A breakthrough curve analysis of unstable density-driven flow and transport in homogenous porous media

2000 FLORIDA AVE NW, WASHINGTON, USA, DC, 2000

Historical-Theological Models of Pilgrimage as a resource for Faith Tourism

Pilgrimage is often seen as a physical journey to a sacred destination fixed by custom, destination-centred and broadly penitential in tone. The work of anthropologists in the last century broadened definitions to consider pilgrimage, across a range of faiths, in terms of a journey of transition and formation of identity. More recent historical scholarship has critiqued the longer development of our idea of pilgrimage, as well as its theological structures and markers. This diachronic approach to pilgrimage has also considered its origins with respect to early Christian conceptions of the life of the Christian in society and found resonances for patterns of lay pilgrimage in early monastic ideas. Such historical-theological dimension of research into pilgrimage provides a useful platform from which we can interrogate the idea of ‘faith tourism’ or ‘pilgrimage tourism’. Many people of faith visit particular churches and holy sites to invoke their historic dimensions as well as to see what is presently on such sites. Visitors seek to re-enact historical narratives in the performance of certain pilgrimages and liturgies associated with them. Historical studies of theology thus may identify narratives that drive choices of action in pilgrimage. An historical reflection on pilgrimage may also be productive in widening definitions of pilgrimage for future development and may offer ideas for development of resources for the traveller

Assessing the impact of health technology assessment in the Netherlands

Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008Objectives: Investments in health research should lead to improvements in health and health care. This is also the remit of the main HTA program in the Netherlands. The aims of this study were to assess whether the results of this program have led to such improvements and to analyze how best to assess the impact from health research.Methods: We assessed the impact of individual HTA projects by adapting the "payback framework" developed in the United Kingdom. We conducted dossier reviews and sent a survey to principal investigators of forty-three projects awarded between 2000 and 2003. We then provided an overview of documented output and outcome that was assessed by ten HTA experts using a scoring method. Finally, we conducted five case studies using information from additional dossier review and semistructured key informant interviews.Results: The findings confirm that the payback framework is a useful approach to assess the impact of HTA projects. We identified over 101 peer reviewed papers, more than twenty-five PhDs, citations of research in guidelines (six projects), and implementation of new treatment strategies (eleven projects). The case studies provided greater depth and understanding about the levels of impact that arise and why and how they have been achieved.Conclusions: It is generally too early to determine whether the HTA program led to actual changes in healthcare policy and practice. However, the results can be used as a baseline measurement for future evaluation and can help funding organizations or HTA agencies consider how to assess impact, possibly routinely. This, in turn, could help inform research strategies and justify expenditure for health research.This research is funded by ZonMw, the Netherlands organization for health research and development (project 945-15-001)

SOFAR float trajectories in the tropical Atlantic 1989-1992

Neutrally buoyant SOFAR floats at nominal depths of 800 m, 1800 m, and 3300 m were tracked acoustically for 3.7 years in the vicinity of the western boundary and the equator of the Atlantic Ocean. Trajectories and summaries from the whole experiment are shown along with detailed trajectories from the second setting of the listening stations, October 1990 to September 1992. Some highlights are mentioned below. Trajectories at 1800 m revealed a swift narrow southward flowing deep western boundary current (DWBC) extending from 7°N across the equator. Two floats directly crossed the equator in the DWBC and went to 10°S. Two other floats left the DWBC near the equator and drifted eastward. Three floats entered the DWBC from the equatorial current system and drifted southward. No obvious DWBC or swift equatorial currents were observed by the 3300 m floats. The 800 m floats plus some surface drifters measured seven anticyclonic eddies as they translated northwestward along the coast of South America in a band from the equator to 12°N. One of the floats (28) entered the Caribbean where tracking stopped. This float was again tracked as it drifted across the mid-Atlantic Ridge and entered the Canary Basin near 34°N 28°W after a gap of 2.7 years. We infer that this float went westward though the Caribbean and northeastward in the Gulf Stream. Float 17 drifted northward from 10°N to 22°N in an eastern boundary current off the coast of West Africa. Floats between 6°N-6°S (roughly) drifted long distances zonally in the equatorial current system.Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation through Grants Nos. OCE85-21082, OCE85-17375, and OCE91-14656

Understanding factors associated with the translation of cardiovascular research: A multinational case study approach

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Background: Funders of health research increasingly seek to understand how best to allocate resources in order to achieve maximum value from their funding. We built an international consortium and developed a multinational case study approach to assess benefits arising from health research. We used that to facilitate analysis of factors in the production of research that might be associated with translating research findings into wider impacts, and the complexities involved. Methods: We built on the Payback Framework and expanded its application through conducting co-ordinated case studies on the payback from cardiovascular and stroke research in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. We selected a stratified random sample of projects from leading medical research funders. We devised a series of innovative steps to: minimize the effect of researcher bias; rate the level of impacts identified in the case studies; and interrogate case study narratives to identify factors that correlated with achieving high or low levels of impact. Results: Twenty-nine detailed case studies produced many and diverse impacts. Over the 15 to 20 years examined, basic biomedical research has a greater impact than clinical research in terms of academic impacts such as knowledge production and research capacity building. Clinical research has greater levels of wider impact on health policies, practice, and generating health gains. There was no correlation between knowledge production and wider impacts. We identified various factors associated with high impact. Interaction between researchers and practitioners and the public is associated with achieving high academic impact and translation into wider impacts, as is basic research conducted with a clinical focus. Strategic thinking by clinical researchers, in terms of thinking through pathways by which research could potentially be translated into practice, is associated with high wider impact. Finally, we identified the complexity of factors behind research translation that can arise in a single case. Conclusions: We can systematically assess research impacts and use the findings to promote translation. Research funders can justify funding research of diverse types, but they should not assume academic impacts are proxies for wider impacts. They should encourage researchers to consider pathways towards impact and engage potential research users in research processes. © 2014 Wooding et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.RAND Europe and HERG, with subsequent funding from the NHFA, the HSFC and the CIHR. This research was also partially supported by the Policy Research Programme in the English Department of Health

