COMMON PROPERTY AND COLLECTIVE ACTION: COOPERATIVE WATERSHED MANAGEMENT IN HAITI

The paper is divided into four sections. First, watershed management in Haiti is presented as a problem of voluntary collective action in which small watersheds are the common responsibility of a group of users. Second, this situation is given formal expression as a "public goods" problem, in which obligations to contribute time and labor to the maintenance and management of watersheds are treated as conditional or contingent commitments to cooperate (rather than defect). Third, an empirical analysis is presented in which key economic and cultural factors are tested to determine those that best explain the individual propensity to cooperate and the conditions necessary for collective action to emerge. Fourth, we interpret these results in light of the model, and suggest some generalizations and extensions of theoretical and empirical research on common property and collective action.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

River Run Off Measurement With SAR Along Track Interferometry

The paper summarizes the need for global space borne river run-off measurements. It reports about an airborne SAR experiment aimed to measure the surface velocity of the river Isar in Bavaria / Germany. The results from two different SAR techniques, including Along Track Interferometry (ATI) show good correspondence. Finally suggestions for further studies are given

Epipericardial fat necrosis – a rare cause of pleuritic chest pain: case report and review of the literature

Epipericardial fat necrosis (EPFN) is an uncommon cause of chest pain. Typically manifesting as severe acute chest pain, EPFN can be mistaken for a serious disorder, such as pulmonary embolism or myocardial infarction. We report a case of EPFN, diagnosed tentatively based on clinical and radiographic findings, with documented resolution of the lesion on chest CT. According to our literature search, this is only the second case in which chest CT alone was used to both diagnose the lesion and track its resolution. It is the first documented case diagnosed and followed as such in North America

Examining Perceptions of Participation in a Pediatric IBD Collaborative: Analyzing the Integral Features and Activities of ImproveCareNow

In 2007, pediatric gastroenterologists from ten practice sites across the U.S. created a quality improvement collaborative, now known as ImproveCareNow, to improve the quality of care provided to children with inflammatory bowel disease. Despite the face validity and great potential of quality improvement collaboratives, investigators do not fully understand how improvement happens, including the variables contributing to quality measures and the necessary components needed to sustain quality improvement. The purpose of this project was to explore perceptions of collaborative participants to identify elements of sustainability. We performed qualitative interviews with 16 ImproveCareNow participants as one method in a triangulated strategy of measuring collaborative participants’ perceptions. We selected informants from a diverse list of practice types and geographic locations, and asked open-ended questions, which we then transcribed and coded. For this master’s paper, I analyzed members’ perceptions of value of, and implementation strategies for, collaborative components like previsit planning, patient databases (population management), standardized clinic forms and algorithms, and decision support. I found that collaborative participants value many system-wide features of collaborative participation, but sites have different paths to implementation, and important features are underdeveloped or under-utilized at some sites. Respondents embraced the potential of population management reports, but noted that data entry burdened clinic flow. Previsit planning was cited as moderately successful, and one site had developed a novel modification of the planning to obviate face-to-face meetings. Standardized clinic templates and decision analysis tools met high expectations for mutual benefit from individual innovation and ingenuity. Analyzing in-depth interviews of ICN participants is the first step in understanding what health care providers perceive as the value from, benefits of, and challenges to initiating and sustaining collaborative quality improvement activitiesMaster of Public Healt

Flexible Correct-by-Construction Programming

Correctness-by-Construction (CbC) is an incremental program construction process to construct functionally correct programs. The programs are constructed stepwise along with a specification that is inherently guaranteed to be satisfied. CbC is complex to use without specialized tool support, since it needs a set of predefined refinement rules of fixed granularity which are additional rules on top of the programming language. Each refinement rule introduces a specific programming statement and developers cannot depart from these rules to construct programs. CbC allows to develop software in a structured and incremental way to ensure correctness, but the limited flexibility is a disadvantage of CbC. In this work, we compare classic CbC with CbC-Block and TraitCbC. Both approaches CbC-Block and TraitCbC, are related to CbC, but they have new language constructs that enable a more flexible software construction approach. We provide for both approaches a programming guideline, which similar to CbC, leads to well-structured programs. CbC-Block extends CbC by adding a refinement rule to insert any block of statements. Therefore, we introduce CbC-Block as an extension of CbC. TraitCbC implements correctness-by-construction on the basis of traits with specified methods. We formally introduce TraitCbC and prove soundness of the construction strategy. All three development approaches are qualitatively compared regarding their programming constructs, tool support, and usability to assess which is best suited for certain tasks and developers.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2204.0564

Pharmacological Evaluation of the SCID T Cell Transfer Model of Colitis: As a Model of Crohn's Disease

Animal models are important tools in the development of new drug candidates against the inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs) Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. In order to increase the translational value of these models, it is important to increase knowledge relating to standard drugs. Using the SCID adoptive transfer colitis model, we have evaluated the effect of currently used IBD drugs and IBD drug candidates, that is, anti-TNF-α, TNFR-Fc, anti-IL-12p40, anti-IL-6, CTLA4-Ig, anti-α4β7 integrin, enrofloxacin/metronidazole, and cyclosporine. We found that anti-TNF-α, antibiotics, anti-IL-12p40, anti-α4β7 integrin, CTLA4-Ig, and anti-IL-6 effectively prevented onset of colitis, whereas TNFR-Fc and cyclosporine did not. In intervention studies, antibiotics, anti-IL-12p40, and CTLA4-Ig induced remission, whereas the other compounds did not. The data suggest that the adoptive transfer model and the inflammatory bowel diseases have some main inflammatory pathways in common. The finding that some well-established IBD therapeutics do not have any effect in the model highlights important differences between the experimental model and the human disease

Case reportEpipericardial fat necrosis – a rare cause of pleuritic chest pain: case report and review of the literature

Epipericardial fat necrosis (EPFN) is an uncommon cause of chest pain. Typically manifesting as severe acute chest pain, EPFN can be mistaken for a serious disorder, such as pulmonary embolism or myocardial infarction. We report a case of EPFN, diagnosed tentatively based on clinical and radiographic findings, with documented resolution of the lesion on chest CT. According to our literature search, this is only the second case in which chest CT alone was used to both diagnose the lesion and track its resolution. It is the first documented case diagnosed and followed as such in North America