliminary cost estimates.