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Background Most countries have endorsed WHO non-communicable disease (NCD) best buy policies, but we know very little about global implementation patterns and about the geopolitical factors affecting implementation. We aimed to assess global implementation based on analysis of multiple geopolitical datasets. Methods We used the 2015 and 2017 WHO NCD progress monitor reports to calculate aggregate implementation scores for 151 countries, based on their implementation of 18 WHO-recommended NCD policies. We ranked all countries and used descriptive statistics to analyse global trends. We used linear regression to assess the associations between policy implementation and World Bank geographic region, risk of premature NCD mortality, percentage of all deaths caused by NCDs, World Bank income group, human capital index, democracy index, and tax burden. Findings In 2017, the mean NCD policy implementation score was 49·3% (SD 18·4%). Costa Rica and Iran had the joint-highest implementation scores (86·1% of all WHO-recommended policies). Scores were lowest in Haiti and South Sudan (5·5%). Between 2015 and 2017, aggregate implementation scores rose in 109 countries and regressed in 32 countries. Mean implementation rose for all of the 18 policies except for those targeting alcohol and physical activity. The most commonly implemented policies were clinical guidelines, graphic warnings on tobacco packaging, and NCD risk factor surveys. Our multiple linear regression model explained 61·1% of the variance in 2017 aggregate scores (p<0·0001), but we found evidence of a high degree of collinearity between the explanatory variables. Interpretation Implementation of WHO-recommended NCD policies is increasing over time. On average, countries implemented just under half of the NCD policies recommended by WHO in 2017. Nutrition-related policies saw gains, while those related to alcohol and physical activity were the most likely to have been dropped. Aggregate implementation scores tended to be highest in high-income countries ...

© 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Coastal environments are increasingly under threat from multiple stressors and pressure from human activities across the land-sea interface. Managing these pressures from people requires, more than ever, understanding what is at stake in terms of the benefits and values associated with coastal waters. This article presents the results of a choice experiment which was designed to elicit society's willingness to pay in the context of economic and environmental trade-offs people to improve coastal water quality. The study site is a coastal Australian city, Adelaide, South Australia. The city discharges a large proportion of its stormwater and treated wastewater to the coastal waters of Gulf St Vincent. Willingness to pay for a package of improvements to urban water management is considerable. A mix of projects that restores 25 days per year of water clarity, seagrass area from 60% to 70% of the original area and five reef areas is worth $AUS67.1. M to households in the Adelaide metropolitan area. The results can inform public policy discussions including the cost-benefit analysis of different water management strategies including investments in urban infrastructure.

Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology has increased with the use of various civilian and military applications. In the present study, we hypothesized that low-dose UWB electromagnetic radiation (UWBR) could elicit a mitogenic effect in AML-12 mouse hepatocytes, in vitro. To test this hypothesis, we exposed AML-12 mouse hepatocytes, to UWBR in a specially constructed gigahertz transverse electromagnetic mode (GTEM) cell. Cells were exposed to UWBR for 2 h at a temperature of 23 degrees C, a pulse width of 10 ns, a repetition rate of 1 kHz, and field strength of 5-20 kV/m. UWB pulses were triggered by an external pulse generator for UWBR exposure but were not triggered for the sham exposure. We performed an MTT Assay to assess cell viability for UWBR-treated and sham-exposed hepatocytes. Data from viability studies indicated a time-related increase in hepatocytes at time intervals from 8-24 h post exposure. UWBR exerted a statistically significant (p < 0.05) dose-dependent response in cell viability in both serum-treated and serum free medium (SFM) -treated hepatocytes. Western blot analysis of hepatocyte lysates demonstrated that cyclin A protein was induced in hepatocytes, suggesting that increased MTT activity after UWBR exposure was due to cell proliferation. This study indicates that UWBR has a mitogenic effect on AML-12 mouse hepatocytes and implicates a possible role for UWBR in hepatocarcinoma.

"Sonderdruck aus der Zeitschrift für Politik, Ix. Band, 1916, Heft 3/4." ; Includes bibliographical references. ; Mode of access: Internet.

Information systems are facing conflicting requirements. On the one hand, systems need to be adaptive and self-managing to deal with rapidly changing circumstances. On the other hand, legislation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, is putting increasing demands on monitoring activities and processes. As processes and systems become more flexible, both the need for, and the complexity of monitoring increases. Our earlier work on process mining has primarily focused on process discovery, i.e., automatically constructing models describing knowledge extracted from event logs. In this paper, we focus on a different problem complementing process discovery. Given an event log and some property, we want to verify whether the property holds. For this purpose we have developed a new language based on Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) and we combine this with a standard XML format to store event logs. Given an event log and an LTL property, our LTL Checker verifies whether the observed behavior matches the (un)expected/(un)desirable behavior.

