The Third Sector: The “Other” Actors of Rural Development, Andalusia 2000–2015

Civil society plays an essential role in the development of our rural areas. In spite of this, little research has been conducted on the role of non-profit organizations, often referred to in general terms as the third sector, within the framework of the LEADER program for rural development, especially in such a large geographical area as Andalusia, the study area of this research. The diversity of the groups that make up the “Others” group of rural development stakeholders is one of its most important characteristics. Over the course of the study period (2000–2015), these organizations have played a very significant role in Andalusia in both quantitative and qualitative terms. In order to find out more about the diversity of third sector organizations and to quantify and evaluate their importance, we carried out a detailed analysis of all the LEADER projects commenced in Andalusia between 2000 and 2015. The quantitative and quantitative results obtained highlight the diversity of these projects and how widely their presence varied from one type of rural area to the next. Our research reopens the debate about the growing role played by non-profit organizations in developed societies at a global level and within LEADER in particular.

A multi-pollutant and multi-sectorial approach to screen the consistency of emission inventories

Some studies show that significant uncertainties affect emission inventories, which may impeach conclusions based on air quality model results. These uncertainties result from the need to compile a wide variety of information to estimate an emission inventory. In this work, we propose and discus a screening method to compare two emission inventories, with the overall goal of improving the quality of emission inventories by feeding back the results of the screening to inventory compilers who can check the inconsistencies found and where applicable resolve errors. The method targets three different aspects: 1) the total emissions assigned to a series of large geographical area, countries in our application; 2) the way these country total emissions are shared in terms of sector of activity and 3) the way inventories spatially distribute emissions from countries to smaller areas, cities in our application. The first step of the screening approach consists in sorting the data and keep only emission contributions that are relevant enough. In a second step, the method identifies, among those significant differences, the most important ones that are evidence of methodological divergence and/or errors that can be found and resolved in at least one of the inventories. The approach has been used to compare two versions of the CAMS-REG European scale inventory over 150 cities in Europe for selected activity sectors. Among the 4500 screened pollutant-sectors, about 450 were kept as relevant among which 46 showed inconsistencies. The analysis indicated that these inconsistencies were almost equally arising from large scale reporting and spatial distribution differences. They mostly affect SO2 and PM coarse emissions from the industrial and residential sectors. The screening approach is general and can be used for other types of applications related to emission inventories.

Large Geographical Area Aerial Surveillance Systems Data Network Infrastructure Managed by Artificial Intelligence and Certified over Blockchain: A Review

This paper proposes an aerial data network infrastructure for Large Geographical Area Surveillance Systems. The work presents a review of previous works from the authors, existing technologies in the market, and other scientific work, with the goal of creating a data network supported by Autonomous Tethered Aerostat Airships used for sensor fixing, a drones deployment base, and meshed data network nodes installation. The proposed approach for data network infrastructure supports several independent and heterogeneous services from independent, private, and public companies. The presented solution employs Edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems for autonomous infrastructure management. The Edge AI used in the presented solution enables the AI management solution to work without the need for a permanent connection to cloud services and is constantly fed by the locally generated sensor data. These systems interact with other network AI services to accomplish coordinated tasks. Blockchain technology services are deployed to ensure secure and auditable decisions and operations, which are validated by the different involved ledgers.

Comprehensive Overview of REDD+ in India: Status, Opportunities and Challenges

Climate change is a worldwide issue with detrimental effects on ecosystems and human well-being. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) is a worldwide policy tool for combating climate change by reducing emissions from the forestry sector and has received widespread attention. Since the program's inception, India has been a strong advocate for REDD+ and its activities. The goal of this research is to evaluate India's current REDD+ readiness. India is the fourth largest CO2 emitter in the world, accounting for 7% of global CO2 emissions. India's emission trajectory shows the country's ever-increasing CO2 emission trend, with an annual average increase rate of 5-6 percent. India has a large geographical area and forest cover, and it holds 7,124.6 million tons of carbon stock. Forests are traditionally managed through a participatory approach, which is similar to REDD+ activities. India has made significant progress toward REDD+ implementation by developing a national REDD+ strategy, enacting consistent laws and regulations, and demonstrating accountability and monitoring of national forest carbon. However, several issues, including forest dependency, community rights, capacity building, policies, and finance, should be carefully addressed to overcome hurdles in REDD+ implementation.

