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Staff scheduling in hospital emergency departments is challenging due to the uncertainty involved in the work needed to be performed, the high impact if the work is not performed, and the non-traditional working hours. Also, the desires of the stakeholder on what should be optimized may not be clear. This paper addresses the impacts of preferences in the staffing of emergency department nurses. The research uses data collected from a local hospital on patient flow to model nurse staffing. This model is used in an optimization framework where objective functions and constraints are varied to determine their impact on scheduling. Value models of patient care and wasted funds, as well as four constraints are explored in this research. The research concludes that understanding and representing the stakeholder's preference properly is critical in determining an optimal schedule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although anthropogenic change is often gradual, the impacts on animal populations may be precipitous if physiological processes create tipping points between energy gain, reproduction or survival. We use 25 years of behavioural, diet and demographic data from elephant seals to characterise their relationships with lifetime fitness. Survival and reproduction increased with mass gain during long foraging trips preceding the pupping seasons, and there was a threshold where individuals that gained an additional 4.8% of their body mass (26 kg, from 206 to 232 kg) increased lifetime reproductive success three‐fold (from 1.8 to 4.9 pups). This was due to a two‐fold increase in pupping probability (30% to 76%) and a 7% increase in reproductive lifespan (6.0 to 6.4 years). The sharp threshold between mass gain and reproduction may explain reproductive failure observed in many species and demonstrates how small, gradual reductions in prey from anthropogenic disturbance could have profound implications for animal populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluating consequences of stressors on vital rates in marine mammals is of considerable interest to scientific and regulatory bodies. Many of these species face numerous anthropogenic and environmental disturbances. Despite its importance as a critical form of mortality, little is known about disease progression in air-breathing marine megafauna at sea. We examined the movement, diving, foraging behaviour and physiological state of an adult female northern elephant seal (Mirounga angustirostris) who suffered from an infection while at sea. Comparing her to healthy individuals, we identified abnormal behavioural patterns from high-resolution biologging instruments that are likely indicators of diseased and deteriorating condition. We observed continuous extended (3–30 minutes) surface intervals coinciding with almost no foraging attempts (jaw motion) during 2 weeks of acute illness early in her post-breeding foraging trip. Elephant seals typically spend ~ 2 minutes at the surface. There were less frequent but highly extended (30–200 minutes) surface periods across the remainder of the trip. Dive duration declined throughout the trip rather than increasing. This seal returned in the poorest body condition recorded for an adult female elephant seal (18.3% adipose tissue; post-breeding trip average is 30.4%). She was immunocompromised at the end of her foraging trip and has not been seen since that moulting season. The timing and severity of the illness, which began during the end of the energy-intensive lactation fast, forced this animal over a tipping point from which she could not recover. Additional physiological constraints to foraging, including thermoregulation and oxygen consumption, likely exacerbated her already poor condition. These findings improve our understanding of illness in free-ranging air-breathing marine megafauna, demonstrate the vulnerability of individuals at critical points in their life history, highlight the importance of considering individual health when interpreting biologging data and could help differentiate between malnutrition and other causes of at-sea mortality from transmitted data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Recent histories of human rights identify the 1970s as the "breakthrough" period when they gained traction globally. However, most of the new historiographers adopt a restricted Americo-Eurocentric perspective that disregards events and peoples in the rest of the world as makers of human rights history. For many in the Global South, the Western "rediscovery" of human rights in the 1970s looks more like retrenchment and repossession, part of a larger "rollback" of Third World agendas to decolonize and reshape the international order. This same period saw an increased use of airline hijackings as a tactic of national liberation movements, which helped to speed a reversal in the official discourse on "terrorism." Together, these forces facilitated a neoliberal hijacking of human rights that delegitimized national self-determination, narrowed international concern to the plight of individual political prisoners, and realigned the moral economy of human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, the main focus of intelligent transport systems (ITS) research programmes has been on technology development and proof of concept, rather than on understanding the implications of system implementation. Improved knowledge is needed about the ways in which drivers use ITS, their short- and long-term effects and how system performance can be optimised. The field operational test, or FOT, is a sophisticated evaluation method that can be used to answer these and other critical questions, and to stimulate market acceptance and demand for ITS. Although the large-scale FOTs conducted to date have yielded important insights into both the positive and potentially negative impacts of ITS, there is considerable scope for improving the design and implementation of FOTs. There are many advantages in doing so. The authors outline, in the form of a checklist, the critical steps and considerations involved in successfully planning and implementing an FOT, drawing on work undertaken in the EC-funded FESTA (Field opErational TeSt support Action) project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]