Developing the Cost of Large Carnivore Conflict Rapid Response Units - A Namibian Case Study

Namibia is home to half the world’s remaining wild cheetahs and - provides critical habitat for lions, leopards, spotted and brown hyena and African Wild Dogs. Despite such ecological importance, only 5% of cheetah's, <1% of African Wild Dogs', and similar percentages of remaining habitat for other large carnivores exists on officially protected lands. As a result, human/carnivore conflict is a large problem on private lands, where 60% of surveyed farmers will shoot any large carnivore on sight. This project explores building a carnivore rapid response team equipped to mitigate human/carnivore conflict through researching the financial costs of such an endeavor, with an eye on capitalizing potential benefits to all 6 Namibian large carnivore species.

Cost-effectiveness analysis of the diagnosis of meniscus tears.

BACKGROUND: Diagnostic imaging represents the fastest growing segment of costs in the US health system. This study investigated the cost-effectiveness of alternative diagnostic approaches to meniscus tears of the knee, a highly prevalent disease that traditionally relies on MRI as part of the diagnostic strategy. PURPOSE: To identify the most efficient strategy for the diagnosis of meniscus tears. STUDY DESIGN: Economic and decision analysis; Level of evidence, 1. METHODS: A simple-decision model run as a cost-utility analysis was constructed to assess the value added by MRI in various combinations with patient history and physical examination (H&P). The model examined traumatic and degenerative tears in 2 distinct settings: primary care and orthopaedic sports medicine clinic. Strategies were compared using the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER). RESULTS: In both practice settings, H&P alone was widely preferred for degenerative meniscus tears. Performing MRI to confirm a positive H&P was preferred for traumatic tears in both practice settings, with a willingness to pay of less than US$50,000 per quality-adjusted life-year. Performing an MRI for all patients was not preferred in any reasonable clinical scenario. The prevalence of a meniscus tear in a clinician's patient population was influential. For traumatic tears, MRI to confirm a positive H&P was preferred when prevalence was less than 46.7%, with H&P preferred above that. For degenerative tears, H&P was preferred until the prevalence reaches 74.2%, and then MRI to confirm a negative was the preferred strategy. In both settings, MRI to confirm positive physical examination led to more than a 10-fold lower rate of unnecessary surgeries than did any other strategy, while MRI to confirm negative physical examination led to a 2.08 and 2.26 higher rate than H&P alone in primary care and orthopaedic clinics, respectively. CONCLUSION: For all practitioners, H&P is the preferred strategy for the suspected degenerative meniscus tear. An MRI to confirm a positive H&P is preferred for traumatic tears for all practitioners. Consideration should be given to implementing alternative diagnostic strategies as well as enhancing provider education in physical examination skills to improve the reliability of H&P as a diagnostic test. CLINICAL RELEVANCE: Alternative diagnostic strategies that do not include the use of MRI may result in decreased health care costs without harm to the patient and could possibly reduce unnecessary procedures.

NAFTA and uneven development in the North American apparel industry

The various contributions to this book have documented how NAFTA-inspired firm strategies are changing the geography of apparel production in North America. The authors show in myriad ways how companies at different positions along the apparel commodity chain are responding to the new institutional and regulatory environment that NAFTA creates. By making it easier for U.S. companies to take advantage of Mexico as a nearby low-cost site for export-oriented apparel production, NAFTA is deepening the regional division of labor within North America, and this process has consequences for firms and workers in each of the signatory countries. In the introduction to this book we alluded to the obvious implications of shifting investment and trade patterns in the North American apparel industry for employment in the different countries. In this concluding chapter we focus on Mexico in the NAFTA era, specifically the extent to which Mexico's role in the North American economy facilitates or inhibits its economic development. W e begin with a discussion of the contemporary debate about Mexico's development, which turns on the question of how to assess the implications of Mexico's rapid and pro-found process of economic reform. Second, we focus on the textile and apparel industries as sectors that have been significantly affected by changes in regulatory environments at both the global and regional levels. Third, we examine the evidence regarding Mexico's NAFTA-era export dynamism, and in particular we emphasize the importance of interfirm networks, both for making sense of Mexico's meteoric rise among apparel exporters and for evaluating the implications of this dynamism for development. Fourth, we turn to a consideration of the national political-economic environment that shapes developmental outcomes for all Mexicans. Although regional disparities within Mexico are profound, aspects of government policy, such as management of the national currency, and characteristics of the institutional environment, such as industrial relations, have nationwide effects, and critics of NAFTA charge that these factors are contributing to a process of economic and social polarization that is ever more evident (Morales 1999; Dussel Peters 2000). Finally, we suggest that the mixed consequences of Mexico's NAFTA-era growth can be taken as emblematic of the contradictions that the process of globalization poses for economic and social development. The anti-sweatshop campaign in North America is one example of transnational or crossborder movements that are emerging to address the negative consequences of this process. In bringing attention to the problem of sweatshop production in North America, activists are developing strategies that rely on a network logic that is not dissimilar to the approaches reflected in the various chapters of this book. © 2009 by Temple University Press. All rights reserved.

