Broader Goals Research Articles

Impact of health technology assessment implementation with a special focus on middle-income countries

ObjectivesBuilding an efficient health technology assessment (HTA) system requires significant effort and political commitment, in addition to human and financial resources. Expectations of what HTA can offer to middle-income countries (MICs) are continuously rising, which drives health policymakers to raise the question of whether HTA could help secure the financial sustainability needed to implement universal health coverage. In this study, we explored the impact HTA adoption may have on the countries and its impact on health system objectives, as well as transferability of benefits and drawbacks observed in higher-income to middle-income countries. MethodsWe utilized secondary data from a systematic literature review and primary data by disseminating a survey among local stakeholders in three MICs across three continents to capture their perspective on the impact of HTA implementation from a local context. ResultsIt was evident from the results of both the literature review and survey that the positive impacts of HTA implementation outweigh the negative impacts. Most of the reviewed literature discussed the impact of HTA on the intermediate objectives of the health finance policy in relation to the broad health system goals. According to the survey respondents, the most evident benefit of HTA implementation is improving the transparency and accountability of healthcare decisions. ConclusionsOverall, HTA implementation can introduce a myriad of benefits to healthcare systems in MICs as well. Our findings show that while HTA implementation may have the potential to generate cost savings in specific areas, there is no guarantee that HTA can generate savings at the macro level. Public Interest SummaryHealth technologies (medicines, devices, and interventions) are rapidly increasing in complexity and cost. Health Technology Assessment (HTA) guides healthcare decision-makers in choosing the most suitable, effective, affordable, and acceptable health technology to invest limited healthcare resources. However, healthcare decision-makers in middle-income countries (MICS) are still uncertain about whether adopting HTA would help them achieve the financial sustainability needed to achieve universal health coverage. Thereforewe sought to gather evidence on how HTA has affected the health systems of countries that have already adopted it by reviewing published research reports. In addition, healthcare decision-makers from three MICs were questioned about their perception of how HTA implementation will affect their country's health system. Wefound that the positive effects of HTA implementation outweigh the negative ones; specifically, the transparency and accountability of decisions are improved. However, although HTA implementation may generate cost savings in specific areas, it may not significantly contribute to overall financial sustainability.

Recent Advances in Technologies, Methods, and Economic Analysis for Sustainable Development of Energy, Water, and Environment Systems

Sustainability has become a broad societal goal, aiming to ensure that human beings coexist safely and harmoniously with nature over a longer time. The influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global economy is coming to an end. The development and merits of sustainable energy supply, advanced technology, and economic features have received significant attention over the last few decades. However, significant gaps still exist with respect to how to design, construct, and implement hybrid and optimal energy systems with the lowest investment and cost. Since 2002, the Sustainable Development of Energy, Water, and Environment Systems (SDEWES) conferences have become a significant meeting venue for researchers to introduce, discuss, share, and disseminate novel concepts and ideas. This paper presents an overview of published articles in the Special Issues (SIs) dedicated by the series SDEWES conferences, especially those published in Energies recommended by the 16th SDEWES Conference, which was held on 10–15 October 2021 in Dubrovnik, Croatia. This SI in Energies focused on four main topics, including the application of renewable bioenergy, component enhancement in renewable systems, sustainable development for buildings and economic analysis and evaluation for sustainability. The collected papers provide insight into the topics related to recent advances in improving sustainable efficiency, including studies on waste-to-wealth techniques, utilization of hybrid bioenergy systems, heat exchangers and other components for performance enhancement, energy supply and demand analysis, low-temperature DHC systems, techno-economic assessment, and environmental evaluation.