The Paracas Society of Prehispanic Peru

Paracas society spread over a large geographical area on the southern Peruvian coast between 800 bce and 200 bce. Unlike an “archaeological culture” that has uniform economy, politics, and ideology and is integrated under a single political structure, the Paracas phenomenon was a series of communities adopting different forms of economic and political organizations that were, nevertheless, economically linked and sharing the same religious ideology. The social mechanisms by which all these communities and political entities were linked included exchange, ritual, and religion, which allowed them to share a series of artifacts, social practices, rituals, and religious iconography. In each of the valleys, every entities, or group of communities, had their own architectural and artisanal features and were economically and politically autonomous. The famous archaeological sites associated with Cerro Colorado on the Paracas peninsula seem to have been more than a central place for Paracas society, a social space of integration in which the worship of ancestors stood out as an ideological and religious sustenance that connected communities and elites from different areas of the southern coast of Peru.

The Use of the Future Subjunctive in Colonial Spanish Texts: Evidence of Vitality or Demise?

This article examines the use of the future subjunctive in two corpora of colonial Mexican texts. The first corpus consists of 255 documents dated 1561–1646 pertaining primarily to the historical area of New Galicia and dealing with matters of the Real Audiencia of Guadalajara. The second consists of 191 documents dated 1681–1816 written in the altiplano central of Mexico, which covers a large geographical area from Mexico City to Zacatecas. After describing the syntactic distribution of the future subjunctive in Medieval Spanish, we examine the evidence of its patterns of usage in Peninsular Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From there, we analyze the quantitative and qualitative data related to the 428 tokens of -re forms found in our corpora and the syntactic structures in which they appear. The data support findings that the future subjunctive first fell out of use in temporal adverbial clauses, while exhibiting the most apparent productivity in relative clauses. However, the corpora examined provide no evidence that the paradigm survived longer in Latin American Spanish than in Peninsular Spanish, as has been argued. Rather, this study suggests that by the eighteenth century, the future subjunctive was a highly stylized marker of formality or politeness in written Spanish.

Towards a Framework for High-Performance Simulation of Livestock Disease Outbreak: A Case Study of Spread of African Swine Fever in Vietnam

The spread of disease in livestock is an important research topic of veterinary epidemiology because it provides warnings or advice to organizations responsible for the protection of animal health in particular and public health in general. Disease transmission simulation programs are often deployed with different species, disease types, or epidemiological models, and each research team manages its own set of parameters relevant to their target diseases and concerns, resulting in limited cooperation and reuse of research results. Furthermore, these simulation and decision support tools often require a large amount of computational power, especially for models involving tens of thousands of herds with millions of individuals spread over a large geographical area such as a region or a country. It is a matter of fact that epidemic simulation programs are often heterogeneous, but they often share some common workflows including processing of input data and execution of simulation, as well as storage, analysis, and visualization of results. In this article, we propose a novel architectural framework for simultaneously deploying any epidemic simulation program both on premises and on the cloud to improve performance and scalability. We also conduct some experiments to evaluate the proposed architectural framework on some aspects when applying it to simulate the spread of African swine fever in Vietnam.

Primary-level palliative care national capacity: Pallium Canada

The need to improve access to palliative care across many settings of care for patients with cancer and non-cancer illnesses is recognised. This requires primary-level palliative care capacity, but many healthcare professionals lack core competencies in this area. Pallium Canada, a non-profit organisation, has been building primary-level palliative care at a national level since 2000, largely through its Learning Essential Approaches to Palliative Care (LEAP) education programme and its compassionate communities efforts. From 2015 to 2019, 1603 LEAP course sessions were delivered across Canada, reaching 28 123 learners from different professions, including nurses, physicians, social workers and pharmacists. This paper describes the factors that have accelerated and impeded spread and scale-up of these programmes. The need for partnerships with local, provincial and federal governments and organisations is highlighted. A social enterprise model, that involves diversifying sources of revenue to augment government funding, enhances long-term sustainability. Barriers have included Canada’s geopolitical realities, including large geographical area and thirteen different healthcare systems. Some of the lessons learned and strategies that have evolved are potentially transferrable to other jurisdictions.

