Suchergebnisse

The papers collected in this issue were presented at the Task Force Meeting on Public Facility Location, held at IIASA in June 1980. The meeting was an important occasion for scientists with different backgrounds and nationalities to compare and discuss differences and similarities among their approaches to location problems. Unification and reconciliation of existing theories and methods was one of the leading themes of the meeting, and the papers collected here are part of the raw material to be used as a starting point towards this aim. The papers themselves provide a wide spectrum of approaches to both technical and substantive problems, for example, the way space is treated (continuously in Beckmann, in Mayhew, and in Thisse et al, discretely in all the others), the way customers are assigned to facilities (by behavioral models in Ermoliev and Leonardi, in Sheppard, and in Wilson, by normative rules in many others), the way the objective function is defined (ranging from total cost, to total profit, total expected utility for customers, accessibility, minimax distance, maximum covering, to a multi-objective treatment of all of them as in Revelle et al. There is indeed room for discussion, in order to find both similarities and weaknesses in different approaches. A general weakness of the current state of the art of location modeling may also be recognized: its general lack of realism relative to the political and institutional issues implied by locational decisions. This criticism, developed by Lea, might be used both as a concluding remark and as a proposal for new challenging research themes to scholars working in the field of location theory.

The papers collected in this issue were presented at the Task Force Meeting on Public Facility Location, held at IIASA in June 1980. The meeting was an important occasion for scientists with different backgrounds and nationalities to compare and discuss differences and similarities among their approaches to location problems. Unification and reconciliation of existing theories and methods was one of the leading themes of the meeting, and the papers collected here are part of the raw material to be used as a starting point towards this aim. The papers themselves provide a wide spectrum of approaches to both technical and substantive problems, for example, the way space is treated (continuously in Beckmann, in Mayhew, and in Thisse et al, discretely in all the others), the way customers are assigned to facilities (by behavioral models in Ermoliev and Leonardi, in Sheppard, and in Wilson, by normative rules in many others), the way the objective function is defined (ranging from total cost, to total profit, total expected utility for customers, accessibility, minimax distance, maximum covering, to a multi-objective treatment of all of them as in Revelle et al. There is indeed room for discussion, in order to find both similarities and weaknesses in different approaches. A general weakness of the current state of the art of location modeling may also be recognized: its general lack of realism relative to the political and institutional issues implied by locational decisions. This criticism, developed by Lea, might be used both as a concluding remark and as a proposal for new challenging research themes to scholars working in the field of location theory.

This paper reports results from the monitoring part of a recent UK Department of Health funded project investigating carbon monoxide (CO) levels in homes during the winter of 2002/2003. In all, 56 homes were monitored for carbon monoxide in 3 cities across the UK. The homes were selected as part of the UK government Warm Front evaluation programme (aimed at reducing fuel poverty) and might be expected to have a higher incidence of problem gas appliances emitting higher than average amounts of CO than the general population. However the ventilation rate of these homes might also be expected to be higher. Measurements of CO were taken at 15-minute intervals in a representative location in the main living area of each home. Thirteen or 23% of the homes were found to exceed the WHO guideline values for ambient CO concentrations. In each home that exceeded the guidelines an assessment of source concentration of each appliance was made by an expert gas engineer, it was found that old, poor quality gas appliances caused a large proportion of exceedances seen.

In the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become clear that primary healthcare systems play a critical role in clinical care, such as patient screening, triage, physical and psychological support, and also in promoting good community advice and awareness in coordination with secondary health care and preventive care. Because of the role of social and environmental factors in COVID-19 transmission and burden of disease, it is essential to ensure that there is adequate coordination of population-based health services and public health interventions. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the primary and community health care (P&CHC) system's weaknesses worldwide. In many instances P&CHC played only a minor role, the emphasis being on hospital and intensive care beds. Political failures compounded this in supporting local community resilience. Placing community building, social cohesion, and resilience at the forefront of dealing with the COVID-19 crisis can help align solutions that provide a vision of "planetary health". This can be achieved by involving local well-being and participation in the face of any pervasive health and environmental crisis, including other epidemics and large-scale ecological crises. This paper proposes that P&CHC should take on two critical roles: first, to support local problemsolving efforts and to serve as a partner in innovative approaches to safeguarding community wellbeing; and second, to understand the local environment and health risks in the context of the global health perspective. We see this as an opportunity of immediate value and broad consequence beyond the control of the COVID-19 pandemic.