Pathways to a net-zero-carbon water sector through energy-extracting wastewater technologies

AbstractThe energy-consuming and carbon-intensive wastewater treatment plants could become significant energy producers and recycled organic and metallic material generators, thereby contributing to broad sustainable development goals, the circular economy, and the water-energy-sanitation-food-carbon nexus. This review provides an overview of the waste(water)-based energy-extracting technologies, their engineering performance, techno-economic feasibility, and environmental benefits. Here, we propose four crucial strategies to achieve net-zero carbon along with energy sufficiency in the water sector, including (1) improvement in process energy efficiency; (2) maximizing on-site renewable capacities and biogas upgrading; (3) harvesting energy from treated effluent; (4) a new paradigm for decentralized water-energy supply units.

Two-Dimensional Transformation of a Conventional Manufacturer into a Smart Manufacturer: Architectonic Design, Maintenance Strategies and Applications

Today, Internet of Things (IoT) plays an important role in emerging industries. Due to that, it is considered as a major focus for research in academic and industrial fields in recent years. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is an assembly of industrial automation, control systems, and Internet of Things (IoT) systems. The broad goals of IIoT can increase work efficiency and productivity, improving asset management through product customization, intelligent monitoring of production applications, and preventive and predictive maintenance of industrial equipment. This article provides a comprehensive list of up-to-date researches carried to transform conventional manufacturers into smart manufacturers by focusing on the two-dimensional dominant key enabling technologies, IIoT and Artificial Intelligence (AI). An IIoT-based generic hieratical architecture is proposed for a smart manufacturer to handle different manufacturer tasks and communication protocols. In addition, current industrial maintenance goals and strategies with major application domains in the transformation to industry 4.0 are carried out.

Bringing Excitement to Empirical Business Ethics Research: Thoughts on the Future of Business Ethics

To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors-in-chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialog around the theme Bringing Excitement to Empirical Business Ethics Research (inspired by the title of the commentary by Babalola and van Gils). These editors, considering the diversity of empirical approaches in business ethics, envisage a future in which quantitative business ethics research is more bold and innovative, as well as reflexive about its techniques, and dialog between quantitative and qualitative research nourishes the enrichment of both. In their commentary, Babalola and van Gils argue that leadership research has stagnated with the use of too narrow a range of perspectives and methods and too many overlapping concepts. They propose that novel insights could be achieved by investigating the lived experience of leadership (through interviews, document analysis, archival data); by focusing on topics of concern to society; by employing different personal, philosophical, or cultural perspectives; and by turning the lens on the heroic leader (through “dark-side” and follower studies). Taking a provocative stance, Bal and Garcia-Lorenzo argue that we need radical voices in current times to enable a better understanding of the psychology underlying ethical transformations. Psychology can support business ethics by not shying away from grander ideas, going beyond the margins of “unethical behaviors harming the organization” and expanding the range of lenses used to studying behavior in context. In the arena of finance and business ethics, Guedhami, Liang, and Shailer emphasize novel data sets and innovative methods. Significantly, they stress that an understanding the intersection of finance and ethics is central to business ethics; financial equality and inclusion are persistent socio-economic and political concerns that are not always framed as ethics issues, yet relevant business policies and practices manifest ethical values. Finally, Charles Cho offers his opinion on the blurry line between the “ethical” versus “social” or “critical” aspects of accounting papers. The Journal of Business Ethics provides fertile ground for innovative, even radical, approaches to quantitative methods (see Zyphur and Pierides in J Bus Ethics 143(1):1–16, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3549-8, 2017), as part of a broad goal of ethically reflecting on empirical research.

Climate change and more disturbed land-use types will further the invasion of a non-native annual grass, Ventenata dubia