Empirical measurement of illicit tobacco trade in the Philippines.

Cigarette smuggling reduces the price of cigarettes, thwarts youth access restrictions, reduces government revenue, and undercuts the ability of taxes to reduce consumption. The tobacco industry often opposes increases to tobacco taxes on the claim that greater taxes induce more smuggling. To date, little is known about the magnitude of smuggling in the Philippines. his information is necessary to effectively address illicit trade and to measure the impacts of tax changes and the introduction of secure tax markings on illicit trade. This study employs two gap discrepancy methods to estimate the magnitude of illicit trade in cigarettes for the Philippines between 1994 and 2009. First, domestic consumption is compared with tax-paid sales to measure the consumption of illicit cigarettes. Second, imports recorded by the Philippines are compared with exports to the Philippines by trade partners to measure smuggling. Domestic consumption fell short of tax-paid sales for all survey years. The magnitude of these differences and a comparison with a prevalence survey for 2009 suggest a high level of survey under-reporting of smoking. In the late 1990s and the mid 2000s, the Philippines experienced two sharp declines in trade discrepancies, from a high of $750 million in 1995 to a low of $133.7 million in 2008. Discrepancies composed more than one-third of the domestic market in 1995, but only 10 percent in 2009. Hong Kong, Singapore, and China together account for more than 80 percent of the cumulative discrepancies over the period and 74 percent of the discrepancy in 2009. The presence of large discrepancies supports the need to implement an effective tax marking and tobacco track and trace system to reduce illicit trade and support tax collection. The absence of a relation between tax changes and smuggling suggests that potential increases in the excise tax should not be discouraged by illicit trade. Finally, the identification of specific trade partners as primary sources for illicit trade may facilitate targeted efforts in cooperation with these governments to reduce illicit trade.

Percutaneous Revision of a Testicular Prosthesis is Safe, Cost-effective, and Provides Good Patient Satisfaction.

Office-based percutaneous revision of a testicular prosthesis has never been reported. A patient received a testicular prosthesis but was dissatisfied with the firmness of the implant. In an office setting, the prosthesis was inflated with additional fluid via a percutaneous approach. Evaluated outcomes included patient satisfaction, prosthesis size, recovery time, and cost savings. The patient was satisfied, with no infection, leak, or complication after more than 1 year of follow-up, at significantly less cost than revision surgery. Percutaneous adjustment of testicular prosthesis fill-volume can be safe, inexpensive, and result in good patient satisfaction.

Predictive immunomonitoring-The COST ENTIRE initiative

SCOPUS: ed.j

Earliness penalties on a single machine subject to precedence constraints: SLK due date assignment

The paper considers the single machine due date assignment and scheduling problems with n jobs in which the due dates are to be obtained from the processing times by adding a positive slack q. A schedule is feasible if there are no tardy jobs and the job sequence respects given precedence constraints. The value of q is chosen so as to minimize a function ϕ(F,q) which is non-decreasing in each of its arguments, where F is a certain non-decreasing earliness penalty function. Once q is chosen or fixed, the corresponding scheduling problem is to find a feasible schedule with the minimum value of function F. In the case of arbitrary precedence constraints the problems under consideration are shown to be NP-hard in the strong sense even for F being total earliness. If the precedence constraints are defined by a series-parallel graph, both scheduling and due date assignment problems are proved solvable in time, provided that F is either the sum of linear functions or the sum of exponential functions. The running time of the algorithms can be reduced to if the jobs are independent. Scope and purpose We consider the single machine due date assignment and scheduling problems and design fast algorithms for their solution under a wide range of assumptions. The problems under consideration arise in production planning when the management is faced with a problem of setting the realistic due dates for a number of orders. The due dates of the orders are determined by increasing the time needed for their fulfillment by a common positive slack. If the slack is set to be large enough, the due dates can be easily maintained, thereby producing a good image of the firm. This, however, may result in the substantial holding cost of the finished products before they are brought to the customer. The objective is to explore the trade-off between the size of the slack and the arising holding costs for the early orders.

The 2001 World Trade Centre evacuation

The WTC evacuation of 11 September 2001 provides an unrepeatable opportunity to probe into and understand the very nature of evacuation dynamics and with this improved understanding, contribute to the design of safer, more evacuation efficient, yet highly functional, high rise buildings. Following 9/11 the Fire Safety Engineering Group (FSEG) of the University of Greenwich embarked on a study of survivor experiences from the WTC Twin Towers evacuation. The experiences were collected from published accounts appearing in the print and electronic mass media and are stored in a relational data base specifically developed for this purpose. Using these accounts and other available sources of information FSEG also undertook a series of numerical simulations of the WTC North Tower. This paper represents an overview of the results from both studies.

