COVID-19 and Outdoor Recreation in Maine and New Hampshire: Analysis of Trends Using Passive Visitation Data

The COVID-19 pandemic has motivated alterations to the way people approach and practice outdoor recreation. Access to outdoor areas has changed rapidly in response to measures like travel bans, closures, and health and safety guidelines. Recreation managers have had to act quickly to keep up with these visitor use fluctuations in order to protect resources from use degradation. I explored how pandemic effects have changed visitation behaviors and trends in outdoor recreation in Acadia National Park and the White Mountain National Forest. Acadia National Park is a well-known and highly trafficked outdoor recreation area with over 3 million visits annually and many entries and exits; the White Mountain National Forest, has similar diffuse entries, has diverse recreation opportunities, and sees less overall visitation than Acadia. This study includes a review of relevant literature on COVID-19 effects on outdoor recreation, an exploration of the use of passive use cellular data derived from the data company StreetLight for visitation estimates, and an analysis of survey data from 2020-2021 about COVID-19 impacts on Acadia visitors and visitor demographics. This paper is unique in that it includes passive use cellular data for examining visitation shifts during the pandemic in diffuse entry outdoor recreation areas. Results indicate that in addition to changes in the overall visitation to these outdoor recreation areas, pandemic visitation also saw shifts in visitor demographics. Additionally, passive cellular data were useful in estimating visitation volume within recreation areas. It is likely there are several areas where recreation managers could incorporate StreetLight InSight analysis results and data gathering techniques into their operations to improve existing outdoor recreation practices

Fractional Chern insulator edges and layer-resolved lattice contacts

Fractional Chern insulators (FCIs) realized in fractional quantum Hall systems subject to a periodic potential are topological phases of matter for which space group symmetries play an important role. In particular, lattice dislocations in an FCI can host topology-altering non-Abelian topological defects, known as genons. Genons are of particular interest for their potential application to topological quantum computing. In this work, we study FCI edges and how they can be used to detect genons. We find that translation symmetry can impose a quantized momentum difference between the edge electrons of a partially-filled Chern band. We propose {\it layer-resolved lattice contacts}, which utilize this momentum difference to selectively contact a particular FCI edge electron. The relative current between FCI edge electrons can then be used to detect the presence of genons in the bulk FCI. Recent experiments have demonstrated graphene is a viable platform to study FCI physics. We describe how the lattice contacts proposed here could be implemented in graphene subject to an artificial lattice, thereby outlining a path forward for experimental dectection of non-Abelian topological defects.Comment: 5+7 pages, 10 figures, v2: modified figure

Gold standard or fool's gold: the pursuit of certainty in experimental criminology

This article assesses some of the claims made for experimental research in the field of rehabilitation of offenders. It suggests that both policy officials and evaluators have tended to over-invest financially and intellectually in a technocratic model of reducing reoffending that emphasizes programmes for offenders, and to under-invest in models that see the process as a complex ‘people changing’ skill. It argues that the complexity of this process renders it hard to evaluate using experimental methods of evaluation such as randomized controlled trials (RCTs). RCTs provide strong internal validity, but in complex settings offer weak external validity, making it hard to generalize from the experimental setting to other settings. The article suggests that the proper role for evaluative research in this field should be seen as building and testing middle-level theories about how best to change offenders’ behaviour

VP164 Applying health technology assessment to pharmacy: the Italian-Medicine-Use-Review-Health Technology Assessment