Identification of suitable habitat for invasive weeds and their projected infestation extent across different land use cover types under a changing climate is crucial for the broad management goals of prevention, detection, and rapid response. In this study, we adopted an ensemble approach of species distribution models to project potential habitat of the invasive annual grass, Ventenata dubia, within the Gallatin County and along its road corridors, in Montana, USA, under current and future climates. The model prediction of V. dubia habitat was excellent with an AUC value of > 0.90. The climate predictors with most influence on V. dubia occurrence were precipitation, potential evapo-transpiration, relative humidity, vapor pressure deficit, and solar radiation for growing season months. Under current climate, the model projected 243 and 1,371 km2 coverage of V. dubia along road corridors and the entire County, respectively. The projected coverage of V. dubia was greatest for road corridors (239% under RCP4.5 and 302% under RCP8.5) compared to that of Gallatin County (127% under RCP4.5 and 241% under RCP8.5). Among the land use cover types, the model projected greatest expansion of V. dubia across agriculture land with 425% and 484%, and grasslands with 278% and 442% under RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 respectively. Our modelling approach suggests that the changing climate will facilitate spread and establishment of non-native species in disturbed habitats. We conclude that V. dubia with a short history of invasion is expanding at an alarming rate and requires greater investment in detection and monitoring to prevent further expansion.

Moral framing in health promotion: lessons from an Indonesian case study.

In this article we illuminate the important, yet typically underreported, role played by moral framing in public health messaging. We present case studies from West Java, Indonesia to demonstrate how moral framing is used to motivate health volunteers and to promote behavior change in line with government health policies. We used qualitative research including participant observation, job shadowing, interviews and focus groups with health promotion workers and community members. Findings were analyzed using thematic and discourse analysis. We identified three moral frameworks typically used to encourage shifts in normative health practices in Indonesia: Islamic values, right to health, and evidence-based public health policy, represented as indicative of modernity. Health workers tailor these moral frameworks to audiences in their health promotion work. While the immediate goal is to meet health performance targets, the broader goal is to generate forms of health citizenship commensurate with Indonesia's political environment of democratic decentralization. COVID-19 presents an opportune moment for the public health community to reevaluate the power of moral framing in health messaging, and how it can be used both as a compelling means of establishing community norms toward the common good, as seen in our Indonesia case study, and also as a mechanism used by counterpublics to challenge these norms and appeal to alternative values and versions of reality.

Pedagogical offensives: soft power, higher education and foreign policy

ABSTRACT Nations have for years sought to attain crucial foreign policy goals through programs of higher education. This article, after delineating the psychological dynamics underlying the creation of soft power affect, looks at three conspicuous such programs. They are America’s Fulbright Program, Australia’s Colombo Plan and the Soviet Union’s Patrice Lumumba University. Each of these was designed to promote both broad and specific foreign policy goals in the post-World War II period. Analyzing these cases yields some essential insights into how nations attempt to raise their global influence through the medium of higher education.

Project-based learning through sensor characterization in a musical acoustics course.

Project-based learning engages students in practical activities related to course content and has been demonstrated to improve academic performance. Due to its reported benefits, this form of active learning was incorporated with an ongoing research project into an introductory, graduate-level Musical Acoustics course at the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University. Students applied concepts from the course to characterize a contact sensor with a polymer diaphragm for musical instrument recording. Assignments throughout the semester introduced students to completing a literature review, planning an experiment, collecting and analyzing data, and presenting results. While students were given broad goals to understand the performance of the contact sensor compared to traditional microphones, they were allowed independence in determining the specific methods used. The efficacy of the course framework and research project was assessed with student feedback provided through open-ended prompts and Likert-type survey questions. Overall, the students responded positively to the project-based learning and demonstrated mastery of the course learning objectives. The work provides a possible framework for instructors considering using project-based learning through research in their own course designs.

Evaluating progress on loss and damage: an assessment of the Executive Committee of the Warsaw International Mechanism under the UNFCCC