SOFAR float trajectories from an experiment to measure the Atlantic cross equatorial flow (1989-1990)

Neutrally buoyant SOFAR floats at nominal depths of 800, 1800, and 3300 m were tracked for 21 months in the vicinity of western boundary currents near 6N and at several sites in the Atlantic near 11N and along the equator. Trajectories at 1800 m show a swift (>50 cm/sec), narrow (100 km wide) southward-flowing Deep Western Boundary Current (DWBC) extending from 7N to the equator. At times (February-March 1989) DWBC water turned eastward and flowed along the equator and at other times (August-September 1990) the DWBC crossed the equator and continued southward. The mean velocity near the equator was eastward from February 1989 to February 1990 and westward from March 1990 to November 1990. Thus the cross-equatorial flow in the DWBC appeared to be linked to the direction of equatorial currents which varied over periods of more than a year. No obvious DWBC nor swift equatorial current was observed by 3300 m floats. Eight-hundred-meter floats revealed a northwestward intermediate level western boundary current although flow patterns were complicated. Three floats that significantly contributed to the northwestward flow looped in anticyclonic eddies that translated up the coast at 8 cm/sec. Six 800 m floats drifted eastward along the equator between 5S and 6N at a mean velocity of 11 cm/sec; one reached 5W in the Gulf of Guinea, suggesting that the equatorial current extended at least 35-40° along the equator. Three of these floats reversed direction near the end of the tracking period, implying low frequency fluctuations.Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation through Grant Nos. OCE-8521082, OCE-8517375, and OCE-9114656

Shearmeter floats in the area of the WHOI Brazil Basin Tracer Release Experiment : technical and oceanographic data

Six drifting floats designed to measure shear were deployed in the vicinity of the Brazil Basin Tracer Release Experiment. The one-year long time series of oceanographic conditions obtained by the floats are for direct comparison with long-term tracer dispersion. The purpose of the tracer dispersion experiment was to study mixing of Antarctic Bottom Water at approximately 4000 m depth with less dense water above. Two of the floats returned shear records, one from about 1660 m depth and one from about 2800 m depth. Mean shear at 1660 m was 2.2 x 10 -3 s-1 with N = 1.1 cph, about 1.9 times the Garrett-Munk model amount. Mean shear at 2800 m was 1.1 x 10-3 with N = 0.5 cph, about 2.2 times Garrett-Munk. There was no apparent depth structure to the shear recorded by the near-bottom float moving over the mountainous seafloor. The two shear time series and the local tidal velocities were not strongly correlated, but the tide and shear series did have some similarities. Some variability in the 1660-m shear may be due to atmospheric forcing. Three floats deeper than 2800 m returned one-year long trajectories. Two trajectories were persistently eastward.Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. OCE-9416014 and OCE-9906685

Institutional strategies for capturing socio-economic impact of academic research

Evaluation of socio-economic impact is an emerging theme for publicly-funded academic research. Within this context the paper suggests that the concept of institutional research capital be expanded to include the capture and evaluation of socio-economic impact. Furthermore, it argues that understanding the typology of impacts and the tracking from research to impact will assist the formulation of institutional strategies for capturing socio-economic impact. A three-stage approach is proposed for capturing and planning activities to enhance the generation of high-quality impact. Stage one outlines the critical role of user engagement that facilitates the tracking of such impact. Stage two employs an analytical framework based on the criteria of ‘depth’ and ‘spread’ to evaluate impacts that have been identified. Stage three utilizes the outcomes of the framework to devise strategies, consisting of either further research (to increase depth) or more engagement (to increase spread) that will improve the generation of higher quality impact

Blood ties: ABO is a trans-species polymorphism in primates

The ABO histo-blood group, the critical determinant of transfusion incompatibility, was the first genetic polymorphism discovered in humans. Remarkably, ABO antigens are also polymorphic in many other primates, with the same two amino acid changes responsible for A and B specificity in all species sequenced to date. Whether this recurrence of A and B antigens is the result of an ancient polymorphism maintained across species or due to numerous, more recent instances of convergent evolution has been debated for decades, with a current consensus in support of convergent evolution. We show instead that genetic variation data in humans and gibbons as well as in Old World Monkeys are inconsistent with a model of convergent evolution and support the hypothesis of an ancient, multi-allelic polymorphism of which some alleles are shared by descent among species. These results demonstrate that the ABO polymorphism is a trans-species polymorphism among distantly related species and has remained under balancing selection for tens of millions of years, to date, the only such example in Hominoids and Old World Monkeys outside of the Major Histocompatibility Complex.Comment: 45 pages, 4 Figures, 4 Supplementary Figures, 5 Supplementary Table