Littoral Rights Under the Takings Doctrine: The Clash Between the Ius Naturale And Stop The Beach Renourishment

Background. Organizing and performing patient transfers in the continuum of care is part of the work of nurses and other staff of a multiprofessional healthcare team. An understanding of discharge practices is needed in order to ultimate patients’ transfers from high technological intensive care units (ICU) to general wards. Aim. To describe, as experienced by intensive care and general ward staff, what strategies could be used when organizing patient’s care before, during, and after transfer from intensive care. Method. Interviews of 15 participants were conducted, audio-taped, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Results. The results showed that the categories secure, encourage, and collaborate are strategies used in the three phases of the ICU transitional care process. The main category; a safe, interactive rehabilitation process, illustrated how all strategies were characterized by an intention to create and maintain safety during the process. A three-way interaction was described: between staff and patient/families, between team members and involved units, and between patient/family and environment. Discussion/Conclusions. The findings highlight that ICU transitional care implies critical care rehabilitation. Discharge procedures need to be safe and structured and involve collaboration, encouraging support, optimal timing, early mobilization, and a multidiscipline approach

Uniqueness and non-uniqueness in percolation theory

This paper is an up-to-date introduction to the problem of uniqueness versus non-uniqueness of infinite clusters for percolation on ${\mathbb{Z}}^d$ and, more generally, on transitive graphs. For iid percolation on ${\mathbb{Z}}^d$, uniqueness of the infinite cluster is a classical result, while on certain other transitive graphs uniqueness may fail. Key properties of the graphs in this context turn out to be amenability and nonamenability. The same problem is considered for certain dependent percolation models -- most prominently the Fortuin--Kasteleyn random-cluster model -- and in situations where the standard connectivity notion is replaced by entanglement or rigidity. So-called simultaneous uniqueness in couplings of percolation processes is also considered. Some of the main results are proved in detail, while for others the proofs are merely sketched, and for yet others they are omitted. Several open problems are discussed.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/154957806000000096 in the Probability Surveys (http://www.i-journals.org/ps/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Rigorous computer analysis of the Chow-Robbins game

Flip a coin repeatedly, and stop whenever you want. Your payoff is the proportion of heads, and you wish to maximize this payoff in expectation. This so-called Chow-Robbins game is amenable to computer analysis, but while simple-minded number crunching can show that it is best to continue in a given position, establishing rigorously that stopping is optimal seems at first sight to require "backward induction from infinity". We establish a simple upper bound on the expected payoff in a given position, allowing efficient and rigorous computer analysis of positions early in the game. In particular we confirm that with 5 heads and 3 tails, stopping is optimal.Comment: 10 page

The two-type Richardson model with unbounded initial configurations

The two-type Richardson model describes the growth of two competing infections on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ and the main question is whether both infection types can simultaneously grow to occupy infinite parts of $\mathbb{Z}^d$. For bounded initial configurations, this has been thoroughly studied. In this paper, an unbounded initial configuration consisting of points $x=(x_1,...,x_d)$ in the hyperplane $\mathcal{H}=\{x\in\mathbb{Z}^d:x_1=0\}$ is considered. It is shown that, starting from a configuration where all points in \mathcal{H} {\mathbf{0}\} are type 1 infected and the origin $\mathbf{0}$ is type 2 infected, there is a positive probability for the type 2 infection to grow unboundedly if and only if it has a strictly larger intensity than the type 1 infection. If, instead, the initial type 1 infection is restricted to the negative $x_1$-axis, it is shown that the type 2 infection at the origin can also grow unboundedly when the infection types have the same intensity.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-AAP440 the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org