Environmental Implications of the Health Care Service Sector

This report analyzes the environmental effects associated with activities undertaken and influenced by the health care service sector. It is one part of a larger study to better understand the environmental effects of service sector activities and the implications for management strategies. Considerable analysis has documented the service sector's contribution to domestic economic conditions, yet little analysis has been performed on the broad impacts service firms have on environmental quality. For this study the authors developed a framework to examine the nature of service sector industries' influence on environmental quality. Three primary types of influence were identified: direct impacts, upstream impacts, and downstream impacts. In addition, indirect impacts induced by service sector activities include their influence over settlement patterns and indirect influences over other sectors of the economy. In their initial analysis, the authors noted that many functions performed in the service sector also are commonly found in other sectors. The impacts of these activities have been analyzed separately from those unique to the health care sector, as they present different challenges. Health care is one of the largest U.S. industries, employing one in nine workers and costing one in seven dollars generated in the economy. Functions performed in the industry that are common in other sectors include: transportation; laundry; food services; facility cleaning; heating and cooling; and photographic processing. Activities unique to the health care industry include: infectious waste generation and disposal; medical waste incineration; equipment sterilization; dental fillings; ritual mercury usage; x-ray diagnosis; nuclear medicine; pharmaceutical usage and disposal; and drinking water fluoridation. The industry has considerable leverage upstream on its suppliers, which is important to managing risks from the use of goods commonly used in the industry, including: mercury-containing products, polyvinyl chloride plastics, latex gloves, and syringe needles. The authors identified a number of areas for potential environmental management initiatives: controlling emissions from on-site "production" type functions; mercury use; the environmental consequences of infection control measures; pollution prevention through substitution of alternative health care services; and research and data collection.

How to Recover a Qubit That Has Fallen Into a Black Hole

We demonstrate an algorithm for the retrieval of a qubit, encoded in spin angular momentum, that has been dropped into a no-firewall black hole. Retrieval is achieved analogously to quantum teleportation by collecting Hawking radiation and performing measurements on the black hole. Importantly, these methods only require the ability to perform measurements from outside the event horizon.Comment: 6 pages v2: modified protocol to discuss total angular momentum, corrected typos, added references v3: updated with referee feedbac

Associative memory in gene regulation networks

The pattern of gene expression in the phenotype of an organism is determined in part by the dynamical attractors of the organism’s gene regulation network. Changes to the connections in this network over evolutionary time alter the adult gene expression pattern and hence the fitness of the organism. However, the evolution of structure in gene expression networks (potentially reflecting past selective environments) and its affordances and limitations with respect to enhancing evolvability is poorly understood in general. In this paper we model the evolution of a gene regulation network in a controlled scenario. We show that selected changes to connections in the regulation network make the currently selected gene expression pattern more robust to environmental variation. Moreover, such changes to connections are necessarily ‘Hebbian’ – ‘genes that fire together wire together’ – i.e. genes whose expression is selected for in the same selective environments become co-regulated. Accordingly, in a manner formally equivalent to well-understood learning behaviour in artificial neural networks, a gene expression network will therefore develop a generalised associative memory of past selected phenotypes. This theoretical framework helps us to better understand the relationship between homeostasis and evolvability (i.e. selection to reduce variability facilitates structured variability), and shows that, in principle, a gene regulation network has the potential to develop ‘recall’ capabilities normally reserved for cognitive systems

Rescuing Complementarity With Little Drama

The AMPS paradox challenges black hole complementarity by apparently constructing a way for an observer to bring information from the outside of the black hole into its interior if there is no drama at its horizon, making manifest a violation of monogamy of entanglement. We propose a new resolution to the paradox: this violation cannot be explicitly checked by an infalling observer in the finite proper time they have to live after crossing the horizon. Our resolution depends on a weak relaxation of the no-drama condition (we call it "little drama") which is the "complementarity dual" of scrambling of information on the stretched horizon. When translated to the description of the black hole interior, this implies that the fine-grained quantum information of infalling matter is rapidly diffused across the entire interior while classical observables and coarse-grained geometry remain unaffected. Under the assumption that information has diffused throughout the interior, we consider the difficulty of the information-theoretic task that an observer must perform after crossing the event horizon of a Schwarzschild black hole in order to verify a violation of monogamy of entanglement. We find that the time required to complete a necessary subroutine of this task, namely the decoding of Bell pairs from the interior and the late radiation, takes longer than the maximum amount of time that an observer can spend inside the black hole before hitting the singularity. Therefore, an infalling observer cannot observe monogamy violation before encountering the singularity.Comment: 26 pages, 3 figures - v2: added references, small tweaks - v3: corrected typos to reflect final published versio

Enabling research in care homes : an evaluation of a national network of research ready care homes

© 2014 Davies et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise statedIn the UK care homes are one of the main providers of long term care for older people with dementia. Despite the recent increase in care home research, residents with dementia are often excluded from studies. Care home research networks have been recommended by the Ministerial Advisory Group on Dementia Research (MAGDR) as a way of increasing research opportunities for residents with dementia. This paper reports on an evaluation of the feasibility and early impact of an initiative to increase care home participation in researchPeer reviewe

In-work poverty in the East Midlands

Research that explores the nature and scale of in-work poverty in the East Midlands, using several established measures

Making the case for ECRIS: Post “Brexit” sharing of criminal records information between the European Union and United Kingdom

Criminal record information has various uses including, in the detection of crime, as evidence in criminal proceedings, in consideration of an appropriate sentence after conviction and in determining the suitability of an individual for, or providing a bar to, employment. As such this information can have a high value but can also significantly interfere with a person’s right to private and family life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The importance of Article 8 in this area has been increasingly recognised in both domestically and in Strasbourg with such case law making clear the imperative that criminal record information is accurate, retained and disclosed only in proper circumstances and, where appropriate, is capable of being subject to proper challenge. The operation of the European Criminal Records Information System (ECRIS) for exchange of criminal records between member states is explored and the benefits and risks of exchanging criminal records information within such an automated system are identified. The compliance of ECRIS to Article 8 ECHR is considered and suggestions made for future improvements. Evidence is provided that ECRIS constitutes a singular improvement on earlier ad-hoc arrangements and should therefore be retained by the United Kingdom post-Brexit

Adaptation without natural selection

Document is itself an extended abstract