Private Capacity Research Articles

A Retrospective and Commentary on FDA’s Bar Code Rule

Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published a final regulation in 2004 that requires pharmaceutical manufacturers to place linear bar codes on certain human drug and biological products. The intent was that bar codes would be part of a system where healthcare professionals would use bar code scanning equipment and software to electronically verify against a patient’s medication regimen that the correct medication is being given to the patient before it is administered, which could ultimately reduce medication errors. In the 2004 prospective regulatory impact analysis, FDA anticipated that the rule would stimulate widespread adoption of bar code medication administration technology among hospitals and other facilities, thereby generating public health benefits in the form of averted medication errors. FDA estimated that annualized net benefits would be $5.3 billion. In this retrospective analysis, we reassess the costs and benefits of the bar code rule and our original model and assumptions. Employing the most recent data available on actual adoption rates of bar code medication administration technology since 2004 and other key determinants of the costs and benefits, we examine the impacts of the bar code rule since its implementation and identify approaches to improve the accuracy of future analyses. In this retrospective study, we use alternative models of health information technology diffusion to create counterfactual scenarios against which we compare the benefits and costs of the bar code rule. The magnitudes of the costs and benefits of the 2004 rule are sensitive to assumptions about the counterfactual technology adoption rate, with the upper-bound range of calculated annualized net benefits between $2.7 billion and $6.6 billion depending on the baseline scenario considered.Disclaimer: The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the authors in their private capacities, and they do not represent the views of the Food and Drug Administration.

Food Allergen Labeling: A Latin American Approach.

Food allergy is a public health concern almost all over the world. Although most of the countries that regulate the declaration of allergens in prepackaged foods include the list recommended by the Codex Alimentarius, some countries have added other allergens to this list due to prevalence data and regional incidence, whereas others have incorporated exceptions for some products derived from allergenic foods. Within this context, the situation in Latin America regarding these regulations is diverse. Data about prevalence of food hypersensitivity are very limited in the region. The countries that have established regulations are Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela. Argentina has approved a regulation for the labeling of food allergens in November 2016. It only needs to be published in the Official Bulletin to go into effect. All countries follow the Codex list that includes latex and excludes sulfites, except Brazil. On the other hand, Argentina is the only country that includes exceptions. As for the methodologies for the detection of allergens in foods, this issue is a serious problem for both the food industry and control laboratories. Available methodologies are based mainly on commercial ELISA kits; currently, there are no Latin American companies that produce them, so ELISA kits are expensive and their acquisition is complicated. There is an initiative in Argentina to address all these gaps in the region through the Platform of Food Allergens (PFA), a nonprofit organization that integrates health professionals, patients, representatives of the food industry, government, and scientists. The different actions carried out by the PFA have made it possible to contact different scientific groups from other Latin American countries in order to expand this initiative and thereby promote and strengthen both public and private capacities in the region.

Semidefinite Programming Strong Converse Bounds for Classical Capacity

We investigate the classical communication over quantum channels when assisted by no-signaling (NS) and positive-partial-transpose-preserving (PPT) codes, for which both the optimal success probability of a given transmission rate and the one-shot $\epsilon$-error capacity are formalized as semidefinite programs (SDPs). Based on this, we obtain improved SDP finite blocklength converse bounds of general quantum channels for entanglement-assisted codes and unassisted codes. Furthermore, we derive two SDP strong converse bounds for the classical capacity of general quantum channels: for any code with a rate exceeding either of the two bounds of the channel, the success probability vanishes exponentially fast as the number of channel uses increases. In particular, applying our efficiently computable bounds, we derive an improved upper bound on the classical capacity of the amplitude damping channel. We also establish the strong converse property for the classical and private capacities of a new class of quantum channels. We finally study the zero-error setting and provide efficiently computable upper bounds on the one-shot zero-error capacity of a general quantum channel.

Unethical Human Experimentation in Developing Countries and International Criminal Law: Old Wine in New Bottles?

Since Nuremberg, the ethics of scientific research involving human beings has been for decades the source of concern and controversy. Profit-driven experimentation sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry has progressively migrated to the South, turning into a widespread phenomenon imbued with ethical challenges and dilemmas. The protection of vulnerable communities from the risks of unethical behaviour and exploitation, often associated with the outsourcing of clinical trials in developing countries, calls for respect of internationally agreed standards. This Article argues that massive experiments conducted in disregard of universal bioethical principles and human rights may amount to crimes against humanity under international criminal law. It also suggests that, in such cases, the International Criminal Court would have jurisdiction over a broad range of liable individuals, including public officials of host and sponsoring States, physicians and researchers acting in their private capacity, as well as officers and directors of pharmaceutical corporations.