Campaigns to circumcise millions of boys and men to reduce HIV transmission are being conducted throughout eastern and southern Africa, recommended by the World Health Organization and implemented by the United States government and Western NGOs. In the United States, proposals to mass-circumcise African and African American men are longstanding, and have historically relied on racist beliefs and stereotypes. The present campaigns were started in haste, without adequate contextual research, and the manner in which they have been carried out implies troubling assumptions about culture, health, and sexuality in Africa, as well as a failure to properly consider the economic determinants of HIV prevalence. This critical appraisal examines the history and politics of these circumcision campaigns while highlighting the relevance of race and colonialism. It argues that the "circumcision solution" to African HIV epidemics has more to do with cultural imperialism than with sound health policy, and concludes that African communities need a means of robust representation within the regime.

This study was undertaken to assess farmers' preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) for various climate-smart interventions in the Indo-Gangetic Plain. The research outputs will be helpful in integrating farmers' choices with government programs in the selected regions. The Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP) was selected because it is highly vulnerable to climate change, which may adversely affect the sustainability of the rice-wheat production system and the food security of the region. Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) can mitigate the negative impacts of climate change and improve the efficiency of the rice-wheat-based production system. CSA requires a complete package of practices to achieve the desired objectives, but adoption is largely dependent on farmers' preferences and their capacity and WTP. To assess farmers' choices and their WTP for the potential climate-smart technologies and other interventions, we used scoring and bidding protocols implemented through focus group meetings in two distinct regions of Eastern and Western IGP. We find that laser land leveling (LLL), crop insurance, and weather advisory services were the preferred interventions in Eastern IGP. Farmers preferred LLL, direct seeding, zero tillage, irrigation scheduling, and crop insurance in Western IGP. Through the bidding approach, farmers implicitly express their WTP for new technologies that could transform current agricultural practices into relatively low-carbon and more productive farming methods. But actual large-scale adoption of the preferred climate-smart technologies and other interventions would require access to funding as well as capacity building among technology promoters and users.

Compliance checking is gaining importance as today's organizations need to show that operational processes are executed in a controlled manner while satisfying prede¿ned (legal) requirements. Deviations may be costly and expose the organization to severe risks. Compliance checking is of growing importance for the business process management and auditing communities. This paper presents an approach for checking compliance of observed process executions recorded in an event log to control-¿ow and temporal compliance requirements. We show a collection of 54 control ¿ow and 15 temporal compliance rules, distributed respectively over 10 and 7 categories. In addition we present how temporal compliance requirements discussed in literature can be uni¿ed and formalized using a generic temporal compliance rule. To check compliance with respect to a compliance rule, the event log describing the observed behavior is aligned with the corresponding rule. The alignment then shows which events occurred out of speci¿ed order and which events deviated by which amount of time from the prescribed behavior. The approach is ¿exible (easy to express new rules), and allowing for multi-perspective diagnostic information in case of compliance violations. The technique and corresponding tool support have been experimentally validated using a case study. Keywords: compliance checking, process mining, conformance checking, data-aware conformance checking, Petri-nets

Much of the western United States is managed by state and federal agencies for multiple uses, including recreation, grazing, extraction, and defense. Biological inventories are integral to proper management and conservation of biodiversity on these lands. We surveyed for amphibians and reptiles occurring on Naval Air Station Fallon (NAS Fallon), Nevada, USA, using a variety of methods. We documented the presence of a majority of the amphibian and reptile species native to this region of the Great Basin. We found 5 species on NAS Fallon that are listed as Species of Conservation Priority by the Nevada Department of Wildlife: the Great Basin Spadefoot (Spea intermontana), Western Toad (Anaxyrus boreas boreas), Northern Desert Horned Lizard (Phrynosoma platyrhinos platyrhinos), Long-nosed Leopard Lizard (Gambelia wizlizenii), and Great Basin Collared Lizard (Crotaphytus bicinctores). However, we found no evidence of any narrowly distributed species of conservation concern, such as the Northern Leopard Frog (Lithobates pipiens) or Northern Rubber Boa (Charina bottae), that could have occurred on installation lands based on historical or recent observations in nearby areas. Our results indicate that this property, while primarily used for military training, can support a diverse, representative herpetofaunal community. Therefore, NAS Fallon should be considered a valuable part of the network of state and federally managed lands necessary for regional conservation planning in the face of future change. Our study also provides a baseline against which future inventories of this federally managed land can be compared.