ABSTRACT The Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage Associated with Climate Change Impacts (WIM) was established in 2013, and its Executive Committee (ExCom) is developing a new five-year workplan. Seizing this opportune moment to assess institutional progress on the issue of loss and damage under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) we address two research questions: (1) Has the ExCom delivered on its workplans to date, and (2) how has the ExCom’s progress varied across thematic areas? Drawing on public documentary sources, we assess the effectiveness and timeliness of the delivery of activities across five thematic areas: slow onset events; non-economic losses; comprehensive risk management approaches; human mobility; and finance, action and support. We find that there has been progress across the thematic areas, but that it has varied in pace. Delays are associated with activities from the two-year workplan being moved into the first five-year workplan or being devolved to the more recently established expert groups. Our results also show that decisions from the Conference of the Parties (COP) or the COP serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA) have played a critical role in accelerating specific aspects of the ExCom’s work. Finally, we note that the ExCom is increasingly relying on its expert groups and their members to deliver many activities. This research advances our understanding of the nature and pace of progress on this issue, and raises new questions about the politics of global climate policy implementation. KEY POLICY INSIGHTS The WIM ExCom’s workplans are characterized by broad goals and are ambiguous about start dates and deadlines. To enhance accountability, future workplans would benefit from clearly defined objectives, outcomes, and timelines. The workplans do not seem to constitute strong commitments: Parties make use of COP/CMA decisions to strengthen the workplans by mandating specific activities or deadlines, adding new activities and prioritizing among existing ones. The politics of implementation merits greater attention: wider political dynamics around loss and damage shape the pace of the ExCom’s supposedly technical work. One example is the delayed establishment of the expert group on action and support.

Do personal values have an effect on self-esteem in middle childhood?

Research on children's values (i.e., broad motivational goals) largely focuses on whether their values have a similar theoretical pattern of organization to those of adults, whether they hold similar value priorities to adults or adolescents, and how their values relate to social behavior. However, little is known about how values relate to wellbeing in middle childhood. We examined relations between the values of children aged 6–12 and aspects of their self-esteem, including global self-worth and five domain-specific-competencies. We found global self-worth and physical appearance were positively related to self-transcendence, conservation, and openness-to-change values, and negatively related to self-enhancement values. Social competence was positively related to self-transcendence and openness-to-change, and negatively to self-enhancement values. The other domain-specific-competencies presented different patterns of relations. Behavioral conduct was positively related to self-transcendence and conservation values, but negatively related to self-enhancement values. Athletic competence was positively related to openness-to-change and self-transcendence, but negatively related to conservation values, whereas scholastic competence was only positively related to openness-to-change values. We found support for our hypotheses and were able to show values relate to aspects of self-esteem at an earlier age than previously thought.

Designing forest restoration projects to optimize the application of broadcast burning

Active forest restoration programs on western US national forests face multiple challenges to meet their broad ecological goals while designing projects that generate sufficient revenue to build and maintain private forest management capacity needed to expand the scale and scope of treatments. We explored ways to design projects where admixing of treatments along gradients of dry and moist mixed conifer forest types could maximize financial viability while including substantial area where broadcast burning could be applied in conjunction with other treatments. In general, we found that restoration treatments in dry forests that included density reduction thinning and broadcast burning resulted in a net projected cost ranging from $110 to $8000 per ha. By contrast, density reduction thinning in moist mixed conifer forests on more productive microsites generated significant commercial timber volume and projected revenue that ranged from $4000 to $20,000 per ha. We used spatial optimization methods to identify potential project areas that maximized revenue while meeting constraints to treat a minimum proportion of each project with broadcast burning. Multiple project area sizes were also explored to understand the effect of restoration scale on financial outcomes. We found that optimal projects in terms of generating revenue to subsidize density reduction and broadcast burning were 810 ha and contained >50% dry forest area. Larger projects and those with a higher percentage of dry forest area resulted in lower revenue, eliminating revenue when projects reached 2700 ha. Forest restoration programs can use these methods to plan and design restoration projects that are financially viable while addressing the broadcast burn backlog in dry forests that require relatively expensive fuel reduction treatments prior to re-introducing fire.

Developing synergy towards growth Africa: Multilingual education as a panacea

Africa is a potentially rich continent due to its considerably rich resources endowment. It is believed that if there is a synergy between these resources, that is if these resources are properly harnessed with a clear vision on the part of our leaders, there is the prospect of growth leading to the development of the continent. The basis of any meaningful development and the bedrock of a breakthrough whether in technology, industry, economy or communication in education. Therefore, language is also a good instrument of synergy toward growth. In African universities especially in Nigeria, dissemination of knowledge is done through bilingualism or multilingualism which is used to attain the broad goals of education. In a multilingual classroom, setting, students will commonly face difficulties in thinking in the largest language (English) because they are influenced by their native language and cultural patterns.