Consumer attitudes towards organic food in the Western Balkans - the case of Albania

Despite the production and market potential for the organic food sector, organic farming is weakly developed in Albania. The sector faces several constraints related to legislation, institutional and private sector capacities. A major challenge for the development of the organic food demand in Albania is the limited awareness of Albanian consumers for organic products. This paper provides insights into the consumer awareness and preferences towards organic food, applying descriptive and segmentation analysis based on a structured survey conducted in Tirana, Albania. According to the study results, there is an overall strong preference for organic food, as organic food is perceived to be safer and healthier compared to conventionally produced food, while environmental considerations of how organic food is grown are not as important in consumers’ view. Despite the overall preference for organic food, most consumers have gaps in their understanding about organic food which should be addressed with awareness campaigns by the private sector and policy makers.

Position-based coding and convex splitting for private communication over quantum channels

The classical-input quantum-output (cq) wiretap channel is a communication model involving a classical sender $X$, a legitimate quantum receiver $B$, and a quantum eavesdropper $E$. The goal of a private communication protocol that uses such a channel is for the sender $X$ to transmit a message in such a way that the legitimate receiver $B$ can decode it reliably, while the eavesdropper $E$ learns essentially nothing about which message was transmitted. The $\varepsilon $-one-shot private capacity of a cq wiretap channel is equal to the maximum number of bits that can be transmitted over the channel, such that the privacy error is no larger than $\varepsilon\in(0,1)$. The present paper provides a lower bound on the $\varepsilon$-one-shot private classical capacity, by exploiting the recently developed techniques of Anshu, Devabathini, Jain, and Warsi, called position-based coding and convex splitting. The lower bound is equal to a difference of the hypothesis testing mutual information between $X$ and $B$ and the "alternate" smooth max-information between $X$ and $E$. The one-shot lower bound then leads to a non-trivial lower bound on the second-order coding rate for private classical communication over a memoryless cq wiretap channel.

Simulation of non-Pauli channels

We consider the simulation of a quantum channel by two parties who share a resource state and may apply local operations assisted by classical communication (LOCC). One specific type of such LOCC is standard teleportation, which is however limited to the simulation of Pauli channels. Here we show how we can easily enlarge this class by means of a minimal perturbation of the teleportation protocol, where we introduce noise in the classical communication channel between the remote parties. By adopting this noisy protocol, we provide a necessary condition for simulating a non-Pauli channel. In particular, we characterize the set of channels that are generated assuming the Choi matrix of an amplitude damping channel as a resource state. Within this set, we identify a class of Pauli-damping channels for which we bound the two-way quantum and private capacities.

Non-Gaussian operations on bosonic modes of light: Photon-added Gaussian channels

We present a framework for studying bosonic non-Gaussian channels of continuous-variable systems. Our emphasis is on a class of channels that we call photon-added Gaussian channels, which are experimentally viable with current quantum-optical technologies. A strong motivation for considering these channels is the fact that it is compulsory to go beyond the Gaussian domain for numerous tasks in continuous-variable quantum information processing such as entanglement distillation from Gaussian states and universal quantum computation. The single-mode photon-added channels we consider are obtained by using two-mode beam splitters and squeezing operators with photon addition applied to the ancilla ports giving rise to families of non-Gaussian channels. For each such channel, we derive its operator-sum representation, indispensable in the present context. We observe that these channels are Fock preserving (coherence nongenerating). We then report two examples of activation using our scheme of photon addition, that of quantum-optical nonclassicality at outputs of channels that would otherwise output only classical states and of both the quantum and private communication capacities, hinting at far-reaching applications for quantum-optical communication. Further, we see that noisy Gaussian channels can be expressed as a convex mixture of these non-Gaussian channels. We also present other physical and information-theoretic properties of these channels.

Relative Entropy Bounds on Quantum, Private and Repeater Capacities

We find a strong-converse bound on the private capacity of a quantum channel assisted by unlimited two-way classical communication. The bound is based on the max-relative entropy of entanglement and its proof uses a new inequality for the sandwiched R\'{e}nyi divergences based on complex interpolation techniques. We provide explicit examples of quantum channels where our bound improves both the transposition bound (on the quantum capacity assisted by classical communication) and the bound based on the squashed entanglement introduced by Takeoka et al.. As an application we study a repeater version of the private capacity assisted by classical communication and provide an example of a quantum channel with negligible private repeater capacity.

