Official Registration System Research Articles

Hybrid land tenure administration in Dunoon, South Africa

Hybrid land tenure administration occurs in a number of South Africa’s state-subsidised housing projects and in the informal settlements from which the housing beneficiaries tend to be drawn. Ownership is the tenure form in most of these housing projects. Under ownership the law only recognises registered land transactions. Non-government tenure administration in Dunoon was organised by street and area committees that are part of the local South African National Civics Association (SANCO) branch, a community based organisation (CBO). SANCO is aligned with the ANC ruling party, and so Dunoon is a case of a CBO driving an alternative land tenure administration system using a form of private conveyancing operating in parallel and opposition to the official registration system for a period after first registration. Thus there was a party structure supporting a system running in opposition to the official system. The situation then evolved where the CBO encouraged registration as the risks to the buyer of off-register transactions became apparent when the official registration system emerged as the dominant land transaction option. Historical analysis and qualitative interviews inform the study. If hybrid governance is inescapable and if ownership titles meet beneficiaries’ needs and wants, then, ideally, state land administration organisations should engage households and community based organisations continually in title maintenance activities. To increase the uptake of registering land, changes to the rigid procedures required for registration should be explored to examine how certain arrangements and land tenure practices as they actually exist can be accommodated.

Nosocomial Infections Incidence Rates, Bulgaria, 1999-2011

The study presents an analysis in two parts of the officially registered NI in the country by the computerized information system (CIS-NI) in the course of a 13-year period (1999-2011). The system employs two types of indicesincidence rate (morbidity, recalculatred in the study per 1000 patients discharged) and percentage distribution (frequency distribution, relative frequency distribution) by infection sites and microbial agents. This part discusses the overall NI incidence rates by hospital and wards categories, accentuating upon pediatric and intensive care wards-anesthesiology and resuscitation, intensive therapy. The average incidence rate is 10% at the following distribution by infection sites: VAP-5%, surgical site infections (SSI) and pulmonary infections (the latter including bronchitis, bronchiolitis, pneumonia, non-associated with procedure of endotracheal intubation) of 16-18% each; urinary tract infections (UTI) 13-15%; sepsis 4-5%, enteric, skin infections, of the sense organs, intraabdominal and cardiovascular system infections-approximately 2% of each group, endometritis and other gynecologic infections-1%, mastitis in young mothers-0.1%. Microbiologically diagnosed are 50-60% ?f the infections as a total and in 40-50% unconfirmed and unexamined microbiologically. E. coli and S. aureus are identified in about one third of the total number of infections, the rest isolates pertain to opportunistic bacterial species, known for their multiresistence: Klebsiella spp, Pseudomonas spp, Acinetobacter spp etc. The incidence rate of infections ranges within low limits, e.g, LRTIs (pulmonary infections)-pediatric wards-upto 3%; VAP/ pulmonary infections-resuscitation (AR UTIs-resuscitation, urology-13%; SSIs-burn units-38%, septic surgery-23%, vascular surgery-11%; sepsis-burn units-22%, resuscitation-8%, cardiovascular surgery-6%, ICUs-5%. The official registration system provides reliable information on a national level for the purpose of NI surveillance and control. The system interpretes the original data of the wards in basic indices as incidence and microbial isolates‘ distribution. This official database reflects the efforts in the sphere of NI prevention and control. Possible additional links to the system would contribute to direct comparisons of indices regarding the care for patients undergoing risk procedures.

Structural barriers to receiving health care services for female sex workers in Russia.

Female sex workers in Russia have been particularly vulnerable to recent social, political, and economic changes. In this article, we describe the facilitators and barriers for sex workers receiving health care services in St. Petersburg, Russia. We conducted observations at medical institutions and nongovernmental organizations and in-depth interviews with 29 female sex workers. We identified the following barriers: poverty, not having documents, lack of anonymity in testing, and the official registration system. We identified the following facilitators: intervention by family members, social connections within the health care system, and referral services from a nongovernmental organization. Our findings indicate a need for reassessing policies and designing programs that better facilitate the use of health care services for the most vulnerable populations. This should include the expansion of support systems and outreach services designed to help female sex workers navigate the health care system.

Antwerp Drugs and Alcohol Monitor: A Belgian local drug scene in the picture

Qualitative data on local drug scenes in Belgium are scarce. As information on them remains limited to the official registration systems, the needs of a number of drug users are not taken into account. From a social scientific and policy point of view, there is a need for information on the experiences and the patterns of drug use. In this study, we have developed and tested a drugs and alcohol monitor for the city of Antwerp. The Antwerp Drugs and Alcohol Monitor (ADAM) combines three qualitative methods: (i) in-depth interviews with 39 key informants; (ii) ethnographic fieldwork by four community fieldworkers; and (iii) ethnographic fieldwork by the researcher. This methodology is based on an analysis of national and international literature on drug-monitoring systems. This paper presents an overview of the results of a pilot study in the city of Antwerp. The ADAM produces a detailed picture of the local drug issues (nature and extent of use, drug markets, quality of life, etc.) and thus offers the understanding that is required for a well-founded local drug policy. Provided that repeated measurements are made, a local drug monitor can inform policymakers, treatment experts, etc. on developments and phenomena concerning drug use. However, the ADAM is a qualitative drug-monitoring system, and it must be emphasised that a combined monitor is more efficient. Indeed, a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods enhances the reliability of the results.

