Illinois Government Research no. 55 1982: Regulating Hospital Facilities Construction: The Illinois Experience 1975-1979

In the present political climate, reform or elimination of the certificate of need program is a distinct possibility. At the national level, the deregulatory movement has led to attacks on the program by officials in the Reagan administration, who claim it is ineffective in containing capital spending and impedes competition in the industry. In the 1980-81 session of the Illinois General Assembly, legislation was introduced that would have abolished the program. Although unsuccessful, the proposed bill reflects the controversy surrounding the program within the state. As the debate continues, at both the national and state level, it is a good time to examine the experience of the Illinois program. This article does that by analyzing the decisions made by the certificate of need program on hospital proposals from 1975 through 1979 and by examining some evidence of the program's impact. In the first section, we present an overall summary of the program's approval rate in terms of the number and percent of projects approved, withdrawn, denied, and modified; in the next section, we describe the types of projects which the program favors; and in the final section, we discuss some evidence of the program's impact on hospital bed supplies. The complex process by which CON decisions are reached in the state is not addressed in this paper so that we may focus on the results of the process and its possible impacts.published or submitted for publicatio

Evaluation tool development for food literacy programs

Food literacy is described as the behaviours involved in planning, purchasing, preparing, and eating food and is critical for achieving healthy dietary intakes. Food literacy programs require valid and reliable evaluation measures. The aim of this paper is to describe the development and validation of a self-administered questionnaire to measure food literacy behaviours targeted by the Food Sensations® for Adults program in Western Australia. Validity and reliability tests were applied to questionnaire item development commencing with (a) a deductive approach using Australian empirical evidence on food literacy as a construct along with its components and (b) adapting an extensively-tested food behaviour checklist to generate a pool of items for investigation. Then, an iterative process was applied to develop a specific food literacy behaviour checklist for program evaluation including exploratory factor analysis. Content, face, and construct validity resulted in a 14-item food behaviour checklist. Three factors entitled Plan & Manage, Selection, and Preparation were evident, resulting in Cronbach’s alpha 0.79, 0.76, and 0.81, respectively, indicating good reliability of each of these factors. This research has produced a validated questionnaire, is a useful starting point for other food literacy programs, and has applications globally

Southern hemispheric halon trends and global halon emissions, 1978–2011

The atmospheric records of four halons, H-1211 (CBrClF2), H-1301 (CBrF3), H-2402 (CBrF2CBrF2) and H-1202 (CBr2F2), measured from air collected at Cape Grim, Tasmania, between 1978 and 2011, are reported. Mixing ratios of H-1211, H-2402 and H-1202 began to decline in the early to mid-2000s, but those of H-1301 continue to increase up to mid-2011. These trends are compared to those reported by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and AGAGE (Advanced Global Atmospheric Experiment). The observations suggest that the contribution of the halons to total tropospheric bromine at Cape Grim has begun to decline from a peak in 2008 of about 8.1 ppt. An extrapolation of halon mixing ratios to 2060, based on reported banks and predicted release factors, shows this decline becoming more rapid in the coming decades, with a contribution to total tropospheric bromine of about 3 ppt in 2060. Top-down global annual emissions of the halons were derived using a two-dimensional atmospheric model. The emissions of all four have decreased since peaking in the late 1980s–mid-1990s, but this decline has slowed recently, particularly for H-1301 and H-2402 which have shown no decrease in emissions over the past five years. The UEA (University of East Anglia) top-down model-derived emissions are compared to those reported using a top-down approach by NOAA and AGAGE and the bottom-up estimates of HTOC (Halons Technical Options Committee). The implications of an alternative set of steady-state atmospheric lifetimes are discussed. Using a lifetime of 14 yr or less for H-1211 to calculate top-down emissions estimates would lead to small, or even negative, estimated banks given reported production data. Finally emissions of H-1202, a product of over-bromination during the production process of H-1211, have continued despite reported production of H-1211 ceasing in 2010. This raises questions as to the source of these H-1202 emissions

Cancer Biology Data Curation at the Mouse Tumor Biology Database (MTB)

Many advances in the field of cancer biology have been made using mouse models of human cancer. The Mouse Tumor Biology (MTB, "http://tumor.informatics.jax.org":http://tumor.informatics.jax.org) database provides web-based access to data on spontaneous and induced tumors from genetically defined mice (inbred, hybrid, mutant, and genetically engineered strains of mice). These data include standardized tumor names and classifications, pathology reports and images, mouse genetics, genomic and cytogenetic changes occurring in the tumor, strain names, tumor frequency and latency, and literature citations.