Size does matter: City scale and the asymmetries of climate change adaptation in three coastal towns

Globally, it is smaller urban settlements that are growing most rapidly, are most constrained in terms of adaptive capacity but increasingly looked to for delivering local urban resilience. Data from three smaller coastal cities and their wider regional governance systems in Florida, US; West Sussex, UK and São Paulo, Brazil are used to compare the influence of scale and sector on city adaptive capacity. These tensions are described through the lens of the Adaptive Capacity Index (ACI) approach. The ACI is built from structuration theory and presents an alternative to social-ecological systems framing of analysis on adaptation. Structuration articulates the interaction of agency and structure and the intervening role played by institutions on information flow, in shaping adaptive capacity and outcomes. The ACI approach reveals inequalities in adaptive capacity to be greater across scale than across government, private and civil society sector capacity in each study area. This has implications for adaptation research both by reinforcing the importance of scale and demonstrating the utility of structuration theory as a framework for understanding the social dynamics underpinning adaptive capacity; and policy relevance, in particular considering the redistribution of decision-making power across scale and/or compensatory mechanisms, especially for lower scale actors, who increasingly carry the costs for enacting resilience planning in cities.

The impact of private accommodation on economic development of tourist destination-the case of Dubrovnik-Neretva County

Private accommodation capacities are a growing segment of the lodging industry in Croatia. In private accommodation capacities 2,684 million tourists were registered in 2010, there were 19,4 million overnight stays, which makes 25% of total arrivals and 34% of total overnights. Although studies have been made on economic impact of tourism on a destination (at the national level), the issues of the impact of private accommodation haven't been given due attention. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to estimate the importance of private accommodation in development of tourist destination on regional level through consumption of tourists accommodated in private capacities, as well as to confirm that tourism receipts realised in private capacities have a positive impact on regional economic development.

Connected by the Ear: The Media, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Romantic Lecture by Sean Franzel

Reviewed by: Connected by the Ear: The Media, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Romantic Lecture by Sean Franzel Ellwood Wiggins Connected by the Ear: The Media, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Romantic Lecture. By Sean Franzel. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013. Pp. 292. Paper $39.95. ISBN 978-0810129337. Lectures are cool again. After decades of detraction from opponents of passive learning and teacher-centered education, the lecture is experiencing a revival. Online tools, podcasting technology, and social media are allowing this authoritative, top-down mode to become a more interactive form of pedagogy. The revolution is everywhere: iTunes U allows millions to audit lecture courses from elite universities free of charge. Giving a TED Talk is a badge of success in any field. Anonymous student bloggers calling themselves the “Münkler-Watch” at the Humboldt University in Berlin have paralyzed a respected professor and created a public furor by posting what they consider objectionable comments from his classroom lectures. This rediscovered aura of the lecture hearkens back to the heyday of a similar media revolution around 1800, when the idea of education and the institution of the university were undergoing radical transformation. Sean Franzel’s book provides an insightful, engaging history of this important shift in the culture of knowledge, while always remaining critically alive to the implications for contemporary issues in media and pedagogy. It will be of high interest to historians, philosophers, and literary scholars. It tells its gripping tale in clear and accessible language that people outside the academy will appreciate. The book complements other valuable studies of the history of learning cultures, such as William Clark’s Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (2006), but in choosing to view this pivotal era through the lens of the lecture, Franzel’s monograph achieves a focus that more sprawling histories lack. This focus is by no means limiting, however, as the lecture proves to be a convergence point for the most pressing cultural and intellectual issues of romanticism. The well argued book consists of six case studies. The first three chapters outline the changing relation of scholar to the state in Kant, Karl Philip Moritz, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Chapters 4–6 then explore the “dialogic” ideal of lecturing in August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Adam Müller, and Fichte. Each of the chapters traces the development of four “inflationary concepts and/or metaphors [that] define the Romantic lecture as such” (9). These four themes distinguish the axis around 1800 from previous attitudes toward knowledge, and persist in some form today. 1) The cult of originality and the expectation that scholars should produce new knowledge were perhaps the most salient features of the era. 2) The desideratum for popularity was a particularly complex and fraught shift. Franzel convincingly ties this to an upheaval in the conceptions of public/private and shows how it imbricates and compromises the processes of national identity formation in Germany. 3) Franzel critiques the idealized metaphor of dialogue as an essential principle of the lecture. [End Page 183] 4) He also demonstrates how the ephemeral lectures were monumentalized in print and other material forms of memorialization with sometimes dire cultural and political consequences. The book’s first chapter lays out Kant’s surprising conceptions of public and private. The rest of the book shows how Kant’s romantic followers were largely responsible for our modern ideas of the dichotomy, which have become so entrenched that we now find Kant’s notions counterintuitive. For Kant, the private sphere refers to an individual’s personal duties to the state. Hence a university professor’s teaching syllabus and lecture schedule are functions of her private self. Her research agenda and publication of new knowledge, in contrast, are public concerns. Kant argued that the scholar should be entirely free and uncensored in her public person (after all, he reassured the Prussian king, the majority of people will have no desire to read or capacity to understand the technical and theoretical arguments of public discourse). In her private capacity as a teacher, however, the lecturer is bound by what the state prescribes to educate useful citizens. For this reason, Kant never disseminated his own...

