An Economic Analysis of Landfill Costs to Demonstrate the Economies of Size and Determine the Feasibility of a Community Owned Landfill in Rural Oklahoma

New regulations have impacted landfill costs and changed solid waste management solutions. Communities must now decide between continued landfill operations and long-term uncertainties associated with contracted services. Preliminary cost analysis addresses these changes and demonstrates economies of size that make regional facilities more feasible than the once popular city-owned landfillsEnvironmental Economics and Policy,

A case for mandatory ultrasound training for rural general practitioners : a commentary

Context: Point-of-care ultrasound is a rapidly evolving technology that enables rapid diagnostic imaging to be performed at a patient’s bedside, reducing time to diagnosis and minimising the need for patient transfers. This has significant applications for rural emergency and general practice, and could potentially prevent unnecessary transfers of patients from rural communities to more urban centres for the purpose of diagnostic imaging, reducing costs and preventing disruption to patients’ lives. Meta-analyses on point-of-care ultrasound have reported extremely high sensitivity and specificity when detecting lung pathology, and the potential applications of the technology are substantial. A significant application of the technology is in the care of rural paediatric patients, where acute lower respiratory pathology is the most common cause of preventable deaths, hospitalisations, and emergency medical retrievals from remote communities for children under five. Issues: Although widely available, point-of-care ultrasound technology is not widely utilised in Australian emergency departments and general practices. Issues with comprehensive training, maintenance of skills, upskilling and quality assurance programs prevent physicians from feeling confident when utilising the technology. In Canada, point-of-care ultrasound training is part of the core competency training in the Royal College of Physicians of Canada emergency medicine fellowship program. Point-of-care ultrasound is widely used in rural practice, although lack of training, funding, maintenance of skills and quality assurance were still listed as barriers to use. Lessons learned: Point-of-care ultrasound is a highly sensitive and specific technology with wide potential applications. Issues with quality control and maintenance of skills are preventing widespread use. Coupling point-of-care ultrasound with telemedicine could help increase the usability and accessibility of the technology by reducing the issues associated with maintenance of skills and quality assurance

Barriers and facilitators to point-of-care ultrasound use in rural Australia

This study explores the barriers and facilitators to point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) use and adoption in rural healthcare since POCUS is a useful resource for rural clinicians to overcome the challenges associated with limited on-site clinical support, such as limited diagnostic imaging services and infrastructure. A qualitative descriptive study was employed, interviews with ten rural clinicians were conducted, and the data were analysed using the Walt and Gilson health policy framework to guide interpretation. Barriers include a lack of standardised training requirements, the cost of the devices and challenges recouping the costs of purchase and training, difficulty with the maintenance of skills, and a lack of an effective method to achieve quality assurance. Coupling POCUS with telemedicine could address the issues of the maintenance of skills and quality assurance to facilitate increased POCUS use, leading to positive patient safety and social and economic implications

Fog City Comics, No. 1

3 numbers black-and-white illustrations. Frequency: Annual Publication dates: Began with no. 1 (September, 1977); ceased with no. 3 (June, 1979). Not for sale to children. Fog City Comics is a three-issue anthology published in Vancouver (the fog city, get it?) by Stampart. They are notable for giving us three terrific Rand Holmes covers and one Holmes story in each of the books. Edited by Terry Hamilton, the series is not one of the stronger contributions to the post-golden-era underground ouevre, but there are certainly some gems to be found. The first issue features funny animal stories throughout, a theme that has seen its share of failures in the past and this is probably one of them. The third issue is 68 pages and easily the best of the series, with a brilliant self-reflective story from Rand Holmes, an epic tale from George Metzger, and several decent contributions from Brent Boates. Library has No. 1 (September, 1977) & No. 3 (1979). The Adler Archive of Underground Comix, Gift of Bill Adler.https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/specialcollections_adlerarchive_undergroundcomix/1057/thumbnail.jp

Mother Goose\u27s rhymes, chimes, and jingles : or the nursery treasure.

