Ohio: Individual State Report - State Level Field Network Study of the Implementation of the Affordable Care Act

This report is part of a series of 21 state and regional studies examining the rollout of the ACA. The national network -- with 36 states and 61 researchers -- is led by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the public policy research arm of the State University of New York, the Brookings Institution, and the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania.Over the past year, state agency leadership and some members of the legislature have taken an interest in exploring various healthcare reforms in Ohio that address rising healthcare costs and identifying ways to improve healthcare quality, efficiency, and improve overall health outcomes for Ohioans. For example, the legislature included language around healthcare price transparency in the most recent state budget and formed a study committee for the summer of 2015 with the purpose of examining healthcare efficiencies that lead to better health outcomes at a lower cost to Ohioans

Enabling collaboration in virtual reality navigators

In this paper we characterize a feature superset for Collaborative Virtual Reality Environments (CVRE), and derive a component framework to transform stand-alone VR navigators into full-fledged multithreaded collaborative environments. The contributions of our approach rely on a cost-effective and extensible technique for loading software components into separate POSIX threads for rendering, user interaction and network communications, and adding a top layer for managing session collaboration. The framework recasts a VR navigator under a distributed peer-to-peer topology for scene and object sharing, using callback hooks for broadcasting remote events and multicamera perspective sharing with avatar interaction. We validate the framework by applying it to our own ALICE VR Navigator. Experimental results show that our approach has good performance in the collaborative inspection of complex models.Postprint (published version

How the Supreme Court Uses the Certiorari Process in the Ninth Circuit To Further Its Pro-Business Agenda: A Strange Pas de Deux with an Unfortunate Coda

This Article examines the proposition that the Roberts Court has an unusually strong pro-business slant through the lens of the Court\u27s certiorari process. The Article uses data from the grant or denial of certiorari petitions filed in environmental cases over a sixteen-year period in both the Ninth and District of Columbia Circuits, selected because each court hears a large number of environmental cases. The recent record in the Ninth Circuit, where environmentalists win below only to lose in the high court, or lose below and subsequently have their petitions denied, is quite different from that in the D.C. Circuit. In the D.C. Circuit, during the same period, the high court has not reversed a single positive environmental decision issued below. In fact, over the same period, there is no instance of the Court granting a petition where environmentalists won in the D.C. Circuit. This Article explores the proposition that the Ninth Circuit has become a unique and useful foil for the Court\u27s conservative wing to advance its pro-business agenda through the manipulation of the certiorari process. The Article discusses various studies of the Roberts Court, which show that its decisions display a strong business bias, that the Court shapes its agenda through the certiorari process, and that the *654 personal policy objectives and preferences of individual Justices play a critical role in that process. The Article also illustrates how the Court\u27s selection of cases signals its preferences, which in turn influences the agenda of issue-oriented lawyers and thus the dockets of lower courts. This interplay has resulted in the Ninth Circuit playing an unusually important role in the evolution of environmental and natural resources law, as its decisions, which generally favor citizen plaintiffs challenging the authority of agencies to issue permits and engage in planning activities, attract the attention of the business-leaning Roberts Court. This conclusion becomes even more apparent when the contrasting types of plaintiffs and cases filed in the D.C. Circuit are brought to the fore. The Article concludes that there is little on the immediate horizon short of a dramatic change in Court personnel that foretells a change in that story. Finally, the Article holds out only the faintest of hopes that exposing this record may change the behavior of those Justices to whom institutional credibility and public acceptance retain some importance