The Influence of Urban Structure on Commuting: An Analysis for the Main Metropolitan Systems in Spain

It is widely recognised that urban mobility is responsible for the generation of an important proportion greenhouse gasses produced by households, at the time that it has important social and economic implications for urban sustainability. Nonetheless, in the literature few attention has been placed on the relationship between urban structure and commuting. In this paper, using travel-to-work data for the main seven metropolitan systems in Spain we investigate both the impact of polycentric urban development on labour mobility and other urban factors influencing excess commuting. In doing so, a synthetic indicator of travelled distance is constructed and correlated to polynucleation and polycentricity indexes. Also an econometric family of models is built to regress excess commuting, after controlling for urban structure, over infrastructure and transport services, labour market structure, housing amenities, commuters’ income level, orographic complexity. Results suggest that effectively there is an inverse relationship between the number and size of subcentres in terms of employment (polynucleation) and the distance travelled by commuters, nevertheless, such relationship is weaker with the strength of functional linkage between subcentres and their hinterland (polycentricity), which in turns suggest the presence of other factors influencing commuting. According to regression analyses, commuting is exacerbated in areas well served by private and high capacity public transport, also in zones where employment dominates over housing, especially if jobs are basically oriented to manufacturing. On the contrary, the diversification of housing typologies reduces labour mobility. In sum, urban structure and other planning-modifiable urban attributes seem to have and endogenous potential to mitigate commuting in metropolitan systems, and consequently contribute to reduce climate change.

Evolution of policies on human resources for health: opportunities and constraints in four post-conflict and post-crisis settings

BackgroundFew studies look at policy making in the health sector in the aftermath of a conflict or crisis and even fewer specifically focus on Human Resources for Health, which is a critical domain for health sector performance. The main objective of the article is to shed light on the patterns and drivers of post-conflict policy-making. In particular, we explore whether the post -conflict period offers increased chances for the opening of ‘windows for opportunity’ for change and reform and the potential to reset health systems.MethodsThis article uses a comparative policy analysis framework. It is based on qualitative data, collected using three main tools - stakeholder mapping, key informant interviews and document reviews - in Uganda, Sierra Leone, Cambodia and Zimbabwe.ResultsWe found that HRH challenges were widely shared across the four cases in the post-conflict period but that the policy trajectories were different – driven by the nature of the conflicts but also the wider context. Our findings suggest that there is no formula for whether or when a ‘window of opportunity’ will arise which allows health systems to be reset. Problems are well understood in all four cases but core issues – such as adequate pay, effective distribution and HRH management – are to a greater or lesser degree unresolved. These problems are not confined to post-conflict settings, but underlying challenges to addressing them – including fiscal space, political consensus, willingness to pursue public objectives over private, and personal and institutional capacity to manage technical solutions – are liable to be even more acute in these settings. The role of the MoH emerged as weaker than expected, while the shift from donor dependence was clearly not linear and can take a considerable time.ConclusionsWindows of opportunity for change and reform can occur but are by no means guaranteed by a crisis – rather they depend on a constellation of leadership, financing, and capacity. Recognition of urgency is certainly a facilitator but not sufficient alone. Post-conflict environments face particularly severe challenges to evidence-based policy making and policy implementation, which also constrain their ability to effectively use the windows which are presented.

Dynamic auction environment with subcontracting

This article provides evidence on the role of subcontracting in the auction‐based procurement setting with private cost variability and capacity constraints. We demonstrate that subcontracting allows bidders to modify their costs realizations in a given auction as well as to control their future costs by reducing backlog accumulation. Restricting access to subcontracting raises procurement costs for an individual project by 12% and reduces the number of projects completed in equilibrium by 20%. The article explains methodological and market design implications of subcontracting availability.

Public-private mix for tuberculosis care and prevention. What progress? What prospects?