Reconciling Cadastral Records in a Dual Land Registration System in Ghana

Soon after gaining independence, the Ghana government adopted a deed registration system for recording land ownership. A legislative instrument supported this decision. The deficiencies of the deed registration system resulted in innumerable cases of land ownership disputes. Juxtaposed with the official registration system is the customary land tenure system, which authorized custodians of the stool lands to allocate parcels through the customary process. Because the customary system did not mandate documentary evidence of the transaction, the allocation process created situations where the same parcel of land was allocated to multiple owners. The weaknesses in the two systems engendered lucrative, illegal and unrecorded land market activities. With increasing population and associated competing interests in available land, it became imperative for the government to review the existing legislation for recording and maintaining records of land parcel ownership. A new legislation was promulgated, based on a land title registration system. While efforts are being made to improve the customary land allocation process, the new legislation seeks to remove the deficiencies in the deed registration system. The introduction of the title registration system has resulted in a duality of the record keeping process. Efforts are currently under way to remove the inconsistencies in the deed records and to reconcile them with those that have been obtained through the title registration system. This paper reviews the cadastral surveying activities and the processes for recording land titles in Ghana in view of existing laws. Experiences in developing procedures for reconciling the records from the two systems are also discussed. Keywords: Cadastral survey, land records, land tenure, registration, survey regulation Journal of Science and Technology Vol. 28 (1) 2008 pp. 128-135

オープン・エンロールメントの実態

Many of the studies of school choice in America published in Japanese have been based on documents written by American researchers. This situation imposes a critical limitation on the examination of the implications inherent in the system of school choice for the educational change that Japan is facing. Bearing in mind the differences between Japanese and American systems regarding school choice, this paper sets out to discover the facts and mechanisms of the open enrollment program of a city district in California.Because there is no official registration system like the Japanese Jyumin-toroku or catchment areas rigidly delineated by city councils(chonai), American children are not assumed to be the prospective students of individual schools. For this reason parents are expected to enroll their children as students in the public school system just before they reach school age. Ordinarily, they are allotted places in their local schools according to where they live. Open enrollment is a system whereby parents are able to request enrollment at any school in the district regardless of where they live, although the availability of spaces, sibling preferences, and the ethnic balance of the school must all be taken into account.Through the open enrollment program that was introduced in the early 1990s, some schools are losing and others are gaining many students. In order to reveal the internal mechanisms of this program this paper focuses on two middle schools:the most popular and the least popular.These two middle schools are very different from each other in such aspects as academic achievement and personal safety. The least popular school is in a suburban area, but it has been notorious for its lack of safety and low level of academic achievement. By contrast, the most popular school is an inner-city middle school situated on the periphery of the downtown and close to a residential area. The neighborhood environment of the most popular school is far better than that of the least popular one. In addition, in the 1980s the most popular school established an academic program titled Gifted and Talented Education(GATE). The school channels students with special academic interests into this GATE program so as to adjust educational settings to student diversity.Through the open enrollment program, the most popular school has become a favorite among parents who live within the catchment areas of the least and the second least popular schools. The parents living within the catchment area of the least popular school refuse to send their children to that school, citing its unsafe environment as an unattractive feature, and seek places for them instead in the most popular school, to which they are mainly attracted by the GATE program.Interestingly, no competition among parents for specific middle schools is attributable to open enrollment. This is partly because the student numbers of the most popular school are falling. For that reason the school is able to offer a great number of places to open enrollment and attract academically gifted students from throughout the district. Moreover, many parents seem to be unaware of the existence of the program. This may also contribute to the lack of competition. Unless parents try to obtain information about open enrollment by themselves, they may never find out about the existence of the program. Access to successful open enrollment is limited to those who are actively seeking information about education and who can provide transportation for their children to and from school.By using the open enrollment program, parents are easily able to avoid local schools in unsafe areas and send their children to the most popular school that has the GATE program. The open enrollment program offers a district-wide multiple tracking system rather than a single-track system of schooling, mainly for the parents and the children seeking the elite track at the middle school level.

Japan: Criminal Procedure on Computer‐Related Crime

By March 1989 approximately 400,000 general‐purpose computers were in use: these could be found in various fields including financial systems, traffic control, medicine, factories, official registration systems and so forth. It could be said that more or less all important activities depended on computers. Reflecting the wide‐ranging computerisation of business quite a lot of computer‐related crime had appeared that could not be easily dealt with under the provisions of the Japanese penal code as then in force. So a bill to amend the penal code was passed into law in the course of the 108th session of the Diet on 27th May, 1987. The new Act contains provisions amending the penal code so as better to cover computer‐related crime. These provisions came into force on 22nd June, 1987. As a consequence it has become necessary to study various procedural issues that pertain to computer‐related crime.

