Concusions: Development of a Universal Return-To-Play Guideline for Athletes of Contact Sports

Sports-related concussions remain the most common head injury among athletes of contact sports. Recent estimates indicated the incidence of concussions range from 1.6-3.8 million cases per year in the United States (US). The importance of appropriate medical management of these patients is vital to their health and they should be allowed to return to their sport only after medical clearance. Concussion guidelines are currently available for primary practitioners to use in order to assist them in their clinical judgment of the concussed patient; the utilization and effectiveness of these guidelines remain in question. A literature review was performed to analyze the current use of guidelines available in the U.S. and to ascertain whether or not a universal, evidence-based, return-to-play guideline would be beneficial in assisting health care practitioners to make an informed decision about the safety of an athlete returning to play. The literature showed the current use of return-to-play guidelines among health care providers is scant. With numerous states recently mandating the management of the concussed athlete to be the responsibility of health care providers, health care institutions are going to see an increase in the number of these patients. Nurse practitioners need to be prepared to manage these patients safely and effectively

Automatic Parameter Configuration for Inventory Management in SAP ERP/APO

Companies today generally hold several thousands SKUs (stock-keeping units) in stock. With an ever increasing trend towards highly customized products, the number of SKUs held by companies is likely to increase even more in the future. For each of the SKUs held in stock, a decision has to be made on how to configure each module of the SKU's inventory system. Doing this for each SKU individually seems to be an unfeasible task, given the large numbers of SKUs held in stock by most companies. Therefore, these companies configure inventory systems not on a SKU-basis but on a group basis, where the groups are usually determined using an ABC/XYZ analysis. The configuration using such a rough group basis for several thousand SKUs does not allow for individually customized inventory systems and therefore might not exploit the implemented inventory methods in a software package in an optimal way. In this research project, decision systems allowing an automated inventory system configuration in SAP ERP and SAP APO at the SKU-level are developed. The SAP ERP corporate software package is the market leader for Enterprise Resource Planning systems, offering a wide range of inventory methods for the relevant inventory system modules. The advanced planning and scheduling system of SAP, Advanced Planning and Optimization (APO), provides additional inventory methods that can be chosen for the configuration in the inventory system modules

Methodological aspects of recent climate change damage cost studies

This paper discusses methodological aspects of recent climate change damage studies. Assessing the total and/or marginal damage costs of environmental change is often difficult and it is certainly difficult in the case of climate change. A major obstacle is the uncertainty on the physical impacts of climate change, especially related to extreme events and so-called ‘low-probability high-impact’ scenarios. The subsequent transposition of physical impacts into monetary terms is also a delicate step, given that climate change impacts involve both market and non-market goods and services, covering health, environmental and social values, and that impacts may be distant in time and space. The complexity of climate change cost assessment thus involves several crucial dimensions, including non-market evaluation, risk and uncertainty, baseline definition, equity and discounting, further elaborated in this paper in the course of the overview of the literature and of the overview and evaluation of the key methodological issues.Climate change damage costs, cost of inaction, methodological aspects, risk and uncertainty, discounting, equity