Evaluation of drug prevention activities: theory and practice.

This publication will explore the limitations for evaluation of drug prevention interventions and address the ways that evaluation can be made more effective. The Prevention Platform of the Pompidou Group (PG) of the Council of Europe has developed a framework of the publication in the context of the work undertaken in recent years in Europe to improve prevention interventions. The results of this work include “Handbook on prevention” by the PG and Jellinek Consultancy, “Prevention and evaluation resources kit” by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) as well as its database of good practices developed within the framework of the Exchange on Drug Demand Reduction Action (EDDRA), COST-A6 programme publications and the 2010 Prague Conference of the Pompidou Group “Prevention evaluation: from dogma to useful tool”

Does Elderly Employment have an Impact on Youth Employment? A General Equilibrium Approach

Does an increase of elderly employment cause a decline in youth employment? A simplified view of a demand driven economy would give a positive answer to this question. Econometric studies based on a single equation approach deliver little support for this belief. However, these studies typically suffer from identification problems to which no attention is paid in most cases. We therefore use a general equilibrium framework when trying to quantify these effects. Using yearly and quarterly Austrian labor and gdp data, we estimate two model variants by Bayesian methods: a) a standard equilibrium model where the degree of complementarity between old, young and primary labor is crucial for the sign and strength of the relevant effects and b) a simple, solely demand driven model which always leads to a crowding out of young through an increase in employment of the old. It turned out that the demand driven model is inferior in fitting the data compared to the standard model. Further, the degree of complementarity is estimated to be strong enough to lead to a small positive effect of elderly employment on youth employment. (authors' abstract)Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Serie

Selective Medical Image Compression using Wavelet Techniques

Selective Image Compression (SeLIC) is a compression technique where explicitly defined regions of interest (Roi) are compressed in a lossless way whereas image regions containing unimportant information are compressed in a lossy manner. Such techniques are of great interest in telemedicine or medical imaging applications with large storage requirements. In this paper we introduce and compare different techniques based on wavelet transforms and demonstrate their good performance which is mainly due to the spatial locality of the wavelet transform domain

Opioid agonist treatment in transition: A cross-country comparison between Austria, Germany and Switzerland

Background and aims: OAT is a well developed and successful treatment strategy for opioid dependent patients in Europe. It has significantly contributed to the fight against the HIV and HCV pandemics, leading to an increased life expectancy in this population. Building on the OAT experiences in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland and their models of care, the objective of this study is to analyse experiences and changes in patient structures to identify necessary adaptations for the system of care. Methods: We analysed national register-based data from patients receiving OAT during the period spanning from 2010 to 2020 in Austria, Germany (cases), and Switzerland. We examined and compared OAT policies and practice at national levels through a review of literature and publicly available policy documents. Results: Across these three countries, the life expectancy of OAT patients increased substantially. The mean age increased from 33.0 in 2010 to 39.1 in 2020 in Austria, from 35.6 years to 41.5 years in Germany (cases), and from 39.6 to 47.1 in Switzerland, respectively. In all three countries, the percentage of patients/cases aged 60 years and older increased more than tenfold between 2010 and 2020. Conclusions: Integrated support models, reliable care structures, internationally comparable high treatment coverage, flexible prescribing practices, and a wide range of available OAT medications are successful strategies. The experiences in these countries indicate that it is possible to address the complex and chronic nature of opioid dependence and its concurrent mental and physical health challenges, resulting in an increasing life expectancy of OAT patients

Photography-based taxonomy is inadequate, unnecessary, and potentially harmful for biological sciences

The question whether taxonomic descriptions naming new animal species without type specimen(s) deposited in collections should be accepted for publication by scientific journals and allowed by the Code has already been discussed in Zootaxa (Dubois & Nemésio 2007; Donegan 2008, 2009; Nemésio 2009a–b; Dubois 2009; Gentile & Snell 2009; Minelli 2009; Cianferoni & Bartolozzi 2016; Amorim et al. 2016). This question was again raised in a letter supported by 35 signatories published in the journal Nature (Pape et al. 2016) on 15 September 2016. On 25 September 2016, the following rebuttal (strictly limited to 300 words as per the editorial rules of Nature) was submitted to Nature, which on 18 October 2016 refused to publish it. As we think this problem is a very important one for zoological taxonomy, this text is published here exactly as submitted to Nature, followed by the list of the 493 taxonomists and collection-based researchers who signed it in the short time span from 20 September to 6 October 2016