24 pages : illustrations ; 20 cm Rhymes with pictures. Caption title: Rhymes, chimes, and jingles; by Mother Goose. Hand colored illustration on cover. Illustration on title page. Cover title: Rhymes, chimes and jingles. Charles P. Hestis was located 104 Nassau St., New York, between 1843 and 1853. New York City directories list Huestis both as an individual publishing at 104 Nassau, and as a member of Huestis & Cozans between 1850 and 1852. Vincent L. Dill was active as a stereotyper in New York between 1826 and 1863. Lacking back cover.https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/specialcollections_books_illustration/1008/thumbnail.jp

INTRODUCTION TO SELECTING SUBSETS OF TRAITS FOR QUANTITATIVE TRAIT LOCI ANALYSIS

Quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping is a popular statistical method that is often used in agricultural applications to identify genomic regions associated with phenotypic traits of interest. In its most common form, a QTL analysis tests one phenotypic trait at a time using a variety of research hypotheses that depend on the application. When multiple traits are available, there are considerable benefits to analyzing subsets of biologically related traits in a multipletrait QTL mapping framework. Determining the most informative subset(s) of traits is the critical challenge that we address in this work. We present our approach, as well as simulations that demonstrate the performance. We also discuss an application of our approach as applied to an Arabidopsis thaliana data set

1,25 dihydroxyvitamin D-mediated orchestration of anticancer, transcript-level effects in the immortalized, non-transformed prostate epithelial cell line, RWPE1

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer mortality among US men. Epidemiological evidence suggests that high vitamin D status protects men from prostate cancer and the active form of vitamin D, 1α,25 dihydroxyvitamin D₃(1,25(OH)₂D) has anti-cancer effects in cultured prostate cells. Still, the molecular mechanisms and the gene targets for vitamin D-mediated prostate cancer prevention are unknown.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We examined the effect of 1,25(OH)₂D (+/- 100 nM, 6, 24, 48 h) on the transcript profile of proliferating RWPE1 cells, an immortalized, non-tumorigenic prostate epithelial cell line that is growth arrested by 1,25(OH)₂D (Affymetrix U133 Plus 2.0, n = 4/treatment per time and dose). Our analysis revealed many transcript level changes at a 5% false detection rate: 6 h, 1571 (61% up), 24 h, 1816 (60% up), 48 h, 3566 (38% up). 288 transcripts were regulated similarly at all time points (182 up, 80 down) and many of the promoters for these transcripts contained putative vitamin D response elements. Functional analysis by pathway or Gene Set Analysis revealed early suppression of WNT, Notch, NF-kB, and IGF1 signaling. Transcripts related to inflammation were suppressed at 6 h (e.g. IL-1 pathway) and suppression of proinflammatory pathways continued at later time points (e.g. IL-17 and IL-6 pathways). There was also evidence for induction of anti-angiogenic pathways and induction of transcripts for protection from oxidative stress or maintenance of cell redox homeostasis at 6 h.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our data reveal of large number of potential new, direct vitamin D target genes relevant to prostate cancer prevention. In addition, our data suggests that rather than having a single strong regulatory effect, vitamin D orchestrates a pattern of changes within prostate epithelial cells that limit or slow carcinogenesis.</p

Case-control genome-wide association study of rheumatoid arthritis from Genetic Analysis Workshop 16 using penalized orthogonal-components regression-linear discriminant analysis

Currently, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are conducted by collecting a massive number of SNPs (i.e., large p) for a relatively small number of individuals (i.e., small n) and associations are made between clinical phenotypes and genetic variation one single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) at a time. Univariate association approaches like this ignore the linkage disequilibrium between SNPs in regions of low recombination. This results in a low reliability of candidate gene identification. Here we propose to improve the case-control GWAS approach by implementing linear discriminant analysis (LDA) through a penalized orthogonal-components regression (POCRE), a newly developed variable selection method for large p small n data. The proposed POCRE-LDA method was applied to the Genetic Analysis Workshop 16 case-control data for rheumatoid arthritis (RA). In addition to the two regions on chromosomes 6 and 9 previously associated with RA by GWAS, we identified SNPs on chromosomes 10 and 18 as potential candidates for further investigation