Dominant Service Provider Research Articles

Effects of historical land use and recovery pathways on composition, structure, ecological function, and ecosystem services in a Caribbean secondary forest

Regenerated secondary forests in the tropics are resilient ecosystems. Differences in land-use history and disturbance, abiotic and biotic site conditions, and successional pathways can influence secondary forest biodiversity, structure, ecological functions, and ecosystem services. However, studies assessing the supply of ecosystem services of secondary forests are limited. We examined trees in plots located across late successional stage secondary forest in the Luquillo Experimental Forest, Puerto Rico with three combinations of historical canopy cover (circa 1936) and post-agricultural recovery pathways: (1) > 50% canopy cover and passive regeneration (>50 P), (2) < 50% canopy cover and passive regeneration (<50 P), and (3) < 50% canopy cover and assisted + passive regeneration (<50 A+P). Using i-Tree Eco methodology, we investigated if differences in historical cover and passive vs assisted natural regeneration resulted in differences in composition and structure, hydrological functions, and estimated regulating ecosystem services, and compared the results between native and non-native species. The <50 P plots had greater species richness than the >50 P and <50 A+P plots, while the <50 A+P plots had significantly greater DBH, height, basal area, aboveground biomass, and estimated quantities of evaporation and transpiration, carbon storage, and removal of airborne contaminants compared to the other recovery pathways. Differences among plot groups can be attributed to historical management actions in concert with successional trajectories characteristic of novel secondary forests. Native species dominated throughout these secondary forests and cumulatively exhibited services that were 1.3 to 3.5 times greater than those of non-native species. However, non-native trees contributed disproportionally to basal area and aboveground biomass, and thus to some ecosystem services. Both natives and non-natives exhibited service provision that varied significantly with diameter size class and service type, and large trees were observed to be dominant service providers irrespective of species origin. Our study marks the first landscape-scale quantitative assessment of forest composition, structure and ecological functioning that is explicitly linked to exploring regulating ecosystem services within the montane secondary forest in Puerto Rico and expands representation of this research from the Caribbean. The findings underscore the role of historical land use and recovery pathways in driving services of tropical forests and show how ecosystem functions can vary in accordance with dynamic structural attributes of individual trees. This research can provide a useful point of comparison for analysis of biomass accumulation, ecosystem service provision, and evaluating service tradeoffs associated with forest structure in other recovering and old-growth tropical landscapes.

의료 정보 전송요구권 도입 가능성에 대한 연구

Two bills have recently been proposed at the Korean National Assembly to introduce data portability provisions to the Personal Information Protection Act. The two bills were largely modeled on Article 20 Right to Data Portability of European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”). We argue that the proposed “one-size-fits-all” provisions are ill-suited to health data portability for a few reasons. First and foremost, the bills stop short of mandating interoperability of data being transferred, in a manner similar to the GDPR. Unlike in some other sectors, however, interoperability is critical in achieving ease of data transmission in health care, because health IT is highly fragmented with numerous vendors, each with their own data format. Secondly, the two bills exempt inferred data and derived data from data portability, also in a manner similar to the GDPR. While such exemption may be striking a balance between the interest of individuals and the interest of data controllers, it renders data portability almost valueless in the context of health care, where important data are usually inferred data and derived data created by health providers. Lastly, an exemption from data portability for small businesses will be at odds with health care, in which primary care clinics are inevitably “small businesses”. These limitations found in the data portability bills are not surprising, in light of the core objective of their model, Article 20 of the GDPR, which was to promote competition by helping users retrieve their data held by dominant service providers. Hence, we argue that a better approach to health data portability is to amend the Medical Service Act that already includes basic measures to facilitate data exchange between health providers. Although the Medical Service Act too has to be amended to implement health data portability in the scale already being implemented in other countries, it will not be limited by the need for universal applicability across different industries that the general, Personal Information Protection Act faces. Instead, more nuanced and sophisticated health data portability can be designed in the Medical Service Act that provides more clarity to complex legal issues unique to health data, such as interoperability, data scope, health information exchange and secondary use, to name a few.

Unexpected functional complementarity from non-bee pollinators enhances cotton yield

While greater biodiversity is often assumed to predict greater ecological function, a number of recent meta-analyses have challenged this notion, arguing instead that a few dominant species can contribute the majority of ecological function provided in a given ecosystem. In the case of mobile ecosystem service providers, such as pollinating insects, the abundance and diversity of the most common taxa (e.g. bees) is often assumed to be the primary driver of service provision across ecosystems. This assumption persists despite the presence and possible contribution of less-dominant service-providing taxa. In this study, we investigate the taxonomic contribution of different pollinator orders to multiple axes of functional complementarity in US Gulf Coast cotton agroecosystems. We find that, contrary to conventional wisdom, non-bee pollinators, including butterflies and flies, contribute significantly to pollination function and expand the multidimensional functional space of visitation by more than 50%. Specifically, butterflies and flies provide critical functional complementarity by visiting spatially and temporally unique flowers that otherwise may have gone without pollination service. We estimate that butterflies and flies together may contribute as much as 120 million USD (of the 1.8 billion USD) per annum of cotton production in the state of Texas. We conclude that conservation efforts should target not only dominant service providers, but also those that complement their service, such as butterflies and flies, to maintain functional breadth and resulting crop profitability in the face of dynamic future agricultural scenarios.

