A systematic review of approaches for continuous quality improvement capacity-building

Context: Continuous quality improvement (CQI) has become prominent in public health settings; yet, little consolidated guidance exists for building CQI capacity of community-based organizations. Objective: To synthesize relevant literature to identify guiding principles and core components critical to building the capacity of organizations to adopt and use CQI. Design: We employed a systematic review approach to assess guiding principles and core components for CQI capacity-building as outlined in the literature. Eligibility Criteria: Studies meeting the following criteria were eligible for review: (1) empirical, peer-reviewed journal article, evaluation study, review, or systematic review; (2) published in 2010 or later; and (3) capacity-building activities were described in enough detail to be replicable. Studies not including human subjects, published in a language other than English, or for which full text was not available were excluded. Study Selection: The initial return of records included 6557 articles, of which 1455 were duplicates. The research team single-screened titles and abstracts of 5102 studies, resulting in the exclusion of 4842 studies. Two hundred sixty-two studies were double-screened during full-text review, yielding a final sample of 61 studies from which data were extracted. Main Outcome Measures: Outcome measures of interest were operationalized descriptions of guiding principles and core components of the CQI capacity-building approach. Results: Results yielded articles from medical education, health care, and public health settings. Findings included guiding principles and core components of CQI capacity-building identified in current practice, as well as infrastructural and contextual elements needed to build CQI capacity. Conclusions: This consolidation of guiding principles and core components for CQI capacity-building is valuable for public health and related workforces. Despite the uneven distribution of articles from health care, medical education, and public health settings, our findings can be used to guide public health organizations in building CQI capacity in a well-informed, systematic manner

Transverse phase-locking in fully frustrated Josephson junction arrays: a new type of fractional giant steps

We study, analytically and numerically, phase locking of driven vortex lattices in fully-frustrated Josephson junction arrays at zero temperature. We consider the case when an ac current is applied {\it perpendicular} to a dc current. We observe phase locking, steps in the current-voltage characteristics, with a dependence on external ac-drive amplitude and frequency qualitatively different from the Shapiro steps, observed when the ac and dc currents are applied in parallel. Further, the critical current increases with increasing transverse ac-drive amplitude, while it decreases for longitudinal ac-drive. The critical current and the phase-locked current step width, increase quadratically with (small) amplitudes of the ac-drive. For larger amplitudes of the transverse ac-signal, we find windows where the critical current is hysteretic, and windows where phase locking is suppressed due to dynamical instabilities. We characterize the dynamical states around the phase-locking interference condition in the $IV$ curve with voltage noise, Lyapunov exponents and Poincar\'e sections. We find that zero temperature phase-locking behavior in large fully frustrated arrays is well described by an effective four plaquette model.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figure

BioConcens: Biomass and bioenergy production agriculture – consequences for soil fertility, environment, spread of animal parasites and socio-economy

The research programme called “international research cooperation and organic integrity” was commenced for a period 2006-2010. It is coordinated by DARCOF (The Danish Research Centre for Organic Farming). The whole programme, with acronym DARCOF III, consists of 15 projects (http://www.darcof.dk/research/darcofiii/index.html). One of them is BIOCONCENS - Biomass and bioenergy production in organic farming – consequences for soil fertility, environment, spread of animal parasites and socio-economy (http://www.bioconcens.elr.dk/uk/). The production of bioenergy in organic agriculture (OA) can reduce its dependency of fossil fuels and decrease green house gasses emission; consequently it will increase sustainability of organic farms. Biorefinery concept based on co-production of biogas, bioethanol and protein fodder in organic farming will be developed within the BIOCONCENS project and the background for the project and the different work packages will be presented in this paper

From bench scale to pilot plant: A 150x scaled-up configuration of a microwave-driven structured reactor for methane dehydroaromatization

