Assessing the efficiency of rural health centres in Burkina Faso: an application of Data Envelopment Analysis

Background: Effective health care provision benefits from the support of measurement techniques. Contrary to the situation in industrialised countries efficiency analyses in the health care sector in Africa are a very recent phenomenon. Hardly any of the existing studies was conducted at the level of primary care. Aim: The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to evaluate the relative efficiency of health centres in rural Burkina Faso and (2) to investigate reasons for inefficient performance. Methods: Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was applied. To account for the situation in that country, the output-oriented approach was used in connection with different returns to scale assumptions. To identify the spatial effect of the catchment area on efficiency the Tobit model was applied. Results: According to constant returns to scale, 14 health centres were relatively efficient. The DEA projections suggest that the inefficient units were too big to be efficient. Tobit regression showed that the relatively efficient health centres are located close to villages in their catchment area. Conclusions: For ethical reasons it is not appropriate to try to improve the efficiency of health centres by closing some of them. Their efficiency can be improved and lives can be saved if access to health centres is enhanced

Defining a relevant architecture in South Africa

Architecture in South Africa is at a crossroads. Afteryears of repression and isolation during which contemporary architecture lost its way, there is now a desperate need for architects to respond to the social a nd cultural challenges of a society riven by massive material contrasts. Within architecture schools, a student body more representative of society than hitherto is engaged in projects which reflect the very diverse needs of the community. Central to the effectiveness of such teaching programmes is the presence of teachers fully engaged in practice, creating a responsible architecture fora renewed nation

Lebensstilwandel in Ostdeutschland

Die mit der Wiedervereinigung einhergehende Veränderung der wirtschaftlichen und politischen Strukturen wirkte sich vielfältig und nachhaltig auf das Leben der Bevölkerung in Ostdeutschland aus. Auf individueller Ebene wurden dabei Anreize für einen Lebensstilwandel geschaffen. Auf der Grundlage ökonomischer Modelle werden in dieser Arbeit die Wirkungen ökonomischer Anreize auf das individuelle Gesundheitsverhalten vor dem Hintergrund einer wirtschaftlichen Transformation untersucht. Anhand von Daten des Sozioökonomischen Panels (SOEP) wird analysiert, ob sich der Lebensstil ostdeutscher Bürger dem der Bevölkerung im Westen angenähert hat. Es läßt sich aufzeigen, daß auch mehr als zehn Jahre nach der «Wende» der ostdeutsche Transformationsprozeß als nicht abgeschlossen gelten kann

Modeling of gas migration through low-permeability clay rock using information on pressure and deformation from fast air injection tests

The characterization of gas migration through low-permeability clay formations has been a focus of R&D programs for radioactive waste disposal, which is also of great importance for shale gas exploration, cap-rock behavior of hydrocarbon reservoirs, and (Formula presented.) sequestration. Laboratory tests have been performed on Opalinus Clay, a Mesozoic claystone that is being investigated in Switzerland as a potential host rock for the storage of nuclear waste. The laboratory program included specific water and air injections tests, as well as oedometer and isotropic compression tests. Undisturbed core samples have been retrieved from a shallow borehole in the Mont Terri Underground Research Laboratory (URL) and from a deep borehole in northern Switzerland. For the shallow cores from Mont Terri URL, largely linear-elastic deformations associated with the gas injection test could be inferred and the change in void ratio was accounted for by the pore compressibility. The corresponding change in permeability was obtained from the results of the water tests, indicating a log-linear relation between permeability and porosity. The derived porosity change and the corresponding change in permeability were implemented in the standard TOUGH2 code, which reproduced the measured gas test results using fitted water retention data derived from laboratory measurements. Similar air injection tests performed on Opalinus Clay cores from the borehole at greater depth showed overall similar behavior, but at lower porosities, lower permeability values, and lower compressibility. These cases indicated nonlinear behavior which was implemented using an effective stress-dependent porosity change and the associated change in permeability. In addition, the anisotropy associated with the bedding planes of the clay formation was considered by assuming different properties for “soft” and “hard” layers to account for storage capacity for the injected gas prior to gas breakthrough. The computed change in the overall porosity could be compared to the measured axial deformation during the gas injection test and was used for calibration of the parameters describing the relationship between the effective stress and porosity, as well as the corresponding change in permeability and capillary pressure.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Update on Nox function, site of action and regulation in Botrytis cinerea