Technological Preferences, Levels of Utilization and Attitude of Students Towards Mobile Learning Technologies in Chartered Universities, Kenya

The affordances of mobile technologies are being felt in many sectors of world’s economy including university education. By solving the limitations of fixed instructional technologies, mobile technologies have received ready acceptance in the education place. The purpose of the study was to investigate the student technological preferences, their levels of utilization as well as attitudes toward mobile technologies. The target population was 30,752 third year undergraduate students in Kenyan Universities. The participants (n = 375) were selected by systematic random sampling. They provided data using self-fill questionnaires. Results indicated that the smartphone was the most popular mobile device; Tecno was the most preferred handset brand; and Android was the most popular operating system. Safaricom was the dominant service provider amongst the student population. Regarding the levels of utilization of mobile technologies by students, it was concluded that though students use their mobile devices sufficiently, the use of the devices for accessing teaching and learning content was considerably low. On the attitude of students towards mobile technologies, it was observed that a sizeable number of students preferred to use the technologies over other existing instructional technologies. The findings of this study will be useful to instructional technologists, education policy makers, mobile handset manufacturers, mobile service providers and university managers as they partner to roll out digital learning infrastructure for Kenyan tertiary education.

On Advertising Games and Spillover in Service Systems

Motivated by the industry cases, we model the advertising competition between the dominant service provider and small service providers in one service market, where the dominant service provider has a major market share and the other small service providers share the remainder of market equally. Based on this setting, we discuss three advertising game models, that is, cooperative game, Boxed Pig game, and Prisoner’s game, derive the conditions for different advertising games, and characterize their equilibria. To be specific, it is found that the advertising spillover and the number of the small service providers directly determines the advertising game equilibria, while other market parameters, to some extent, can affect the results of the advertising game equilibria. According to our theoretical findings, some management insights and suggestions are given from both the academic and practical perspectives.

Australian Superannuation Outsourcing: Fees, Related Parties and Concentrated Markets

Utilising a unique dataset collected by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), this paper examines the outsourcing by superannuation fund trustees eight superannuation functions, including administration, asset allocation, and investment management. In each of these individual outsourcing markets, we analyse related-party service providers, the concentration of independent service providers, and the combined impact on outsourcing costs. We find that ‘relatedness’ per se does not imply higher outsourcing fees: Related-party service providers used by not-for-profit funds generally charge no more than independent service providers, whereas retail related-party service providers tend to charge higher fees than their independent counterparts. We also find a wide diversity in competitiveness in the market for each function: Where outsourcing is concentrated among a small number of service providers - even where a large number of providers offer the service - we find that the dominant service providers charge higher fees.

A Different Approach to Providing Care to Utah’s Nursing Home Patients in a High-Cost, Dynamic Environment

Keywords: home- and community-based services; deinstitutionalization; waiver; long-term care The State of Utah foresees a boom in the growth of its senior population over the next 40 years. This increase will potentially create more conflict between the financing of human service programs for seniors and other state priorities (e.g., public education, transportation, and corrections). A major concern in this area is the State's Medicaid program. Medicaid is the major payer of long-term care services for the senior population, and at the same time Medicaid is responsible for the financing of the health care needs for an increasing number of the lower income persons. Compared to Medicare, which pays for 19% of long-term care costs, Medicaid supports nearly half of the total national long-term care expenditures. These dollars constitute about one-third of Medicaid spending. Despite initiatives diverting individuals to community- based settings, nationally 63% of fiscal year 2005 Medicaid's long-term care spending went to nursing homes (Georgetown University, 2007). This continuing reliance on nursing home care for the delivery of long-term care services may be difficult to sustain for several reasons; (a) the increase in the age 65+ populations, (b) the expense of nursing home care, and (c) consumer's apparent preferences regarding where to receive long-term care. These all point toward a need to decrease the reliance on nursing homes as the dominant service provider of such services. Given these issues, states have been working to develop ways to provide more flexibility in their long-term care delivery systems. With the expected rapid acceleration in the growth of the age 65+ population and the consequent increasing utilization of high-cost, long-term care services, additional planned and tested options are needed. Without carefully planned, cost-effective options, the accelerated growth in the senior population may soon result in an inability to sustain coverage of other Medicaid populations, fund expansions for uninsured populations, or maintain levels of support in other areas of state responsibility. It is not clear that the current, ever-tightening federal regulatory approach to the Medicaid program facilitates the needed development of new, innovative program models. This article will address the intersection of the demographics of Utah's population with the historical approaches to Medicaid longterm care coverage. It will describe an alternative model developed in Utah for providing care to nursing home patients that responds to the cost pressures in long-term care and individual preferences in service delivery. It will also describe how Utah has recently been forced to undergo major modifications as a result of regulatory compliance issues. UTAH DEMOGRAPHICS The aging of the baby boomers in Utah is changing the state's population. In 2004, the Utah's growth rate of its senior population started to exceed that of the overall population, and is expected to continue to do so through 2050 (Ellis & Dodge, 2005). The projections for the increase in Utah's age 65 and older population are sobering. They indicate a growth of 4,167 people in 2006, increasing to an estimated 13,186 in 2020 (Utah Commission on Aging, 2006). As a proportion of Utah's total population, the age 65+ population will increase from 8.5% in 2000 to a projected 17.8% in 2050 (Ellis & Dodge, 2005). Additionally, the state is experiencing a rapid increase in the number of residents turning age 75 and 85. The 85+ population is considered to be the most fragile of the senior population. There will be 55% that require some form of long-term care (Melnyk, 2005). Utah's age 85+ population is predicted to grow from 28,340 in 2006 to 59,470 in 2030, increasing 110%, compared to a national projected growth of 80% (Utah Commission on Aging, 2006). While the senior population will increase rapidly in Utah, the under age 18 population will remain relatively constant. …