Peroperative and immediate postoperative adverse events in patients undergoing elective general and orthopaedic surgery: The Gothenburg study of perioperative risk (PROPER). Part II

All anaesthetic and surgical procedures impose a certain risk of complications. However, reliable estimates of this risk from prospective studies are rare. This study is a prospective clinical epidemiological study of 1361 consecutive patients subjected to elective general and orthopaedic surgery. These patients were followed from an extensive preoperative assessment to three months after the operation. In this report the peroperative and early postoperative period in the postoperative care unit or intensive care unit is described. General anaesthesia was given to 59% and regional/local anaesthesia to 41%. Adverse peroperative events occurred in 19%. The most common were circulatory events (11%), respiratory (4%), and allergic events (1%). Most events were of minor severity. However, with the official registration system, only 1 out of 8 events was detected. In the postoperative unit one or more adverse event was noted in 47% of the cases. These were dominated by circulatory (18.4%) and respiratory events (5.0%). CNS depression was noted in 6.8% of the cases. Most per- and postoperative event variables were highly correlated to the degree of surgical stress. In conclusion, a new concept for preoperative assessment and the registration of events during and after surgery was used. In this way, a large number of events of importance, not least for quality assurance, were found that would be missed with the official coding system. In a previous report we could show that even minor events affected the cost of care substantially.

The Principles and Preliminary Results of the Turkish Demographic Survey

A FUNDAMENTAL problem facing nearly all responsible public health officials in developing nations is the general lack of routine, reliable, and current estimates of natality and mortality. A glance through any one of the United Nations Yearbooks dramatically demonstrates this fact. The primary reason for this absence of basic data is that the official vital registration systems in these countries are marginal. This marginal state is caused by deep-seated problems inherent in a less developed country. Before an official registration system can function effectively, many built-in cultural and technological advances must be in operation-advances such as attendance at birth by qualified medical workers, a large proportion of births in medical facilities, and a high level of literacy among the populations. Prerequisites for these achievements include adequate per capita income, numerous trained medical personnel and wellequipped facilities, good roads, and communication systems. One could almost define development in terms of the effectiveness of an official vital registration system. Most developing countries cannot afford to wait for a completely functioning official system. They need reliable estimates of population growth and fertility now. This paper describes how Turkey is attempting to obtain this vitally needed information until such time as its official registration system becomes effective.

Migration and Industry in a City

Human mobility is, by some authers, said to be one of the main couses of pesonal and social disorganization, or of social and cultural changes, at least indices of their causes as Burgess once said. But migration, a most important factor of such mobility, has been studied chiefly on place of birth data or net migrators, not on all cases of migration in a given cmmunity, which took place actually in a certain time, that is to say, not as a kind of spatial mobility. This is perhaps owing to the fact that we have no such rigid official registration system of migration as those of birth and death. However the data that can de obtained from our rationing system of stable food that has been taking effect in and after the second War in Japan, are, if used with proper discretion, to offer us adequate information on some attributes of all migrators. The data of this research were, therefore, taken from the official registers of this system kept in a city called “Yokkaichi” situated on the west coast of “Ise Bay”, about 40 k.m. south-west of Nagoya. It is a port city of the middle-class type, chiefly industrial, with a population of about 130, 000. They were limited to all of those who migrated in or out in a year, 1951. The number of migrators studied is about three million. The data were arranged according to the two districts, the central older district and the outer new one, and further divided into 15 areas, 7 of which were in the former district and the other 8 of which were in the latter. And they were analyzed on the viewpoints of migration rate, sex ratio and age distribution of migrators, and distance traversed by them. Thus the migration patterns of two districts and 15 areas were compared. As the result we have had the following tentative conclusions so far. Of course we must acknowledge some serious exceptions. (1) The more urban, namely, the more indusrial or/and commercial an area is, the higher the migration rate of that area is. Therefore, mobility is thought to be closely correlated with urban characteristics. (2) Two distinct polar types can be discerned among the migration patterns of districts and areas. The one is that migration selectivity on age and sex is more severe or stronger and the number of migrators who went longer distance is far larger than that of those who did shorter distance. The other is that selectivity on both is rather weak and shorter-distance migrators are more numerious than those who migrated longer distance. (3) The former type is, generally speaking, found in the district and the areas which are industrial rather than commercial or more, industrial, especially in the areas in which a certain kind of industry prevails predominantly. The latter one is found in the district and the areas which are distinctly commercial or more commercial. So it can be assumed that industry in general is rather, or perhaps some kinds of industry are largely, correlated with migration selectivity.