Spatial accessibility and social inclusion: The impact of Portugal's last health reform

Health policies seek to promote access to health care and should provide appropriate geographical accessibility to each demographical functional group. The dispersal demand of health‐careservices and the provision for such services atfixed locations contribute to the growth of inequality intheir access. Therefore, the optimal distribution of health facilities over the space/area can lead toaccessibility improvements and to the mitigation of the social exclusion of the groups considered mostvulnerable. Requiring for such, the use of planning practices joined with accessibility measures. However,the capacities of Geographic Information Systems in determining and evaluating spatial accessibility inhealth system planning have not yet been fully exploited. This paper focuses on health‐care services planningbased on accessibility measures grounded on the network analysis. The case study hinges on mainlandPortugal. Different scenarios were developed to measure and compare impact on the population'saccessibility. It distinguishes itself from other studies of accessibility measures by integrating network data ina spatial accessibility measure: the enhanced two‐stepfloating catchment area. The convenient location forhealth‐care facilities can increase the accessibility standards of the population and consequently reducethe economic and social costs incurred. Recently, the Portuguese government implemented a reform thataimed to improve, namely, the access and equity in meeting with the most urgent patients. It envisaged,in terms of equity, the allocation of 89 emergency network points that ensured more than 90% of thepopulation be within 30 min from any one point in the network. Consequently, several emergency serviceswere closed, namely, in rural areas. This reform highlighted the need to improve the quality of the emergencycare, accessibility to each care facility, and equity in their access. Hence, accessibility measures becomean efficient decision‐making tool, despite its absence in effective practice planning. According to anapplication of this type of measure, it was possible to verify which levels of accessibility were decreased,including the most disadvantaged people, with a larger time of dislocation of 12 min between 2001 and 2011

As iron sharpens iron: A mentoring approach to labour market integration for humanitarian migrants

Integration of humanitarian migrants into the labour market is crucial for the long-term success of EU Member States. Previous research suggests that mentoring may be a viable labor market integration strategy. This paper tests the impact of mentoring among Arabic speaking humanitarian migrants in Germany, Greece and Italy. Results show that respondents who were mentored exhibited an increased probability of being employed, particularly when there was an educational component to the mentoring or when meaningful interpersonal connections were formed. This study provides first-hand evidence that mentoring promotes gainful employment as well as elucidates the pathways of its success

Improved Calibration Method for Dynamic Traffic Assignment Models

The calibration of dynamic traffic assignment (DTA) models involves the estimation of model parameters to best replicate real-world measurements. Good calibration is essential to estimate and predict accurately traffic states, which are crucial for traffic management applications to alleviate congestion. A widely used approach to calibrate simulation-based DTA models is the extended Kalman filter (EKF). The EKF assumes that the DTA model parameters are unconstrained, although they are in fact constrained; for instance, origin–destination (O-D) flows are nonnegative. This assumption is typically not problematic for small- and medium-scale networks in which the EKF has been successfully applied. However, in large-scale networks (which typically contain numbers of O-D pairs with small magnitudes of flow), the estimates may severely violate constraints. In consequence, simply truncating the infeasible estimates may result in the divergence of EKF, leading to extremely poor state estimations and predictions. To address this issue, a constrained EKF (CEKF) approach is presented; it imposes constraints on the posterior distribution of the state estimators to obtain the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimates that are feasible. The MAP estimates are obtained with a heuristic followed by the coordinate descent method. The procedure determines the optimum and are computationally faster by 31.5% over coordinate descent and by 94.9% over the interior point method. Experiments on the Singapore expressway network indicated that the CEKF significantly improved model accuracy and outperformed the traditional EKF (up to 78.17%) and generalized least squares (up to 17.13%) approaches in state estimation and prediction

Incorporating social interaction into hybrid choice models

The aim of this paper is to develop a methodological framework for the incorporation of social interaction effects into choice models. The developed method provides insights for modeling the effect of social interaction on the formation of psychological factors (latent variables) and on the decision-making process. The assumption is based on the fact that the way the decision maker anticipates and processes the information regarding the behavior and the choices exhibited in her/his social environment, affects her/his attitudes and perceptions, which in turn affect her/his choices. The proposed method integrates choice models with decision makers’ psychological factors and latent social interaction. The model structure is simultaneously estimated providing an improvement over sequential methods as it provides consistent and efficient estimates of the parameters. The methodology is tested within the context of a household aiming to identify the social interaction effects between teenagers and their parents regarding walking-loving behavior and then the effect of this on mode to school choice behavior. The sample consists of 9,714 participants aged from 12 to 18 years old, representing 21 % of the adolescent population of Cyprus. The findings from the case study indicate that if the teenagers anticipate that their parents are walking lovers, then this increases the probability of teenagers to be walking-lovers too and in turn to choose walking to school. Generally, the findings from the application result in: (a) improvements in the explanatory power of choice models, (b) latent variables that are statistically significant, and (c) a real-world behavioral representation that includes the social interaction effect

