Current Italian legislation does not permit euthanasia of dogs, unless they are ill or dangerous. Despite good intentions and ethical benefits, this 'no-kill policy' has caused a progressive overpopulation of dogs in shelters, due to abandonment rates being higher than adoption rates. Shelter overcrowding has negative implications for dog welfare and increases public costs. The aim of this pape...

BACKGROUND Homeless people suffer from high levels of morbidity and mortality, but there is surprisingly little empiric evidence that homelessness has a direct adverse effect on health. METHODS This study examined the relationship between shelter use and risk of death using longitudinal data in a cohort of 8,769 homeless men in Toronto, Ontario. Shelter use was modelled as a time-dependent co...

BACKGROUND H3N8 canine influenza virus (CIV) infection might contribute to increased duration of shelter stay for dogs. Greater understanding of factors contributing to CIV within shelters could help veterinarians identify control measures for CIV. OBJECTIVES To assess community to shelter dog CIV transmission, estimate true prevalence of CIV, and determine risk factors associated with CIV in...

OBJECTIVE To measure the impact of shelter intervention and protection orders on the mental health functioning, resiliency, and further abuse of documented and undocumented immigrant women and their children in Houston, Texas, United States. METHODS A prospective cohort study initiated in 2011 examined a subsample of 106 immigrant mothers, primarily from Mexico and Central America, and evalua...

Recent invasions by non-native gobiid fish species that are ongoing in the Western European rivers Rhine and Meuse, will lead to interactions with native benthic fish species. Since both non-native gobiids and native benthic species are bottom dwelling species with a preference for shelter during at least part of their life cycle, it is likely that competition for shelter will occur between the...

Complex virtual environments can be simulated with physical or procedural motion. Physical motion is more realistic, but requires the integration of an ordinary differential equation from an initial state. Procedural motion has the advantage of being randomly accessible, though it is not physically based. We combine these techniques into a multiresolution model. A coarse-level simulation is sam...

The hardware shift to multi-core processors and multiprocessor systems calls for new software and systems development tools to help developers transform their code into parallel applications and gain performance increases. Developers now have to know how to create software and architect systems that can use parallel hardware efficiently. Virtualized systems development is a development methodol...

Stonitsch and Markowski perform multiple-Doppler radar analyses of a cold front over Oklahoma and Kansas. Despite their interesting results, their explanations include a number of misconceptions about cold fronts. These misconceptions include the proper interpretation of the frontogenesis function, the role of entrainment versus differential surface sensible heat flux toward weakening the virtu...

CONTEXT Evacuation and shelter-in-place decision making for hospitals is complex, and existing literature contains little information about how these decisions are made in practice. OBJECTIVE To describe decision-making processes and identify determinants of acute care hospital evacuation and shelter-in-place during Hurricane Sandy. DESIGN Semistructured interviews were conducted from March...

A Distributed Virtual Reality System for Spatial Updating Concepts, Implementation, and Experiments PhD Thesis of Markus von der Heyde Introduction: Over the course of evolution humans as well as other animals learned to navigate through complex environments. Such navigation had two main goals: to find food and to find the way back to shelter. For most moving organisms it is important to know t...