Resilient Soils for Resilient Farms: An Integrative Approach to Assess, Promote, and Value Soil Health for Small- and Medium-Size Farms

Healthy soils are the foundation of our food system and support broad environmental goals, including improved water quality and carbon sequestration. Increasingly, we appreciate that aspects of soil health such as fertility for plants, suppression of disease, and cycling of nutrients are linked to the functional diversity of soil microbial communities. The impact of functional capacity is influenced by farm management, which varies with farm size. Small to medium-size farms, with gross sales of less than $250,00 per year, make up 89% of farms in the United States, despite often being ignored in policy decisions. They are often more integrated into local food systems than larger farms, have greater investment in long-term sustainability due to their tendency to be passed from farmers to children, and are more reliant on soil health than larger farms. We describe a research framework to advance understanding of the soil microbiome and its role in soil health, environmental outcomes, and agricultural sustainability on small and medium farms. Our perspective elevates four research priorities to link the benefits of healthy soil microbiomes from the microscale to the macroscale. We hope this approach will lead to practical applications to enable success in the context of ongoing environmental and economic challenges that affect the agricultural landscape.

The Digital Twin in Medicine: A Key to the Future of Healthcare?

There is a growing need for precise diagnosis and personalized treatment of disease in recent years. Providing treatment tailored to each patient and maximizing efficacy and efficiency are broad goals of the healthcare system. As an engineering concept that connects the physical entity and digital space, the digital twin (DT) entered our lives at the beginning of Industry 4.0. It is evaluated as a revolution in many industrial fields and has shown the potential to be widely used in the field of medicine. This technology can offer innovative solutions for precise diagnosis and personalized treatment processes. Although there are difficulties in data collection, data fusion, and accurate simulation at this stage, we speculated that the DT may have an increasing use in the future and will become a new platform for personal health management and healthcare services. We introduced the DT technology and discussed the advantages and limitations of its applications in the medical field. This article aims to provide a perspective that combining Big Data, the Internet of Things (IoT), and artificial intelligence (AI) technology; the DT will help establish high-resolution models of patients to achieve precise diagnosis and personalized treatment.

Bringing science communication skills into the university classroom and back out again: What do palaeoscience educators think?

University-level pedagogy and public science communication both have the same broad goal: to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and understanding from a specialist or expert, to a non-specialist group. Recent research has emphasised the need for there to be a two-way transfer or dialogue of ideas between these fields, but collaboration thus far is rare, particularly at the tertiary education level. Performing science outreach is mostly a voluntary service for academics, and institutions provide little in the way of support, training or recognition. Here I explore the potential for a positive feedback loop between science communication and higher-education pedagogy in the palaeosciences. A synthesis of best practises in science outreach is drawn from the literature and related to pedagogical concepts and findings. The resulting congruences suggest enormous potential for ‘cross-pollination' of ideas between the fields. However, in-depth one-on-one interviews and focus groups with palaeoscience educators, as well as an online survey, indicate that this potential remains largely untapped in the palaeosciences community. While respondents could identify certain skills as being integral to success in science communication, they did not appear to realise that the same skills, when applied in the classroom, could contribute towards key challenges in higher education today, including the stimulation of student engagement and motivation, the accommodation of an increasingly diverse student body, the anticipation of common student misconceptions in science, and the improvement of pedagogical models of delivery. Another emergent theme was that being a good science communicator was “much simpler” than being a good teacher, conflicting with evidence-based pedagogical and outreach research. While many palaeoscientists did express strong commitments to science communication, they had previous experience of time constraints and conflicts with other academic responsibilities. Therefore, both palaeoscientists and their institutions would benefit from viewing science communication as a valuable and formally rewardable activity within the scholarship of sharing knowledge, which also contributes to other aspects of a successful academic career.