Ultra-fine pitch stencil printing for a low cost and low temperature flip-chip assembly process

This paper presents the results of a packaging process based on the stencil printing of isotropic conductive adhesives (ICAs) that form the interconnections of flip-chip bonded electronic packages. Ultra-fine pitch (sub-100-mum), low temperature (100degC), and low cost flip-chip assembly is demonstrated. The article details recent advances in electroformed stencil manufacturing that use microengineering techniques to enable stencil fabrication at apertures sizes down to 20mum and pitches as small as 30mum. The current state of the art for stencil printing of ICAs and solder paste is limited between 150-mum and 200-mum pitch. The ICAs-based interconnects considered in this article have been stencil printed successfully down to 50-mum pitch with consistent printing demonstrated at 90-mum pitch size. The structural integrity or the stencil after framing and printing is also investigated through experimentation and computational modeling. The assembly of a flip-chip package based on copper column bumped die and ICA deposits stencil printed at sub-100-mum pitch is described. Computational fluid dynamics modeling of the print performance provides an indicator on the optimum print parameters. Finally, an organic light emitting diode display chip is packaged using this assembly process

Preemptive scheduling on uniform parallel machines with controllable job processing times

In this paper, we provide a unified approach to solving preemptive scheduling problems with uniform parallel machines and controllable processing times. We demonstrate that a single criterion problem of minimizing total compression cost subject to the constraint that all due dates should be met can be formulated in terms of maximizing a linear function over a generalized polymatroid. This justifies applicability of the greedy approach and allows us to develop fast algorithms for solving the problem with arbitrary release and due dates as well as its special case with zero release dates and a common due date. For the bicriteria counterpart of the latter problem we develop an efficient algorithm that constructs the trade-off curve for minimizing the compression cost and the makespan.

Approximating the evacuation of the World Trade Center North Tower using computer simulation

This article concerns an investigation of the full scale evacuation of a building with a configuration similar to that of the World Trade Center (WTC) North Tower using computer simulation. A range of evacuation scenarios is explored in order to better understand the evacuation of the WTC on 11 September 2001. The analysis makes use of response time data derived from a study of published WTC survivor accounts. Geometric details of the building are obtained from architects' plans while the total building population used in the scenarios is based on estimates produced by the National Institute of Standards and Technology formal investigation into the evacuation. This paper attempts to approximate the events of 11 September 2001 and pursue several `what if' questions concerning the evacuation. In particular, the study explores the likely outcome had a single staircase survived intact from top to bottom. More generally, this paper explores issues associated with the practical limits of building size that can be expected to be efficiently evacuated using stairs alone.

Nursing resources and patient outcomes in intensive care: a systematic review of the literature

Objectives: To evaluate the empirical evidence linking nursing resources to patient outcomes in intensive care settings as a framework for future research in this area. Background: Concerns about patient safely and the quality of care are driving research on the clinical and cost-effectiveness of health care interventions, including the deployment of human resources. This is particularly important in intensive care where a large proportion of the health care budget is consumed and where nursing staff is the main item of expenditure. Recommendations about staffing levels have been trade but may not be evidence based and may not always be achieved in practice. Methods: We searched systematically for studies of the impact of nursing resources (e.g. nurse-patient ratios, nurses' level of education, training and experience) on patient Outcomes, including mortality and adverse events, in adult intensive care. Abstracts of articles were reviewed and retrieved if they investigated the relationship between nursing resources and patient Outcomes. Characteristics of the studies were tabulated and the quality of the Studies assessed. Results: Of the 15 studies included in this review, two reported it statistical relationship between nursing resources and both mortality and adverse events, one reported ail association to mortality only, seven studies reported that they Could not reject the null hypothesis of no relationship to mortality and 10 studies (out of 10 that tested the hypothesis) reported a relationship to adverse events. The main explanatory mechanisms were the lack of time for nurses to perform preventative measures, or for patient surveillance. The nurses' role in pain control was noted by One author. Studies were mainly observational and retrospective and varied in scope from 1 to 52 units. Recommendations for future research include developing the mechanisms linking nursing resources to patient Outcomes, and designing large multi-centre prospective Studies that link patient's exposure to nursing care oil a shift-by-shift basis over time. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Trade unions, civil society organisations and health reforms

This article provides an analysis of resistance to neoliberalism and commodification in the public healthcare sector as seen from a trade union perspective. It uses recent research on social-movement unionism and new labour internationalism to structure a series of case studies examining resistance to different dimensions of healthcare commodification in four countries. The range of alliances trade unions are making do not fit tidily into one model, but give insights into the movement elements of trade unionism. This dimension must be strengthened, but can also be in tension with collective bargaining and other institutional processes. How to constantly reconcile these different positions is the future challenge facing trade unions.