There is a lack of Health-Technology-Assessment (HTA) tools in pharmacy practice and the collection of real-world-evidence (RWE) in community pharmacy to populate longer-term-disease-progression-modelling (1). This project is looking at the development and application of a novel Patient-Reported-Outcome- Measure (PROM) in community pharmacy that can enable: the evaluation of the quality of care delivered from the patient perspective in terms of economic impact, patient health outcomes and ‘utilities’; the collection of RWE and evaluate long-term effect of care; to provide different stakeholders with unique evidence-based information that help formulate health policies in community pharmacy that are safe, effective, patient-focused and cost-effective, balancing access to innovation and cost containment. Evidence from the Italian-Medicine-Use-Review (I-MUR) trial (2) showed that the I-MUR intervention provided by community pharmacists to asthma patients is effective, cost-saving and cost-effective (3). The trial allowed to model a framework (I-MUR-HTA) that would enable to routinely deliver the intervention, but also collect and analyse PROM data on its clinical-effectiveness, quality-of-life and cost-effectiveness. I-MUR-HTA was discussed within three expert-panel discussions including policy-makers, commissioners, academics, healthcare-professionals and patient-representatives in Italy, United Kingdom and Europe. Current plan include testing the use of the tool in the real world environment. Evidence collected from the panel discussions confirmed that I-MUR-HTA evidence-based information is relevant to meet current National-Health-Care-System plans and this is what is needed to support the evaluation of innovative effective and cost-effective health policies and promote their implementation across nations. Current Italian law on pharmacy services provides the appropriate institutional framework to regulate the introduction of I-MUR-HTA across the territory. Its implementation is underway and a real-world pilot is planned to take place in Italy. I-MUR-HTA appears to be an innovative tool to promote active patient involvement into policy-decision-making and pharmacy-service

Ideology and Entry Policy: Why Non-Socialist Parties in Sweden Support Open Door Migration Policies

While the continued growth of far-right populist parties across Europe has led to a rich body of literature detailing the impact of anti-immigrant parties on entry policies, less attention has been directed towards analyzing how mainstream non-socialist parties formulate their migration policy preferences. In this paper, we seek to correct this imbalance by addressing the case of Sweden. The conventional wisdom frequently portrays non-socialist parties as proponents of restrictive entry policies for labor migrants and asylum seekers. However, we show that center-right parties and the Greens have largely been the driving force behind key Swedish migration policy developments over the past several decades, allowing greater numbers of migrants to enter and settle permanently. Our analysis shows that non-socialist support for generous entry policies is largely consistent over time, regardless of efforts by far-right populist parties, or the socialist left, to see more restrictive entry policies enacted. To account for this stance, we focus on the role of party ideology as the missing factor. While vote maximization and inter-party competition have their place in accounts of entry policy preference formation, a more nuanced analysis requires examining the role of ideology. Long-held ideological principles help parties evaluate societal change, leading them to formulate generous entry policies in the face of pressure from both the left and the right for stricter migration policies

Livestock disease resilience: from individual to herd level

Infectious diseases are a major threat to the sustainable production of high-producing animals. Control efforts, such as vaccination or breeding approaches often target improvements to individual resilience to infections, i.e., they strengthen an animal’s ability to cope with infection, rather than preventing infection per se. There is increasing evidence for the contribution of non-clinical carriers (animals that become infected and are infectious but do not develop clinical signs) to the overall health and production of livestock populations for a wide range of infectious diseases. Therefore, we strongly advocate a shift of focus from increasing the disease resilience of individual animals to herd disease resilience as the appropriate target for sustainable disease control in livestock. Herd disease resilience not only captures the direct effects of vaccination or host genetics on the health and production performance of individuals but also the indirect effects on the environmental pathogen load that herd members are exposed to. For diseases primarily caused by infectious pathogens shed by herd members, these indirect effects on herd resilience are mediated both by individual susceptibility to infection and by characteristics (magnitude of infectiousness, duration of infectious period) that influence pathogen shedding from infected individuals. We review what is currently known about how vaccination and selective breeding affect herd disease resilience and its underlying components, and outline the changes required for improvement. To this purpose, we also seek to clarify and harmonise the terminology used in the different animal science disciplines to facilitate future collaborative approaches to infectious disease control in livestock

A small-molecule inhibitor of Haspin alters the kinetochore functions of Aurora B

By phosphorylating Thr3 of histone H3, Haspin promotes centromeric recruitment of the chromosome passenger complex (CPC) during mitosis. Aurora B kinase, a CPC subunit, sustains chromosome bi-orientation and the spindle assembly checkpoint (SAC). Here, we characterize the small molecule 5-iodotubercidin (5-ITu) as a potent Haspin inhibitor. In vitro, 5-ITu potently inhibited Haspin but not Aurora B. Consistently, 5-ITu counteracted the centromeric localization of the CPC without affecting the bulk of Aurora B activity in HeLa cells. Mislocalization of Aurora B correlated with dephosphorylation of CENP-A and Hec1 and SAC override at high nocodazole concentrations. 5-ITu also impaired kinetochore recruitment of Bub1 and BubR1 kinases, and this effect was reversed by concomitant inhibition of phosphatase activity. Forcing localization of Aurora B to centromeres in 5-ITu also restored Bub1 and BubR1 localization but failed to rescue the SAC override. This result suggests that a target of 5-ITu, possibly Haspin itself, may further contribute to SAC signaling downstream of Aurora B