Reflections on Wolfart, Challenges to Religious Literacy, and Course Design

Abstract Despite its recent prominence as a rationale for the academic study of religion, Professor Wolfart shows both that “religious literacy” has been poorly defined and that little evidence has been adduced for its positive effects. Yet the institutional and social pressures that have led some to embrace religious literacy as a positive argument for the academic study of religion persist, and the essay offers no alternative conception of the broad goals towards which collegiate education about religion should be directed. It is worth considering, therefore, whether some of the flaws with religious literacy as an educational approach might be remedied. In particular, this response proposes that the yawning gap between the abstract goal and the fact that in the U.S. most undergraduates will take only a single course in the study poses a challenge of course design. Carefully designing courses for religious literacy might diminish the imprecision in the concept and provide more tangible evidence of what religiously literate students might be able to do.

Experiences of Nurses on Tutor-marker Feedback in their Postgraduate Open and Distance Learning Course at the University of Namibia

The development of education in Namibia is guided by four broad goals: access equity, quality and democracy. Open and distance learning (ODL) remains one of the most convenient modes of study, promoting access to higher education in Namibia. However, studies have pointed out that feedback plays a significant role in the improvement of distance education and students’ performance. Institutions of higher education need to constantly assess the experiences of students who choose to study through this mode in order to devise strategies that can be used to address the challenges. The experiences of postgraduate nursing students regarding tutor-marker feedback in Namibia have not been extensively researched. The purpose of this study was to explore and describe the experiences of nurses regarding tutor-marker feedback in their postgraduate ODL course at the University of Namibia. A qualitative, explorative and contextual study was conducted. The sample comprised postgraduate nursing diploma students specialising in nursing education and health service management in the 2020 academic year, studying through ODL. Purposive sampling was utilised. Data were collected from 17 participants using semi-structured interviews. The data were analysed using qualitative thematic analysis and strategies to ensure trustworthiness. Ethical considerations related to the study were implemented. The analysed data revealed three themes, namely: students’ experience of tutor-marker feedback, challenges of marking feedback, and recommendations for improvement. Therefore, the findings of this study call for actions and plans from ODL management teams to address the challenges identified in this study. For effective learning to take place in ODL, timely and helpful feedback from tutors should be provided.

Scientific evidence on the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015, the United Nations agreed on 17 Sustainable Development Goals as the central normative framework for sustainable development worldwide. The effectiveness of governing by such broad global goals, however, remains uncertain, and we lack comprehensive meta-studies that assess the political impact of the goals across countries and globally. We present here condensed evidence from an analysis of over 3,000 scientific studies on the Sustainable Development Goals published between 2016 and April 2021. Our findings suggests that the goals have had some political impact on institutions and policies, from local to global governance. This impact has been largely discursive, affecting the way actors understand and communicate about sustainable development. More profound normative and institutional impact, from legislative action to changing resource allocation, remains rare. We conclude that the scientific evidence suggests only limited transformative political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals thus far.

Reading the Love Commandments and Learning the Imitation of Christ in Aquinas

Aquinas’s exposition of the twofold commandment of charity embeds a pedagogy for learning the imitation of Christ. This pedagogy may be gathered from his commentaries on the Gospels of Matthew and John, with refinements from the Summa theologiae. Christ commands love of God and neighbour and calls us to friendship that requires imitation of him. Aquinas depicts this imitation of Christ as a gratuitous, effective, and right love of neighbour which, I suggest, is grounded in, and develops his articulation of, love of neighbour as an expansion of love of self that is holy, just, and true. In this way, we learn to imitate Christ by following his commandment of charity, and we learn to follow the commandment of charity by imitating Christ. This interpenetrating pedagogy exemplifies and belongs essentially to Aquinas’s broader goal of promoting conformity to Christ through his practice of sacra doctrina or holy teaching.