Modelling long-distance route choice using mobile phone call detail record data: A case study of Senegal

The growing mobile phone penetration rates have led to the emergence of large-scale call detail records (CDRs) that could serve as a low-cost data source for travel behaviour modelling. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no previous study evaluating the potential of CDR data in the context of route choice behaviour modelling. Being event-driven, the data are discontinuous and only able to yield partial trajectories, thus presenting serious challenges for route identification. This paper proposes techniques for inferring the users' chosen routes or subsets of their likely routes from partial CDR trajectories, as well as data fusion with external sources of information such as route costs, and then adapts the broad choice framework to the current modelling scenario. The model results show that CDR data can capture the expected travel behaviour and the derived values of travel time are found to be realistic for the study area

Modeling Recreation Demand When the Access Point Is Unknown

Not observing where an individual enters a geographically large recreation area complicates the task of modeling recreation demand. Traditionally, analysts have arbitrarily defined distances on the basis of the midpoint of a river or beach segment or on the basis of the nearest access point. In this article, we draw on the aggregation literature to generate a consistent framework for incorporating information on site characteristics and travel costs gathered at a finer level than that used to obtain trip counts. We use Monte Carlo experiments to illustrate the performance of the traditional midpoint and nearest access point approximations. Our results suggest that, while the nearest access point approach often provides a good approximation to underlying preferences, use of the midpoint approach can lead to significant bias in the travel cost parameter and corresponding welfare calculations. Finally, we use our approach to model recreation demand for the major river systems in Iowa using data from the 2009 Iowa Rivers and River Corridors Survey

Pulse EPR-enabled interpretation of scarce pseudocontact shifts induced by lanthanide binding tags

Pseudocontact shifts (PCS) induced by tags loaded with paramagnetic lanthanide ions provide powerful long-range structure information, provided the location of the metal ion relative to the target protein is known. Usually, the metal position is determined by fitting the magnetic susceptibility anisotropy (Δχ) tensor to the 3D structure of the protein in an 8-parameter fit, which requires a large set of PCSs to be reliable. In an alternative approach, we used multiple Gd(3+)-Gd(3+) distances measured by double electron-electron resonance (DEER) experiments to define the metal position, allowing Δχ-tensor determinations from more robust 5-parameter fits that can be performed with a relatively sparse set of PCSs. Using this approach with the 32 kDa E. coli aspartate/glutamate binding protein (DEBP), we demonstrate a structural transition between substrate-bound and substrate-free DEBP, supported by PCSs generated by C3-Tm(3+) and C3-Tb(3+) tags attached to a genetically encoded p-azidophenylalanine residue. The significance of small PCSs was magnified by considering the difference between the chemical shifts measured with Tb(3+) and Tm(3+) rather than involving a diamagnetic reference. The integrative sparse data approach developed in this work makes poorly soluble proteins of limited stability amenable to structural studies in solution, without having to rely on cysteine mutations for tag attachment.Financial support by the Australian Research Council (ARC) and an Australia-Weizmann Making Connections grant is gratefully acknowledged. B. G. thanks the ARC for a Future Fellowship

Frequency and Severity Approaches to Indexing Exposure to Trauma: The Critical Incident History Questionnaire for Police Officers

The Critical Incident History Questionnaire indexes cumulative exposure to traumatic incidents in police by examining incident frequency and rated severity. In over 700 officers, event severity was negatively correlated (rs = -61) with frequency of exposure. Cumulative exposure indices that varied emphasis on frequency and severity-using both nomothetic and idiographic methods-all showed satisfactory psychometric properties and similar correlates. All indices were only modestly related to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. Ratings of incident severity were not influenced by whether officers had ever experienced the incident. Because no index summarizing cumulative exposure to trauma had superior validity, our findings suggest that precision is not increased if frequency is weighted by severity