Attitudes about Addiction: A National Study of Addiction Educators

The following study, funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), utilized the Addiction Belief Inventory (ABI; Luke, Ribisl, Walton, & Davidson, 2002) to examine addiction attitudes in a national sample of U.S. college/university faculty teaching addiction-specific courses (n = 215). Results suggest that addiction educators view substance abuse as a coping mechanism rather than a moral failure, and are ambivalent about calling substance abuse or addiction a disease. Most do not support individual efficacy toward recovery, the ability to control use, or social use after treatment. Modifiers of addiction educator attitudes include level of college education; teaching experience; licensure/certification, and whether the educator is an addiction researcher. Study implications, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed

Embedding the concept of ecosystems services:The utilisation of ecological knowledge in different policy venues

The concept of ecosystem services is increasingly being promoted by academics and policy makers as a means to protect ecological systems through more informed decision making. A basic premise of this approach is that strengthening the ecological knowledge base will significantly enhance ecosystem health through more sensitive decision making. However, the existing literature on knowledge utilisation, and many previous attempts to improve decision making through better knowledge integration, suggest that producing ‘more knowledge’ is only ever a necessary but insufficient condition for greater policy success. We begin this paper by reviewing what is already known about the relationship between ecological knowledge development and utilisation, before introducing a set of theme issue papers that examine—for the very first time—how this politically and scientifically salient relationship plays out across a number of vital policy venues such as land-use planning, policy-level impact assessment, and cost–benefit analysis. Following a detailed synthesis of the key findings of all the papers, this paper identifies and explores new research and policy challenges in this important and dynamic area of environmental governance

Access and allocation in earth system governance: Water and climate change compared

A significant percentage of the global population does not yet have access to safe drinking water, sufficient food or energy to live in dignity. There is a continuous struggle to allocate the earth's resources among users and uses. This article argues that distributional problems have two faces: access to basic resources or ecospace; and, the allocation of environmental resources, risks, burdens, and responsibilities for causing problems. Furthermore, addressing problems of access and allocation often requires access to social processes (science, movements and law). Analysts, however, have tended to take a narrow, disciplinary approach although an integrated conceptual approach may yield better answers. This article proposes a multi-disciplinary perspective to the problem of access and allocation and illustrates its application to water management and climate change. © The Author(s) 2010

Synthesis of Code-disjoint Combinational Circuits

In this paper it is shown how a circuit, given as a netlist of gates, can be transformed into a code-disjoint circuit. Carefully selected gates of the separately implemented parity bit are utilized for the optimization of the necessary area overhead. 1 Introduction The design of self-testing and self-checking circuits is of growing interest now. The outputs of the monitored circuit are elements of an error detecting code; for instance, a parity code or a Berger code [4, 6, 9--13, 16]. The encoded outputs of the self-testing or self-checking circuit are monitored by a (self-testing) code-checker. Internal faults of the monitored circuit or the checker can be detected by this method. To also detect faults at the input lines, code-disjoint circuits have to be used [12]. Both the inputs and the outputs of a code-disjoint circuit are encoded [3]. As long as no error occurs input codewords are mapped onto output code-words and noncode inputs are mapped onto non-code outputs by a code-disjoi..