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Climate change, temperature extremes, and conflict: Evidence from mainland Southeast Asia
No full textDe l’esclave Stichus au chauffeur Uber : six modalités du lien de subordination dans les relations de travail
No full textIn-Corpore : ce que le droit fait à nos corps : compte-rendu d’un colloque en Gender Law
Get PDFColloque des 9 et 10 février 2023 organisé par le FRI institut suisse d’études juridiques féministes et gender law, à l’Université de Neuchâte
Assessment of the Efficiency of Public Hospitals in Romania
Get PDFConsidering the high pressure on the healthcare limited resources, mainly on hospitals, determined by the population ageing, and the increased incidence of chronic and infectious diseases, it is essential to both decrease expenditures and provide good quality healthcare. In this paper we focus on the efficiency of Romanian public hospitals. Our research goals are to identify and examine the inefficient public hospitals in Romania; to determine sources of inefficiency in Romanian public hospitals; to describe a potential reduction in all inputs on average to rationalize hospital resources; and recommend that hospital management be improved. We propose an approach that contains preliminary data analyses to obtain homogeneous distributions, then we use Data Envelopment Analysis to estimate the technical efficiency scores for the hospitals in the sample. The results showed that more than half of the examined small hospitals were technically inefficient and that they could have produced a larger number of discharges and consequently an increased number of inpatient days. Possible reductions in inputs were also indicated. These results suggest ways of improving hospital management and restructuring and reorganizing decisions that can be implemented in the hospital network.tru
It’s a new day – is it? Testing accumulation and sensitisation effects of workload on fatigue in daily diary studies
Get PDFStudies investigating the stressor–strain relation using daily diary designs have been interested in within-person deviations that predict well-being outcomes on the same day. These models typically have not accounted for the possibility of short-term accumulation (i.e. previous stressor experiences having a lasting effect and affecting strain on subsequent occasions) and sensitisation (i.e. previous stressor experiences amplifying subsequent reactions to stressors) effects of stressors such as workload across days. In this study, we test immediate, accumulation, and sensitisation effects of workload on fatigue within and across days using four diary studies (mean observations = 1,406; mean N = 166). In all four studies, we observed that workload had positive concurrent effects on fatigue. In addition, we found that workload had positive effects on fatigue within one day. However, there was insufficient support for short-term accumulation or sensitisation effects, implying that higher levels of workload on previous days did not directly affect or amplify the effect of workload on fatigue on that day. We discuss implications for recovery theories and potential future avenues to refine the theoretical propositions that describe intra-individual stress and recovery processes across days
Noble gases as tracers of surface water – groundwater interactions: insights from novel field and modelling approaches
Get PDFAccepted on the recommendation of
Prof. Philip Brunner, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland (Thesis director)
Prof. Daniel Hunkeler, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland (Rapporteur)
Prof. Peter Cook, Flinders University, Australia (Rapporteur)
Prof. Olaf Cirpka, University of Tübingen, Germany (Rapporteur)
Dr. Roland Purtschert, University of Bern, Switzerland (Rapporteur)
Defended on May 17, 2023Understanding the interactions between surface water (SW) and groundwater (GW) in alluvial aquifer systems is of critical importance for the sustainable management of water resources. Advances in realtime and continuous measurement of a range of hydrological tracers provide new opportunities for the characterization of SW-GW dynamics at unprecedented spatiotemporal resolutions. Amongst several promising tracer methods, noble gases are particularly well-adapted to the study of SW-GW interactions, and provide an integrated signal on the flow paths and travel times of water. Capitalizing on the insights offered by novel measurement technologies requires tracer interpretation methods that appropriately capture tracer transport processes in dynamic environmental conditions. However, recourse to highly-simplified tracer interpretation methods, conceptually detached from the complexity of natural systems, is still widespread. In such cases, the potentially rich information content of tracer measurements may be underutilized.
This thesis aims at investigating how established and emerging noble gas tracer methods can be optimally used - and when they should be avoided - for the study of SW-GW interactions in alluvial aquifer systems. To this end, a range of novel laboratory, field, and modelling approaches are employed to systematically assess the applicability, limitations, and potential of some gas tracer methods toward informing SW-GW exchange processes. The first gas tracer method examined is the 222Rn apparent age model, which is widely used to estimate the ages of very young GW (days to weeks). High-resolution measurements of the spatial distribution of 222Rn emanation rates in an alluvial aquifer reveal significant spatial heterogeneity in 222Rn production. The explicit simulation of 222Rn in synthetic mass-transport models shows that this level of heterogeneity, combined with mixing of GW, can result in strongly biased estimates of GW age, effectively limiting the applicability of the 222Rn apparent age method to a limited range of field conditions. Although temporal changes in 222Rn concentrations may reveal insights into GW age dynamics, the information content of 222Rn measurements may be best extracted through the integration of 222Rn observations in the calibration process of physics-based flow and transport models.
Indeed, the second part of this thesis is devoted to exploring how the explicit simulation of tracer concentrations and the assimilation of untransformed tracer data in highly parameterized, physicsbased models may inform model parameters and ultimately predictions of management interest. Within this framework, the joint assimilation of hydraulic and noble gas data (222Rn and helium), acquired over the course of a novel tracer injection experiment, is shown to strongly inform model parameters and reduce predictive uncertainty of several important water management quantities, such as GW age, SW-GW mixing ratios, and SW infiltration fluxes, far beyond what is achieved with “traditional” hydraulic data alone. These results build upon mounting evidence as to the benefits of explicitly simulating and assimilating diverse observation types with physically-based flow and transport models, avoiding the layer of conceptual simplification and potential bias accrued with simplified tracer interpretation models.
Finally, the successful combination of novel gas injection methods, developed over the course of this project, and the assimilation of high-resolution gas tracer measurements in an explicit tracer simulation framework strongly support further developments of (noble) gas tracer methods and tracer-numerical model synergies