Public-private mix (PPM) for tuberculosis (TB) care implies working with all relevant public and private health care providers to ensure that high-quality TB care is offered to all who need it. Despite significant global progress in PPM expansion and in TB control in general, a large proportion of care providers in high-incidence countries remain unengaged, and one third of the estimated TB cases go unnotified or undetected. To present a global perspective on the progress and prospects of expanding PPM for TB care and prevention. People with TB in high-incidence countries approach diverse care providers. Productive working collaborations between national TB programmes and other care providers have been scaled up in many countries. However, a large proportion of private providers still do not participate in collaboration or follow recommended TB management practices. Persisting challenges include weak commitment and capacity to work together within both public and private sectors, poor enforcement of essential regulations and inadequate investments. Scaling up PPM programmes is critical to ending the TB epidemic. Investing in implementing bold policies that harness public and private sector capacity, combine collaborative and regulatory approaches and promote modern digital tools to simplify care delivery is the logical way forward.

Nonconvexity of private capacity and classical environment-assisted capacity of a quantum channel

The capacity of classical channels is convex. This is not the case for the quantum capacity of a channel: the capacity of a mixture of different quantum channels exceeds the mixture of the individual capacities and thus is non-convex. Here we show that this effect goes beyond the quantum capacity and holds for the private and classical environment-assisted capacities of quantum channels.

Maximum privacy without coherence, zero-error

We study the possible difference between the quantum and the private capacities of a quantum channel in the zero-error setting. For a family of channels introduced by Leung et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 030512 (2014)], we demonstrate an extreme difference: the zero-error quantum capacity is zero, whereas the zero-error private capacity is maximum given the quantum output dimension.

Reclaiming Proportionality (Society for Applied Philosophy Annual Lecture 2016)

Reclaiming Proportionality (Society for Applied Philosophy Annual Lecture 2016)

Review of Women in Psychiatry: Personal Perspectives, edited by Donna M. Norris, Geetha Jayaram, and Annelle B. Primm

[Author Affiliation]Meena Ramani. 1 Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, Nassau University Medical Center, East Meadow, New York.Donna Dilmanian. 2 Department of Psychology, Long Island University, Post Campus, Brookville, New York.ISBN: 978.1.58562.408.9. Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Publishing, 2012, 345 pages.Address correspondence to: Meena Ramani, MD, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, Nassau University Medical Center, 2201 Hempstead Turnpike, East Meadow, NY 11554, E-mail: drmeenaramani@gmail.comArecent study by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) (Association of American Medical Colleges 2010) indicates that the number of women applicants at accredited United States medical schools peaked from 10% in 1965 to 51% in 2003. In 2010 and 2011, women made up 47% of the applicant pool at accredited United States medical schools. Impressively, in 2008, 49.3% of medical degrees awarded in the United States were awarded to women, representing the largest national class of women medical doctors to date. Women continue to radiate toward specialties in internal medicine, family medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics, and gynecology. The AAMC reports that in 2011, only 6.3% of women residents were in psychiatry. Professionally, women remain grossly underrepresented in the ranks of assistant professor, associate professor, and full professor, as well as in leadership positions such as department chairs and deans.Today, we are living at the crossroads of Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In (Sandberg 2013) and the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008. Both women's empowerment and mental health issues are at the fore of our nation's dialogue, but where are the women psychiatrists? Women in Psychiatry: Personal Perspectives seeks to explore this very issue, and to help empower women at all phases of their training and professional development to become effective psychiatrists during this critical juncture in our cultural history.Women in Psychiatry: Personal Perspectives is a compilation of the stories of 21 women in the field of psychiatry. These women offer details of their personal and professional journeys as they traverse an array of social, cultural, academic, and systemic challenges. They discuss the impact that their identities and backgrounds have had on their training and careers in psychiatry. They address topics including cultural background, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, marital status, subspecialty, place of employment, and work setting. They share insight into the resources that helped them to shape their paths and overcome obstacles. Most importantly, they contribute to the current cultural dialogue on both gender issues and mental health parity by offering encouragement and support to help women continue to tackle the professional and social challenges that both doctors and patients face in our time.The narratives of Women in Psychiatry address issues at various levels of training and professional development. The authors address the obstacles to deciding on and gaining acceptance to medical school, and the impact of cultural and social biases on women's transition into medical training. The authors discuss how they came to choose psychiatry as a specialty, and address controversies in the medical community surrounding specialization in psychiatry, a topic of utmost importance as we seek to empower psychiatrists of both genders. The authors examine how they came to choose the ways that they would each practice psychiatry: In private practice, hospitals, public administration, organizational and legislative capacities, military settings, and academia.Additionally, the book chronicles the impact of various factors on the professional development of women psychiatrists. The authors discuss the impact of racism, past and present; sexism during training and in professional settings; immigrant status and acculturation; and religious practices and social barriers. …