Microwave-assisted gas-phase conversion on structured catalysts is emerging as a promising process intensifi-cation technology in the field of heterogeneous catalysis. The combination of selective heating and structured catalytic materials induces a temperature difference between the heated catalytic sample and the surrounding void regions to avoid non-selective gas-phase reactions. This operational principle allowed inhibiting thermal cracking in alkane dehydrogenation processes as well as retarding catalyst deactivation by coking in methane dehydroaromatization (MDA) processes. However, its effectiveness has not been reported so far out of the lab-oratory scale conditions. This work addresses the scaling of the microwave-assisted MDA process from lab scale experiments to a scaled-up configuration capable of stable operation with a 150-fold higher feeding rate. The scaling-up potential and main obstacles to overcome for this technology are critically discussed. In addition, a techno-economic assessment of the MW-MDA process is presented. The catalytic activity was kept for seven consecutive reaction cycles, i.e. 35 h MW-MDA, prior to a progressive decay due to permanent deactivation caused by zeolite dealumination and active metal loss. The scaled set-up operated for up to 295 consecutive hours under unmanned operation conducting 4 -h MDA-regeneration cycles on Mo/ZSM-5@SiC monoliths and resulting in 125-fold increase of converted methane and a 450-fold increase of benzene (0.17 LC6H6/h) in comparison with the laboratory scale tests. Scaled set-up experiments were run using only a 6-fold microwave input power, thus, highlighting the non-linearity between energy consumption and scaling factor for this tech-nology and the importance of microwave cavity design

Transverse Phase Locking for Vortex Motion in Square and Triangular Pinning Arrays

We analyze transverse phase locking for vortex motion in a superconductor with a longitudinal DC drive and a transverse AC drive. For both square and triangular arrays we observe a variety of fractional phase locking steps in the velocity versus DC drive which correspond to stable vortex orbits. The locking steps are more pronounced for the triangular arrays which is due to the fact that the vortex motion has a periodic transverse velocity component even for zero transverse AC drive. All the steps increase monotonically in width with AC amplitude. We confirm that the width of some fractional steps in the square arrays scales as the square of the AC driving amplitude. In addition we demonstrate scaling in the velocity versus applied DC driving curves at depinning and on the main step, similar to that seen for phase locking in charge-density wave systems. The phase locking steps are most prominent for commensurate vortex fillings where the interstitial vortices form symmetrical ground states. For increasing temperature, the fractional steps are washed out very quickly, while the main step gains a linear component and disappears at melting. For triangular pinning arrays we again observe transverse phase locking, with the main and several of the fractional step widths scaling linearly with AC amplitude.Comment: 10 pages, 14 postscript figure

Slow relaxations and history dependence of the transport properties of layered superconductors

We study numerically the time evolution of the transport properties of layered superconductors after different preparations. We show that, in accordance with recent experiments in BSCCO performed in the second peak region of the phase diagram (Portier et al, 2001), the relaxation strongly depends on the initial conditions and is extremely slow. We investigate the dependence on the pinning center density and the perturbation applied. We compare the measurements to recent findings in tapped granular matter and we interpret our results with a rather simple picture.Comment: 4 pages, 4 fig

Edible insects unlikely to contribute to transmission of coronavirus SARS-CoV-2

In the context of food safety, edible insects are evaluated for biological hazards such as microbial pathogens according to regulations currently in place. When the European Food Safety Authority evaluated the hazards of edible insects as a potential source of pathogenic viruses for humans and livestock, the novel zoonotic coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 had not yet emerged but other pathogenic coronaviruses such as SARS (SARS-CoV) and MERS (MERS-CoV) were known. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, animal sources of protein for human consumption are being evaluated for the risks of being a transmission vector of coronaviruses, like SARS-CoV-2. Insects lack a receptor that can bind SARS-CoV-2, thus preventing the virus from replicating in insects, unlike some vertebrate livestock species and companion animals. Despite extensive monitoring, coronaviruses have never been recorded in insect microbiomes. Contamination of insects produced for food or feed may occur during the production process, resulting from rearing substrate or from insect farmers. However, the currently permitted rearing substrates do not include animal products and the farming process is highly automated, thus limiting interactions between farmers and insects. If contamination would still occur, the fact that the insects in production are not hosts to SARS-CoV-2 precludes virus replication and the further processing of the insects will destroy the contamination. We conclude that the hazard of edible insects being a transmission vector of SARS-CoV-2 is extremely low.</p