Advancing Stream-Tracer Techniques and their Mathematical Analysis

Stream-tracer tests are often conducted to evaluate transport and reaction processes in streams and their adjacent hyporheic zones. But in spite of broad application, serious caveats remain, even with regards to supposedly well established approaches of stream-tracer techniques. In this thesis, I address several of these problems with regard to experiments and their mathematical analysis. One of these common techniques are gas-tracer tests, which are used for estimating rate coefficients for reaeration across the air-water-interface. In this thesis, I illustrate how large errors are made by erroneously assuming a constant tracer input source over time, which can usually not be guaranteed in the field. I also suggest an easy-to-implement method that accounts for this temporal variability in the analysis process. Additionally, I show that neglecting dispersion in transport leads to an underestimation of reaeration rate coefficients, and that these effects carry over to the calculation of metabolic rates, such as aerobic respiration and photosynthesis from measured concentrations of dissolved oxygen. Furthermore, conceptual models linking in-stream transport to hyporheic exchange are often stark simplifications of the processes occurring in nature. To what extent these models can nonetheless be useful in the estimation of hyporheic exchange processes I investigated by comparing in-stream and subsurface measurements of stream-tracer tests. I show that the two different observation approaches provide snapshots of very different parts of the stream-hyporheic zone system, that cannot easily be reconciled. Whereas the in-stream observations provide information on shallow hyporheic processes with effect on whole-stream chemistry, the subsurface results reveal the spatial distribution of reactivity in the stream bed that is not captured by the in-stream analysis, thereby identifying the location of a highly reactive benthic biolayer. The shortcomings of stream-tracer techniques are also particularly evident in the context of reactive tracers, which have become a popular tool for the estimation of aerobic respiration rates and hyporheic exchange in streams. The application of the reactive tracer resazurin requires extensions of general models linking in-stream transport and hyporheic exchange with compound-specific properties. This way, models have become increasingly complex, making the reliable estimation of their associated parameters difficult. I present a nested local-in-global parameter estimation approach, that allows determining a set of transport and reaction parameters coupled with the inference of a continuous function describing the hyporheic travel-time distribution of the tracer compound in an efficient way. This thesis thus aims at advancing stream-tracer techniques with respect to their experimental methods, the conceptual assumptions regarding transport and reaction processes as well as the estimation of parameters associated with these models.Markierversuchen werden häufig durchgeführt um Transport- und Reaktionsprozessen in Flüssen und ihren angrenzenden hyporheischen Zonen zu bestimmen. Obwohl es sich hierbei um eine weit verbreitete Methode handelt, die häufig Anwendung findet, weisen verschiedenste Aspekte dieses Ansatzes grobe Defizite auf. In dieser Arbeit thematisiere ich einige dieser Defizite in Bezug auf experimentelle Methoden und ihre mathematische Auswertung. Markierversuche mit Gasen stellen eine Gruppe dieser fehlerbehafteten Methoden dar. Diese werden häufig durchgeführt um Wiederbelüftungsraten von Flüssen zu ermitteln. In meiner Dissertation stelle ich dar, welche Fehler durch die fälschliche Annahme einer konstanten Tracergaseingabe über die Zeit gemacht werden, da dieses kontinuierliche Signal unter Feldbedingungen gewöhnlicherweise nicht gewährleistet werden kann. Ich zeige eine einfache Möglichkeit auf, den zeitlichen Trend der Gaszugabe im Auswertungsschritt zu berücksichtigen. Zudem weise ich nach, dass das Vernachlässigen von dispersivem Transport in der Auswertung zu einer Unterschätzung des Ratenkoeffizienten der Wiederbelüftung führt, die sich in der Berechnung von metabolischen Raten (aerobe Respiration und Fotosynthese) aus Konzentrationszeitreihen des gelösten Sauerstoffs fortpflanzen. Des weiteren betrachte ich die Validität konzeptioneller Modelle, die Transport im Fluss mit hyporheischem Austausch in Verbindung setzen. Diese Modelle stellen zumeist grobe Vereinfachungen der Realität dar. In welchem Maße diese Modelle dennoch zulässige Abschätzungen hyporheischer Austauschprozesse liefern untersuche ich in dieser Arbeit anhand eines Vergleichs von Markierstoffkonzentrationen, die im Fluss selbst bzw. in der hyporheischen Zone erfasst werden. Ich zeige auf, dass diese beiden verschiedenen Betrachtungspunkte inkongruente Anteile des Gesamtsystems darstellen, die kaum in Einklang gebracht werden können. Während die Aufzeichnung im Fluss Informationen liefert über flache hyporheische Prozesse, welche die im Fluss vorherrschenden Bedingungen beeinflussen, zeigen die Beobachtungen in der hyporheischen Zone die Zonierung der Reaktivität im Flussbett auf, und ermöglichen es somit, die Lage einer reaktiven benthischen Bioschicht zu identifizieren. Die Unzulänglichkeiten der Markierversuche in Flüssen sind besonders offensichtlich im Zusammenhang mit reaktiven Markierversuchen, die seit einigen Jahren vermehrt Einsatz finden um aerobe Respirationsraten und hyporheischen Austausch in Flüssen abzuschätzen. Für die Verwendung des reaktiven Markierstoffs Resazurin ist es notwendig, bestehende Modelle um substanzspezifische Eigenschaften des Markierstoffs zu erweitern. Dadurch nehmen die Modelle zunehmend an Komplexität zu, was die zuverlässige Abschätzung der Modellparameter erschwert. In meiner Arbeit stelle ich einen geschachtelten Algorithmus vor, der die globale Abschätzung von Transport- und Reaktionsparametern mit der lokalen Inferenz einer kontinuierlichen Funktion, welche die hyporheische Fließzeitverteilung des Markierstoffs beschreibt, auf effiziente Weise verbindet. Ziel dieser Dissertation ist es somit, bestehende Markierversuchs-Verfahren zu ver-bessern in Hinblick auf experimentelle Methoden, konzeptionelle Annahmen des Transport- und Reaktionsverhaltens, sowie der Abschätzung der Modellparameter

