Los archivos municipales custodian, a veces, verdaderos tesoros documentales que, aunque suelen ser conocidos, usados o referenciados en el ámbito local, se ven desprovistos del contexto y del ...objetivo que los materializó. Indagar en el cuándo, el porqué, el quién o el cómo se gestó tal o cual documentación se escapa a la labor del archivero para convertirse en la del investigador. En este sentido, el objetivo de este trabajo es intentar arrojar luz sobre el origen y las características de un plano urbano conservado en el Archivo Municipal de Alcalá la Real (AMAR) del que, aunque no era inédito, pues se ha usado profusamente en publicaciones e investigaciones locales, se desconocía el porqué de su existencia y su verdadera importancia, ya que se trata de uno de los ejemplos pioneros en el territorio andaluz, e incluso español, de la planimetría producida a mediados del siglo XIX en respuesta a una orden real que perseguía la ordenación del incipiente crecimiento urbanístico del momento.
As of December 2008, state governments had approximately $1.94 trillion set aside in pension funds for their employees. How does the value of these assets compare to the present value of states' ...pension liabilities? Just as future Social Security and Medicare liabilities do not appear in the headline numbers of the U.S. federal debt, the financial liability from underfunded public pensions does not appear in the headline numbers of state debt. If pensions are underfunded, then the gap between pension assets and liabilities is off-balance-sheet government debt. We show that government accounting standards require states to use procedures that severely understate their liabilities. We then discuss the true economic funding of state public pension plans. Using market-based discount rates that reflect the risk profile of the pension liabilities, we calculate that the present value of the already-promised pension liabilities of the 50 U.S. states amount to $5.17 trillion, assuming that states cannot default on pension benefits that workers have already earned. Net of the $1.94 trillion in assets, these pensions are underfunded by $3.23 trillion. This “pension debt” dwarfs the states' publicly traded debt of $0.94 trillion. And we show that even before the market collapse of 2008, the system was economically severely underfunded, though public actuarial reports presented the plans' funding status in a more favorable light.
•The consistency and implementation of urban master plan and land use plan in suburban Beijing are compared.•Quantitative and spatial conflicts between the two plans are revealed.•Neither plan has ...been well implemented despite the slightly better performance of the land use plan.•Core-periphery decreasing trends were revealed in land quota allocation and effectiveness of planning implementation.•Recommendations are proposed to improve spatial governance in rapidly urbanizing countries.
The evaluation of the extent to which urban and land use planning have achieved their objectives is crucial to better management of urban land development. China’s urban and land use plans have the common purpose of controlling urban sprawl. This research aimed at comparatively assessing the consistency and implementation of these plans, considering the Changping District in suburban Beijing as a case study. Three main findings were obtained: (1) each plan used different strategies to control new developments, and there were several quantitative and spatial conflicts between the two plans; (2) neither plan has been well implemented or effective in controlling urban sprawl, despite the slightly better performance of the land use plan; (3) core-periphery decreasing trends were revealed in land quota allocation and effectiveness of planning implementation. Remote regular towns received the least land resources from the top-down planning system but also developed fast, mainly through informal and illegal approaches. Further investigation into the double failure of China’s current spatial planning system in quantitative and spatial control over urban land development requires a deeper integration of various spatial management systems, a fundamental transformation of planning philosophy, and a higher respect for peripheral areas in urban-rural integration. The planning assessment approach and reform recommendations developed on the basis of the Chinese practice are probably referable for other developing countries facing similar processes of rapid urbanization and imperfect spatial management.
Typically to a roboticist, a plan is the outcome of other work, a synthesized object that realizes ends defined by some problem; plans qua plans are seldom treated as first-class objects of study. ...Plans designate functionality: a plan can be viewed as defining a robot’s behavior throughout its execution. This informs and reveals many other aspects of the robot’s design, including: necessary sensors and action choices, history, state, task structure, and how to define progress. Interrogating sets of plans helps in comprehending the ways in which differing executions influence the interrelationships between these various aspects. Revisiting Erdmann’s theory of action-based sensors, a classical approach for characterizing fundamental information requirements, we show how plans (in their role of designating behavior) influence sensing requirements. Using an algorithm for enumerating plans, we examine how some plans for which no action-based sensor exists can be transformed into sets of sensors through the identification and handling of features that preclude the existence of action-based sensors. We are not aware of those obstructing features having been previously identified. Action-based sensors may be treated as standalone reactive plans; we relate them to the set of all possible plans through a lattice structure. This lattice reveals a boundary between plans with action-based sensors and those without. Some plans, specifically those that are not reactive plans and require some notion of internal state, can never have associated action-based sensors. Even so, action-based sensors can serve as a framework to explore and interpret how such plans make use of state.
