Background: Early and repeated patient–provider conversations about advance care planning (ACP) are now widely recommended. We sought to characterize barriers and strategies for realizing an iterative model of ACP patient–provider communication.
Methods: A total of 2 multidisciplinary focus groups and 3 semistructured interviews with 20 providers at a large Veterans...
BACKGROUND: Increasing emphasis in performance-based payment, public reporting, and quality improvement
(QI) has led to widespread interest in measuring and improving the quality of care. By 2014, hospice programs
will be required to report quality data to the federal government or incur financial penalties. With this increased
interest in quality...
Floods are beneficial to nature but can be destructive to humans. For centuries humanity has attempted to control nature and specifically rivers and their flooding. After looking at a history of river management in the United States, an examination of both the burdens and benefits of flood control policy in...
The domestic cat is one of the world’s most popular companion animals. However, to date much remains to be learned about cat behavior and the cat-human relationship. To examine the influence of proximate factors on cat behavior and the human-cat bond, three studies were undertaken. Study 1 directly measured the...
Increasing demands on earth resources require the need to
know how much resource is present. A new technology, which is
developing partially with the support of the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration, will help to inventory and monitor surface resources
in a more comprehensive manner than previously possible.
Research in...
Tree-like patterns are ubiquitous in nature. Botanical trees, river networks, and blood systems are the most well-known examples of complex hierarchical systems met in observations. Interestingly, many of such systems exhibit statistical self-similarity. There are two main types of self-similarity: Horton self-similarity and Tokunaga self-similarity. Although there is an increased...
Mountain rivers are important aquatic ecosystems that regulate sediment and water delivery to higher order streams. While previous studies have debated the roles of hillslope and fluvial processes in driving change in channel morphology of mountain rivers, few have examined how these processes influence channel response over longer timescales. The...
The mound-building harvester ant, Pogonmyrmex owyheei Cole,
(formerly included in the species occidentals) is widely distributed
on the semi-arid rangeland east of the Cascade mountains in Oregon.
Because of its seed foraging and vegetation clearing habits, this ant
has been considered as a possible competitor with livestock and
wildlife for...
Species' distributions across the landscape are perhaps the least understood yet most conspicuous features of life on earth. Ecologists have long studied species' distributions; yet, many questions remain about why species occur where they do. Such questions persist largely because species' distributions are complex systems with challenging properties like non-linearity,...