Telephone consultations to manage paediatric outpatient clinics during the COVID-19 pandemic: a service evaluation

Background North West Wales is predominantly rural with a relatively small population spread over a large geographical area. The rapid development of the COVID-19 pandemic led to a radical re-thinking of how to provide continuing paediatric outpatient care in the face of a lockdown. The solution adopted was to use telephone consultations. Aims This study took place during the summer of 2020, after the first lockdown had been relaxed. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the acceptability of telephone consultations as an alternative to conventional paediatric outpatient appointments and assess whether it could continue to have a useful role beyond the pandemic. Methods Two hundred ninety-five telephone surveys were conducted with respondents, most of whom were carers of paediatric outpatients. Questions explored the child’s underlying condition, respondents’ attitudes towards the service received, social factors including distance previously travelled to the hospital and whether they would find ongoing telephone review acceptable or not. Results Sixty-one percent of respondents expressed a positive interest in ongoing telephone consultations. They commented particularly on compatibility with work commitments, childcare arrangements and travel times. Those travelling more than 1 h were particularly positive in their support. Respondents expressed the continued need for face-to-face review if the child’s condition changed acutely. Conclusion Telephone consultations are an acceptable means of improving clinic punctuality, accessibility and convenience for families in rural areas, with ongoing potential beyond the pandemic. Careful consideration is required of the individual’s needs and requirement for physical examination when extending the use of telephone consultations.

Improving attendance in addictions - do quality improvement plans work?

AimsWe assessed whether a quality improvement plan initiated in 2018 had sustained benefits for improving attendance rates at addiction prescriber reviews, after 13 months.MethodThe QIP re-audit had Humber Teaching NHSFT approval. We assessed electronic healthcare records of patients prescribed OST at a specialist addictions service, spanning a large geographical area, split into three Hubs. Data were analysed via Microsoft excel.Baseline data for the whole addictions service were collected in April 2018 (n = 343), followed by QIP implementation. The QIP included a new appointment letter explaining the importance of the prescriber review, text message confirmation and reminder the day before, verbal reminder from keyworker and a call from the prescriber explaining the importance of attending (for persistent non-attenders). In the event of nonattendance, a medication safety review was completed. Further data were collected in December 2018 (n = 339) and a re-audit of one Hub (n = 91) was completed in Jan 2020.ResultAt baseline in April 2018, half (50% n = 170/343) of all patients had attended an addictions prescriber review in the last 3 months; Hub 1 (55%; n = 52/95), Hub 2 (34%; n = 45/133) and Hub 3 (65%; n = 73/115). The Quality Improvement Plan was implemented. Attendance rates for subsample (Hub 1) conducted in Oct 2018 showed a reduction in attendance (51%; n = 48/92). This led to the enhanced Quality Improvement Plan.After the enhanced Quality Improvement Plan implementation in Dec 2018, attendance rates improved for all Hubs to 76% (n = 258/339); Hub 1 (77%; n = 72/93), Hub 2 (73%; n = 97/133), Hub 3 (79%; n = 89/113). For non-attending patients, a medication review was conducted in their absence by the prescriber for most (94%; n = 74/81) patients (see table 1 and Figure 1).In January 2020, reassessment of attendance rates for Hub 1 (subsample), in January 2020 (n = 91) which showed attendance had increased to 86% (n = 78/91). All (100% n = 13) patients who did not attend for the prescriber review in person, had a medication review in their absence. In addition, the reasons for nonattendance were discussed with the patient and their keyworker, following which they were booked for a subsequent appointment.ConclusionNonattendance at clinical appointments causes a significant financial burden across the NHS. It was fantastic to see that the QIP improved patient attendance rates and this was sustained and improved, over a year later. Serial non-attenders may need an enhanced strategy.