This paper presents a new flight trajectory optimisation method, based on genetic algorithms, where the selected optimisation criterion is the minimisation of the total cost. The candidate flight ...trajectories evaluated in the optimisation process are defined as flight plans with two components: a lateral flight plan (the set of geographic points that define the flight trajectory track segments) and a vertical flight plan (the set of data that define the altitude and speed profiles, as well as the points where the altitude and/or speed changes occur). The lateral components of the candidate flight plans are constructed by selecting a set of adjacent nodes from a routing grid. The routing grid nodes are generated based on the orthodromic route between the flight trajectory’s initial and final points, a selected maximum lateral deviation from the orthodromic route and a selected grid node step size along and across the orthodromic route. Two strategies are investigated to handle invalid flight plans (relative to the aircraft’s flight envelope) and to compute their flight performance parameters. A first strategy is to assign a large penalty total cost to invalid flight profiles. The second strategy is to adjust the invalid flight plan parameters (altitude and/or speed) to the nearest limit of the flight envelope, with priority being given to maintaining the planned altitude. The tests performed in this study show that the second strategy is computationally expensive (requiring more than twice the execution time relative to the first strategy) and yields less optimal solutions. The performance of the optimal profiles identified by the proposed optimisation method, using the two strategies regarding invalid flight profile performance evaluation, were compared with the performance data of a reference flight profile, using identical input data: initial aircraft weight, initial and final aircraft geographic positions, altitudes and speed, cost index, and atmospheric data. The initial and final aircraft geographic positions, and the reference flight profile data, were retrieved from the FlightAware web site. This data corresponds to a real flight performed with the aircraft model used in this study. Tests were performed for six Cost Index values. Given the randomness of the genetic algorithms, the convergence to a global optimal solution is not guaranteed (the solution may be non-optimal or a local optima). For a better evaluation of the performance of the proposed method, ten test runs were performed for each Cost Index value. The total cost reduction for the optimal flight plans obtained using the proposed method, relative to the reference flight plan, was between 0.822% and 3.042% for the cases when the invalid flight profiles were corrected, and between 1.598% and 3.97% for the cases where the invalid profiles were assigned a penalty total cost.
We sought to outline the framework and methods used by the World Health Organization (WHO) STEPwise approach to noncommunicable disease (NCD) surveillance (STEPS), describe the development and ...current status, and discuss strengths, limitations, and future directions of STEPS surveillance.
STEPS is a WHO-developed, standardized but flexible framework for countries to monitor the main NCD risk factors through questionnaire assessment and physical and biochemical measurements. It is coordinated by national authorities of the implementing country. The STEPS surveys are generally household-based and interviewer-administered, with scientifically selected samples of around 5000 participants.
To date, 122 countries across all 6 WHO regions have completed data collection for STEPS or STEPS-aligned surveys.
STEPS data are being used to inform NCD policies and track risk-factor trends. Future priorities include strengthening these linkages from data to action on NCDs at the country level, and continuing to develop STEPS' capacities to enable a regular and continuous cycle of risk-factor surveillance worldwide.
Facing pressures to contend with continual changes in physical availability, to balance water supply with environmental and social impacts, and to build resilience to environmental hazards such as ...droughts and climate change, water managers increasingly use management plans as a blueprint for managing water. We apply qualitative content analysis to evaluate water management plans from diverse water and land use organizations in California's Central Valley. To understand whether plans are working toward holistic, multi-dimensional management, we assess plans' coverage of water supply, environmental, and socioeconomic dimensions of water use, as well as the quality and implementability of the plans. The plans provide a strong assessment of water supplies and indicate progression toward integrated water resource management. However, we identify gaps in managing water for the environment, considering socioeconomic and distributional impacts, planning for future drought and climate change, and effective coordination with other water agencies and the public.
We use historical particularities of pension funding law to investigate whether managers of U.S. corporate defined benefit pension plan sponsors strategically use regulatory freedom to lower the ...reported value of pension liabilities, and hence required cash contributions. For some years, pension plans were required to estimate two liabilities—one with mandated discount rates and mortality assumptions, and another where these could be chosen freely. Using a sample of 11,963 plans, we find that the regulated liability exceeds the unregulated measure by 10% and the difference further increases for underfunded pension plans. Underfunded plans tend to assume substantially higher discount rates and lower life expectancy. The effect persists both in the cross-section of plans and over time and it serves to reduce cash contributions. We further show that plan sponsor managers use the freed-up cash for corporate investment and that credit risk is unlikely to explain the finding.
When breast cancer is detected and treated early, the chances of survival are very high. However, women in many settings face complex barriers to early detection, including social, economic, ...geographic, and other interrelated factors, which can limit their access to timely, affordable, and effective breast health care services. Previously, the Breast Health Global Initiative (BHGI) developed resource‐stratified guidelines for the early detection and diagnosis of breast cancer. In this consensus article from the sixth BHGI Global Summit held in October 2018, the authors describe phases of early detection program development, beginning with management strategies required for the diagnosis of clinically detectable disease based on awareness education and technical training, history and physical examination, and accurate tissue diagnosis. The core issues address include finance and governance, which pertain to successful planning, implementation, and the iterative process of program improvement and are needed for a breast cancer early detection program to succeed in any resource setting. Examples are presented of implementation, process, and clinical outcome metrics that assist in program implementation monitoring. Country case examples are presented to highlight the challenges and opportunities of implementing successful breast cancer early detection programs, and the complex interplay of barriers and facilitators to achieving early detection for breast cancer in real‐world settings are considered.
Women in many settings face complex barriers to early detection, including social, economic, geographic, and other interrelated factors, which can limit her access to timely, affordable, and effective breast health care services. In this consensus manuscript, phases of an early detection program development are described, beginning with management strategies required for the diagnosis of clinically detectable disease, and core issues are described pertaining to successful planning, implementation, and the iterative process of program improvement needed for a breast cancer early detection program to succeed in any resource setting.
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