Although primary source for the data represented in MTB is peer-reviewed scientific literature an increasing amount of data is derived from disparate sources. MTB includes annotated histopathology images and cytogenetic assay images for mouse tumors where these data are available from The Jackson Laboratory’s mouse colonies and from outside contributors. MTB encourages direct submission of mouse tumor data and images from the cancer research community and provides investigators with a web-accessible tool for image submission and annotation. 

Integrated searches of the data in MTB are facilitated by the use of several controlled vocabularies and by adherence to standard nomenclature. MTB also provides links to other related online resources such as the Mouse Genome Database, Mouse Phenome Database, the Biology of the Mammary Gland Web Site, Festing's Listing of Inbred Strains of Mice, the JAX® Mice Web Site, and the Mouse Models of Human Cancers Consortium's Mouse Repository. 

MTB provides access to data on mouse models of cancer via the internet and has been designed to facilitate the selection of experimental models for cancer research, the evaluation of mouse genetic models of human cancer, the review of patterns of mutations in specific cancers, and the identification of genes that are commonly mutated across a spectrum of cancers.

MTB is supported by NCI grant CA089713

Numerical simulation of the edge stress singularity and the adhesion strength for compliant mushroom fibrils adhered to rigid substrates

Bio-inspired adhesion of micropatterned surfaces due to intermolecular interactions has attracted much research interest over the last decade. Experiments show that the best adhesion is achieved with compliant “mushroom”-shaped fibrils. This paper analyses numerically the effects of different mushroom shapes on adhesion to a rigid substrate. When a remote stress is applied on the free end of a fibril perfectly bonded to a rigid substrate, the resultant stress distribution along the fibril is found to change dramatically between the straight punch and mushroom fibrils. A singular stress field is present at the edge of the fibril where it contacts the substrate and, in this work, the amplitude of the singularity is evaluated for fibrils perfectly bonded to a flat substrate so that sliding cannot occur there. This exercise is carried out for fibril geometries involving combinations of different diameters and thicknesses of the mushroom cap. By assuming a pre-existing detachment length at the corner where the stress singularity lies, we predict the adhesive strength for various mushroom cap shapes. Our study shows that a smaller stalk diameter and a thinner mushroom cap lead to higher adhesive strengths. A limited number of results are also given for other shapes, including those having a fillet radius connecting the stalk to the cap. The results support the rational optimization of synthetic micropatterned adhesives

Risks associated with obesity in pregnancy, for the mother and baby: a systematic review of reviews

Maternal obesity is linked with adverse outcomes for mothers and babies. To get an overview of risks related to obesity in pregnant women, a systematic review of reviews was conducted. For inclusion, reviews had to compare pregnant women of healthy weight with women with obesity, and measure a health outcome for mother and/or baby. Authors conducted full-text screening, quality assurance using the AMSTAR tool and data extraction steps in pairs. Narrative analysis of the 22 reviews included show gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia, gestational hypertension, depression, instrumental and caesarean birth, and surgical site infection to be more likely to occur in pregnant women with obesity compared with women with a healthy weight. Maternal obesity is also linked to greater risk of preterm birth, large-for-gestational-age babies, foetal defects, congenital anomalies and perinatal death. Furthermore, breastfeeding initiation rates are lower and there is greater risk of early breastfeeding cessation in women with obesity compared with healthy weight women. These adverse outcomes may result in longer duration of hospital stay, with concomitant resource implications. It is crucial to reduce the burden of adverse maternal and foetal/child outcomes caused by maternal obesity. Women with obesity need support to lose weight before they conceive, and to minimize their weight gain in pregnancy

Probabilistic Clustering of Sequences: Inferring new bacterial regulons by comparative genomics

Genome wide comparisons between enteric bacteria yield large sets of conserved putative regulatory sites on a gene by gene basis that need to be clustered into regulons. Using the assumption that regulatory sites can be represented as samples from weight matrices we derive a unique probability distribution for assignments of sites into clusters. Our algorithm, 'PROCSE' (probabilistic clustering of sequences), uses Monte-Carlo sampling of this distribution to partition and align thousands of short DNA sequences into clusters. The algorithm internally determines the number of clusters from the data, and assigns significance to the resulting clusters. We place theoretical limits on the ability of any algorithm to correctly cluster sequences drawn from weight matrices (WMs) when these WMs are unknown. Our analysis suggests that the set of all putative sites for a single genome (e.g. E. coli) is largely inadequate for clustering. When sites from different genomes are combined and all the homologous sites from the various species are used as a block, clustering becomes feasible. We predict 50-100 new regulons as well as many new members of existing regulons, potentially doubling the number of known regulatory sites in E. coli.Comment: 27 pages including 9 figures and 3 table