Insights from surface enhanced resonance Raman spectroscopy and QM/MM calculations

Understanding the coupling between heme reduction and proton translocation in cytochrome c oxidase (CcO) is still an open problem. The propionic acids of heme a3 have been proposed to act as a proton loading site (PLS) in the proton pumping pathway, yet this proposal could not be verified by experimental data so far. We have set up an experiment where the redox states of the two hemes in CcO can be controlled via external electrical potential. Surface enhanced resonance Raman (SERR) spectroscopy was applied to simultaneously monitor the redox state of the hemes and the protonation state of the heme propionates. Simulated spectra based on QM/MM calculations were used to assign the resonant enhanced CH2 twisting modes of the propionates to the protonation state of the individual heme a and heme a3 propionates respectively. The comparison between calculated and measured H2OD2O difference spectra allowed a sound band assignment. In the fully reduced enzyme at least three of the four heme propionates were found to be protonated whereas in the presence of a reduced heme a and an oxidized heme a3 only protonation of one heme a3 propionates was observed. Our data supports the postulated scenario where the heme a3 propionates are involved in the proton pathway

Multi-year time series of daily solute and isotope measurements from three Swiss pre-Alpine catchments

Time series analyses of solute concentrations in streamwater and precipitation are powerful tools for unraveling the interplay of hydrological and biogeochemical processes at the catchment scale. While such datasets are available for many sites around the world, they often lack the necessary temporal resolution or are limited in the number of solutes they encompass. Here we present a multi-year dataset encompassing daily records of major ions and a range of trace metals in both streamwater and precipitation in three catchments in the northern Swiss Pre-Alps. These time series capture the temporal variability observed in solute concentrations in response to storm events, snow melt, and dry summer conditions. This dataset additionally includes stable water isotope data as an extension of a publicly available isotope dataset collected concurrently at the same locations, and together these data can provide insights into a range of ecohydrological processes and enable a suite of analyses into hydrologic and biogeochemical catchment functioning