116 research outputs found
Organizing Watersheds in South Dakota
Wherever you live, you are within a watershed. Your farm, ranch, home on a town lot, or your business in the city are all within the natural boundaries of some watershed. All the lands and waters of the nation are bounded by natural drainage divides
Decarbonizing development: three steps to a zero-carbon future
This report lays out three steps for a smooth transition to a zero-carbon future and provides data, examples and policy advice to help countries makes the shift.
Overview
Getting to zero net emissions and stabilizing climate change starts with planning for the long-term future and not stopping at short-term goals. It means getting prices right as part of a broad policy package that can trigger changes in both investments and behaviors, and it requires smoothing the transition for those most affected.
A new World Bank report walks policymakers through those three steps with data, examples and policy advice to help put countries on a path to decarbonizing their development in a smooth and orderly way.
The solutions exist, and they are affordable – if governments take action today, the report says
Boundary value problems for the stationary axisymmetric Einstein equations: a disk rotating around a black hole
We solve a class of boundary value problems for the stationary axisymmetric
Einstein equations corresponding to a disk of dust rotating uniformly around a
central black hole. The solutions are given explicitly in terms of theta
functions on a family of hyperelliptic Riemann surfaces of genus 4. In the
absence of a disk, they reduce to the Kerr black hole. In the absence of a
black hole, they reduce to the Neugebauer-Meinel disk.Comment: 46 page
Preventing foot ulceration in diabetes:systematic review and meta-analyses of RCT data
Aims/hypothesis:
Foot ulceration is a serious complication for people with diabetes that results in high levels of morbidity for individuals and significant costs for health and social care systems. Nineteen systematic reviews of preventative interventions have been published, but none provides a reliable numerical summary of treatment effects. The aim of this study was to systematically review the evidence from RCTs and, where possible, conduct meta-analyses to make the best possible use of the currently available data.
Methods:
We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of RCTs of preventative interventions for foot ulceration. OVID MEDLINE and EMBASE were searched to February 2019 and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials to October 2018. RCTs of interventions to prevent foot ulcers in people with diabetes who were free from foot ulceration at trial entry were included. Two independent reviewers read the full-text articles and extracted data. The quality of trial reporting was assessed using the Cochrane Risk of Bias tool. The primary outcome of foot ulceration was summarised using pooled relative risks in meta-analyses.
Results:
Twenty-two RCTs of eight interventions were eligible for analysis. One trial of digital silicone devices (RR 0.07 [95% CI 0.01, 0.55]) and meta-analyses of dermal infrared thermometry (RR 0.41 [95% CI 0.19, 0.86]), complex interventions (RR 0.59 [95% CI 0.38, 0.90], and custom-made footwear and offloading insoles (RR 0.53 [95% CI 0.33, 0.85]) showed beneficial effects for these interventions.
Conclusions/interpretation:
Four interventions were identified as being effective in preventing foot ulcers in people with diabetes, but uncertainty remains about what works and who is most likely to benefit
An artificial intelligence tool for heterogeneous team formation in the classroom
Nowadays, there is increasing interest in the development of teamwork skills
in the educational context. This growing interest is motivated by its
pedagogical effectiveness and the fact that, in labour contexts, enterprises
organize their employees in teams to carry out complex projects. Despite its
crucial importance in the classroom and industry, there is a lack of support
for the team formation process. Not only do many factors influence team
performance, but the problem becomes exponentially costly if teams are to be
optimized. In this article, we propose a tool whose aim it is to cover such a
gap. It combines artificial intelligence techniques such as coalition structure
generation, Bayesian learning, and Belbin's role theory to facilitate the
generation of working groups in an educational context. This tool improves
current state of the art proposals in three ways: i) it takes into account the
feedback of other teammates in order to establish the most predominant role of
a student instead of self-perception questionnaires; ii) it handles uncertainty
with regard to each student's predominant team role; iii) it is iterative since
it considers information from several interactions in order to improve the
estimation of role assignments. We tested the performance of the proposed tool
in an experiment involving students that took part in three different team
activities. The experiments suggest that the proposed tool is able to improve
different teamwork aspects such as team dynamics and student satisfaction
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The effects of market economy and foreign MNE subsidiaries on the convergence and divergence of HRM
This study explores patterns of human resource management (HRM) practices across market economies, and between indigenous firms and foreign MNE subsidiary operations, offering a novel perspective on convergence and divergence. Applying institutional theorizing to improve our understanding of convergence/ divergence as a process and an outcome, data collected from nine countries at three points in time over a decade confirm that convergence and divergence occur to different extents in a non-linear fashion, and vary depending on the area of HRM practice observed. Patterns of adoption and convergence/ divergence are explained through the effect of institutional constraints, which vary between liberal and coordinated market economies, and between indigenous firms and foreign MNE subsidiaries. The study contributes a more graded conceptualization of convergence/ divergence, which reflects the complex dynamic reality of international business
Ocean climate observing requirements in support of climate research and climate information
Natural variability and change of the Earth’s climate have significant global societal impacts. With its large heat and carbon capacity and relatively slow dynamics, the ocean plays an integral role in climate, and provides an important source of predictability at seasonal and longer timescales. In addition, the ocean provides the slowly evolving lower boundary to the atmosphere, driving, and modifying atmospheric weather. Understanding and monitoring ocean climate variability and change, to constrain and initialize models as well as identify model biases for improved climate hindcasting and prediction, requires a scale-sensitive, and long-term observing system. A climate observing system has requirements that significantly differ from, and sometimes are orthogonal to, those of other applications. In general terms, they can be summarized by the simultaneous need for both large spatial and long temporal coverage, and by the accuracy and stability required for detecting the local climate signals. This paper reviews the requirements of a climate observing system in terms of space and time scales, and revisits the question of which parameters such a system should encompass to meet future strategic goals of the World Climate Research Program (WCRP), with emphasis on ocean and sea-ice covered areas. It considers global as well as regional aspects that should be accounted for in designing observing systems in individual basins. Furthermore, the paper discusses which data-driven products are required to meet WCRP research and modeling needs, and ways to obtain them through data synthesis and assimilation approaches. Finally, it addresses the need for scientific capacity building and international collaboration in support of the collection of high-quality measurements over the large spatial scales and long time-scales required for climate research, bridging the scientific rational to the required resources for implementation
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