Certification schemes and the governance of land : enforcing standards or enabling scrutiny?

Given the challenges of upholding human rights in countries where land grabbing has been most acute, attention has turned to alternative regulatory mechanisms by which better land governance might be brought about. This essay considers one such approach: certification schemes. These encourage agricultural producers to adopt sustainability standards which are then monitored by third-party auditors. Used by the European Union to help govern its biofuel market, they now also have an important mandatory dimension. However, through a study of Bonsucro and the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels, we find both flaws in their standards and shortcomings in their ability to discipline the companies they are financially dependent upon. In sum, we suggest that the real value of these roundtable certification schemes might lie less in their ability to enforce standards than their (partially realised) role in enabling scrutiny, providing new possibilities for corporate accountability in transnational commodity chains

Arenas of contestation: policy processes and land tenure reform in post-apartheid South Africa

Philosophiae Doctor - PhDSummary: This thesis considers different groupings that have come together in their participation in the policy processes relating to tenure reform in post-apartheid South Africa. It is methodologically and theoretically grounded in Bourdieu's notion of cultural 'fields' spaces of ongoing contestation and struggle, but in which actors develop a shared 'habitus', an embodied history. In these land reform policies and law-making activities, individuals and groups from different fields- the bureaucratic, activist and legal - have interacted in their contestations relating to the legitimation of their forms of knowledge. The resulting compromises are illuminated by a case study of a village in the former Gazankulu 'homeland' - a fourth 'cultural field'. Rather than seeing these fields as bounded, the thesis recognises the influence of wider political discourses and materialities, or the wider 'field of power'. In each of the four very different fields, as a result of a shared history, actors within them have developed practices based upon particular shared discourses, institutions and values.South Afric

Philadelphia Drug Monitoring Program and Compliance with Department of Health Requirements

Objectives: With this newly instituted mandate, we found that many of the resident did not have access to the PDMP query site. Our initial goal is to have 100% of residents have log-in access to the PDMP site. Our long-term goals involve increasing the query of the PDMP website by OB-GYN residents prior to prescribing narcotic pain medication. There are several changes that we can make to result in improvement of our initial goal including: identifying residents that require access, working with program coordinator to identify gaps in their PDMP application, and assisting in providing DOH with any additional documentation necessary for access. We will measure our improvement with a survey of residents as to their ability to access the PDMP website prior to our intervention and afterwards. After the intervention we wish to survey the residents on their use and utilization of the Pennsylvania Department of Health Drug Prescription Drug Monitoring Programhttps://jdc.jefferson.edu/patientsafetyposters/1066/thumbnail.jp

The Impact of Pre-Service Violent Behavior on Violence Perpetration Among Service Members.

Using the Army Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Service Members New Soldier Study data, the present analysis tries to identify some of the factors that may explain variation in violence perpetration (physical assault) among service men. We are particularly interested in observing the lasting effect of pre-service severe violent behavior on more recent violence perpetration. The potential for violence-deterring effect of an adult institution of informal social control such as marriage will be examined as well.https://ir.library.louisville.edu/uars/1033/thumbnail.jp

Unifying prospective and retrospective interval-time estimation: a fading-gaussian activation-based model of interval-timing

Hass and Hermann (2012) have shown that only variance-based processes will lead to the scalar growth of error that is characteristic of human time judgments. Secondly, a major meta-review of over one hundred studies (Block et al., 2010) reveals a striking interaction between the way in which temporal judgments are queried and cognitive load on participants’ judgments of interval duration. For retrospective time judgments, estimates under high cognitive load are longer than under low cognitive load. For prospective judgments, the reverse pattern holds, with increased cognitive load leading to shorter estimates. We describe GAMIT, a Gaussian spreading-activation model, in which the sampling rate of an activation trace is differentially affected by cognitive load. The model unifies prospective and retrospective time estimation, normally considered separately, by relating them to the same underlying process. The scalar property of time estimation arises naturally from the model dynamics and the model shows the appropriate interaction between mode of query and cognitive load

Removing inter-subject technical variability in magnetic resonance imaging studies

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) intensities are acquired in arbitrary units, making scans non-comparable across sites and between subjects. Intensity normalization is a first step for the improvement of comparability of the images across subjects. However, we show that unwanted inter-scan variability associated with imaging site, scanner effect and other technical artifacts is still present after standard intensity normalization in large multi-site neuroimaging studies. We propose RAVEL (Removal of Artificial Voxel Effect by Linear regression), a tool to remove residual technical variability after intensity normalization. As proposed by SVA and RUV [Leek and Storey, 2007, 2008, Gagnon-Bartsch and Speed, 2012], two batch effect correction tools largely used in genomics, we decompose the voxel intensities of images registered to a template into a biological component and an unwanted variation component. The unwanted variation component is estimated from a control region obtained from the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), where intensities are known to be unassociated with disease status and other clinical covariates. We perform a singular value decomposition (SVD) of the control voxels to estimate factors of unwanted variation. We then estimate the unwanted factors using linear regression for every voxel of the brain and take the residuals as the RAVEL-corrected intensities. We assess the performance of RAVEL using T1-weighted (T1-w) images from more than 900 subjects with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI), as well as healthy controls from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database. We compare RAVEL to intensity-normalization-only methods, histogram matching, and White Stripe. We show that RAVEL performs best at improving the replicability of the brain regions that are empirically found to be most associated with AD, and that these regions are significantly more present in structures impacted by AD (hippocampus, amygdala, parahippocampal gyrus, enthorinal area and fornix stria terminals). In addition, we show that the RAVEL-corrected intensities have the best performance in distinguishing between MCI subjects and healthy subjects by using the mean hippocampal intensity (AUC=67%), a marked improvement compared to results from intensity normalization alone (AUC=63% and 59% for histogram matching and White Stripe, respectively). RAVEL is generalizable to many imaging modalities, and shows promise for longitudinal studies. Additionally, because the choice of the control region is left to the user, RAVEL can be applied in studies of many brain disorders

Comparison Between Standard HABIT and HABIT-VR: Hand-Arm Function and Patient Acceptability Differences​

https://digitalcommons.unmc.edu/surp2022/1002/thumbnail.jp

920-52 Are Provider Profiles Affected by Risk-adjustment Methodology? Results from the Cooperative Cardiovascular Project

Health care payors and consumers have a growing interest in risk-adjusted provider profiles. Using chart-abstracted clinical data from the Cooperative Cardiovascular Project, we ranked 28 hospitals performing bypass surgery in Alabama and Iowa by their risk-adjusted surgical mortality rates using three published risk-adjustment methodologies: Parsonnet (PI, O’Connor (a) and Hannan (H). In total. 3653 bypass surgery cases performed from 6/92 to 3/93 were reviewed (mean 130 cases/hospital). The discriminatory abilities of each method for predicting surgical mortality were quite similar (area under ROC curves 0.72–0.75). Below, we display the risk-adjusted hospital rankings (comparing observed with expected mortality) by these three riskadjustment techniques:In terms of hospital rankings, there was generally close correlation between any two of the methods (Spearman's R=0.87,0.88, and 0.93, comparing P-O, P-H, and H-O). Rankings for an individual hospital varied, however, an average of ±3.3 ranks (range 0–12 ranks) depending on which riskadjustment methodology was used.ConclusionIn general. published methods of risk-adjustment for bypass surgery accurately identify institutions with low, moderate and high adjusted mortality outcomes. The precise ranking of an individual hospital. however, may vary depending on the risk adjustment method applied