Conservation initiatives to protect and restore valued species communities in human-dominated landscapes face challenges linked to their potential costs. Conservation easements on private land may represent a cost-effective alternative to land purchase, but long-term costs to monitor and enforce easements, or defend legal challenges, remain uncertain. We explored the cost-effectiveness of conse...

A new class of partially coherent beams with a separable phase, which carry optical vortices, is introduced. It is shown that any member of the class can be represented as an incoherent superposition of fully coherent Laguerre-Gauss modes of arbitrary order, with the same azimuthal mode index. The free-space propagation properties of such partially coherent beams are studied analytically, and t...

Cellular therapies, such as stem cell-based treatments, have been widely researched and numerous products and treatments have been developed. Despite this, there has been relatively limited use of these technologies in the healthcare sector. This study sought to investigate the perceived barriers to this more widespread adoption. An anonymous online questionnaire was developed, based on the fin...

In this study, we compared the likely cost-effectiveness of alternative strategies for controlling a school-based measles outbreak. The analysis involved assessing the expected costs and number of cases in a school-based outbreak of measles, with no intervention and with each of six control strategies. The marginal cost per case prevented ranged from $32.90 when only previously unvaccinated sch...

We derive an expression for the lower bound of the phase-space beam quality factor M(2) of an ultrashort pulse. We show that the condition M(2)>or=1 does not, in general, hold for such pulsed beams. Rather, the minimum value of M(2) depends on the pulse spectrum. We also show that M(2) attains minimum only for pulsed beams whose spot size varies with frequency as omega(-1/2), and that the radia...

The National Health and Medical Research Council has recently issued guidelines on colo-rectal cancer, and given significant support to Colorectal Cancer Screening. However, the evidence of cost-effectiveness is inconclusive according to the Cochrane Centre. I argue that it would be wise to undertake trials that are appropriately funded. Otherwise, there is a risk that much money will be spent ...

INTRODUCTION Pregnancy and the first few years of a child's life are important windows of opportunity in which to equalise life chances. A Better Start (ABS) is an area-based intervention being delivered in five areas of socioeconomic disadvantage across England. This protocol describes an evaluation of the impact and cost-effectiveness of ABS. METHODS AND ANALYSIS The evaluation of ABS compr...