Emergy science provides methods to evaluate any process in which inputs are transformed into some new output. Transformation processes are ubiquitous in nature and in the economies of people. To date, economic and natural processes of many kinds have been evaluated, but the production of humans and their cultural information has only begun to be explored. This paper investigates in detail the e...

Successful conservation efforts require understanding human behaviors that directly affect biodiversity. Choice of household location represents an observable behavior that has direct effects on biodiversity conservation, but no one has examined the sociocultural predictors of this choice relative to its environmental impacts. We conducted a case study of the Teton Valley of Idaho and Wyoming (...

conclusions based on the results of this research, it seems that allocating public resources in the form of providing health insurance or government subsidies can decline financial burden of drugs on patients. results the results showed that the estimated effects of sub-specialist visits tariff and general physician visits tariff on the drug demand were positive but not significant (p > 0.05) a...

Reproduction numbers, defined as averages of the number of people infected by a typical case, play a central role in tracking infectious disease outbreaks. The aim of this paper is to develop methods for estimating reproduction numbers which are simple enough that they could be applied with limited data or in real time during an outbreak. I present a new estimator for the individual reproductio...

Reproduction numbers, defined as averages of the number of people infected by a typical case, play a central role in tracking infectious disease outbreaks. The aim of this paper is to develop methods for estimating reproduction numbers which are simple enough that they could be applied with limited data or in real time during an outbreak. I present a new estimator for the individual reproductio...

BACKGROUND Computer assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) is widely used for health surveys. The advantages of CATI over face-to-face interviewing are timeliness and cost reduction to achieve the same sample size and geographical coverage. Two major CATI sampling procedures are used: sampling directly from the electronic white pages (EWP) telephone directory and list assisted random digit dial...

Trials have provided conflicting estimates of the risk of gastrointestinal illness attributable to tap water. To estimate this risk in an Iowa community with a well-run water utility with microbiologically challenged source water, the authors of this 2000-2002 study randomly assigned blinded volunteers to use externally identical devices (active device: 227 households with 646 persons; sham dev...

BACKGROUND This study examines the relationships of population and environmental characteristics to hospital discharges for childhood accident, assault, and child abuse injuries among youth from 0 to 17 years of age. METHODS The analysis uses aggregate data on populations and environments in 1,646 California zip code areas that were collected for the year 2000. Zero inflated negative binomial...

The use of different concentrations of sodium hypochlorite solutions (placebo; 1% and 3.5% sodium hypochlorite solutions) and 2 water-storage containers (traditional plastic container and the improved CDC safe water-storage container) as interventions in 2 rural communities using different water sources (improved vs. unimproved) was evaluated over a period of 4 months. Standard methods were use...

In this paper we consider epidemic models of directly transmissible SIR (susceptible → infective → recovered) and SEIR (with an additional latent class) infections in fully-susceptible populations with a social structure, consisting either of households or of households and workplaces. We review most reproduction numbers defined in the literature for these models, including the basic reproducti...