Additional file 1: Table S1. Strains used in this work

Lernen und Lebensstilwandel in Transformationsökonomien

-- This paper discusses consequences of changing economic conditions and job characteristics for individual behaviour by means of addiction. The central assumption is that unwanted high consumption of health damaging goods leads to an income loss. If an individual has decided on his consumption path in an absolut rational manner before economic conditions changed, it is possible that he is on a suboptimal high consumption path ex post. If the critical value scatters dynamically around mean, which the individual does not know, a rational person is able to generate an adjustment process which brings him back to the optimal consumption path.Lebensstil,gesundheitsrelevantes Verhalten,Rationale Sucht,Transformation

A Desktop Universe for the Introductory Astronomy Laboratory

What is a well-intentioned astronomy instructor to do? There is no argument that experience with the real world is desirable in any astronomy course, especially the introductory classes that fulfill the science distribution requirements at many colleges and universities. Though it is a simple matter to take students out of doors, show them the motions of the Sun, Moon, and stars, and have them squint for a few seconds at Saturn\u27s rings through a telescope, these activities represent only a small portion of the subject matter of modern astronomy. It is simply not possible, given the constraints of time, weather, and equipment at most schools, to have students determine the photometric distance of a star cluster, measure the dispersion distance of a pulsar, or confirm Hubble\u27s redshift-distance relation for themselves. [excerpt

Gas flow in near surface comet like porous structures: Application to 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

We performed an investigation of a comet like porous surface to study how sub-surface sublimation with subsequent flow through the porous medium can lead to higher gas temperatures at the surface. A higher gas temperature of the emitted gas at the surface layer, compared to the sublimation temperature, will lead to higher gas speeds as the gas expands into the vacuum thus altering the flow properties on larger scales (kilometres away from the surface). Unlike previous models that have used modelled artificial structures, we used Earth rock samples with a porosity in the range 24 – 92 % obtained from X-ray micro computed tomography (micro-CT) scans with resolution of some μm. Micro-CT scanning technology provides 3D images of the pore samples. The direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method for the rarefied gas dynamics is directly applied on the digital rock samples in an unstructured mesh to determine the gas densities, temperatures and speeds within the porous medium and a few centimetres above the surface. The thicknesses of the rock samples were comparable to the diurnal thermal skin depth (5cm). H2O was assumed to be the outgassing species. We correlated the coma temperatures and other properties of the flow with the rock porosities. The results are discussed as an input to analysis of data from the Microwave Instrument on Rosetta Orbiter (MIRO) on the 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

Hydro-mechanical response to gas transfer of deep argillaceous host rocks for radioactive waste disposal

During recent decades, argillaceous sedimentary formations have been studied as potential host formations for the geological disposal of long-living and heat-emitting radioactive waste—Boom Clay in Belgium and Opalinus Clay and Brown Dogger in Switzerland. A significant issue in the long-term performance of these potential host rocks concerns the generation and transport of gases. The pressure resulting from the generation of gas in an almost impermeable geological medium in the near field of a repository will increase. Under high gas pressures, the mechanical and hydraulic properties of the host rock are expected to change significantly. Preferential gas pathways may develop which exploit material heterogeneity, anisotropy (bedding planes), rock discontinuities, or interfaces between the different components of the repository, and may eventu- ally lead to the release of the produced gases. Gas flow through these clayey rocks is investigated on the basis of laboratory work. Priority has been given to studying the volume change response of these initially water-saturated materials through relatively fast and controlled volume-rate gas injections. The effect of the gas injection rate, the confining pressure and the bedding orientation on the gas transport properties have been studied with particular attention paid to the coupling with strain behaviour. The results have shown features common to the three formations concerning the gas transfer process through preferential pathways, despite their initially differential properties.This work is funded by the European Joint Programme on Radioactive Waste Management (EURAD WP- GAS) within the Horizon 2020-Euratom programme under grant agree- ment No 847593 (2019–2024). Past research contracts with NAGRA (National Cooperative for the Disposal of Radioactive Waste, Switzer- land) and ONDRAF/NIRAS (Belgian Agency for Radioactive Waste and Enriched Fissile Materials) also provided fundingPeer ReviewedPostprint (published version