Visual communication in urban planning and urban design

This report documents the current status of visual communication in urban design and planning. Visual communication is examined through discussion of standalone and network media, specifically concentrating on visualisation on the World Wide Web(WWW).Firstly, we examine the use of Solid and Geometric Modelling for visualising urban planning and urban design. This report documents and compares examples of the use of Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) and proprietary WWW based Virtual Reality modelling software. Examples include the modelling of Bath and Glasgow using both VRML 1.0 and 2.0. A review is carried out on the use of Virtual Worldsand their role in visualising urban form within multi-user environments. The use of Virtual Worlds is developed into a case study of the possibilities and limitations of Virtual Internet Design Arenas (ViDAs), an initiative undertaken at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London. The use of Virtual Worlds and their development towards ViDAs is seen as one of the most important developments in visual communication for urban planning and urban design since the development plan.Secondly, photorealistic media in the process of communicating plans is examined.The process of creating photorealistic media is documented, examples of the Virtual Streetscape and Wired Whitehall Virtual Urban Interface System are provided. The conclusion is drawn that although the use of photo-realistic media on the WWW provides a way to visually communicate planning information, its use is limited. The merging of photorealistic media and solid geometric modelling is reviewed in the creation of Augmented Reality. Augmented Reality is seen to provide an important step forward in the ability to quickly and easily visualise urban planning and urban design information.Thirdly, the role of visual communication of planning data through GIS is examined interms of desktop, three dimensional and Internet based GIS systems. The evolution to Internet GIS is seen as a critical component in the development of virtual cities which will allow urban planners and urban designers to visualise and model the complexity of the built environment in networked virtual reality.Finally a viewpoint is put forward of the Virtual City, linking Internet GIS with photorealistic multi-user Virtual Worlds. At present there are constraints on how far virtual cities can be developed, but a view is provided on how these networked virtual worlds are developing to aid visual communication in urban planning and urban design

Enabling parametric design space exploration by non-designers

In mass customization, software configurators enable novice end-users to design customized products and services according to their needs and preferences. However, traditional configurators hardly provide an engaging experience while avoiding the burden of choice. We propose a Design Participation Model to facilitate navigating the design space, based on two modules. Modeler enables designers to create customizable designs as parametric models, and Navigator subsequently permits novice end-users to explore these designs. While most parametric designs support direct manipulation of low-level features, we propose interpolation features to give customers more flexibility. In this paper, we focus on the implementation of such interpolation features into Navigator and its user interface. To assess our approach, we designed and performed user experiments to test and compare Modeler and Navigator, thus providing insights for further developments of our approach. Our results suggest that barycentric interpolation between qualitative parameters provides a more easily understandable interface that empowers novice customers to explore the design space expeditiously

Predicting growing stock volume of Eucalyptus plantations using 3-D point clouds derived from UAV imagery and ALS data

Estimating forest inventory variables is important in monitoring forest resources and mitigating climate change. In this respect, forest managers require flexible, non-destructive methods for estimating volume and biomass. High-resolution and low-cost remote sensing data are increasingly available to measure three-dimensional (3D) canopy structure and to model forest structural attributes. The main objective of this study was to evaluate and compare the individual tree volume estimates derived from high-density point clouds obtained from airborne laser scanning (ALS) and digital aerial photogrammetry (DAP) in Eucalyptus spp. plantations. Object-based image analysis (OBIA) techniques were applied for individual tree crown (ITC) delineation. The ITC algorithm applied correctly detected and delineated 199 trees from ALS-derived data, while 192 trees were correctly identified using DAP-based point clouds acquired fromUnmannedAerialVehicles(UAV), representing accuracy levels of respectively 62% and 60%. Addressing volume modelling, non-linear regression fit based on individual tree height and individual crown area derived from the ITC provided the following results: Model E ciency (Mef) = 0.43 and 0.46, Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) = 0.030 m3 and 0.026 m3, rRMSE = 20.31% and 19.97%, and an approximately unbiased results (0.025 m3 and 0.0004 m3) using DAP and ALS-based estimations, respectively. No significant di erence was found between the observed value (field data) and volume estimation from ALS and DAP (p-value from t-test statistic = 0.99 and 0.98, respectively). The proposed approaches could also be used to estimate basal area or biomass stocks in Eucalyptus spp. plantationsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Model-based Planning for a Sustainable Urban Development

The objective of the presented project is the development of methodological and information-technical fundamentals for the realization of an integrated urban information management. The main focus is on demand-oriented development of an integrated multi-scale city model for the application context of the municipal energy efficiency, which convergently depicts all relevant objects with their semantic properties and their topologies for the representation of municipal transport and energy networks. The technical implementation of the model is effected by a prototypical model management platform with functionalities for rule-based semantic model analysis. The provision of standardized interfaces enables the integration, accompanying planning, of simulations and optimization processes