Beyond opportunity costs: who bears the implementation costs of reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation?

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) in developing countries is based on the premise that conserving tropical forests is a cost-effective way to reduce carbon emissions and therefore can be fully funded by international actors with obligations or interests in reducing emissions. However, concerns have repeatedly been raised about whether stakeholders in REDD+ host countries will actually end up bearing the costs of REDD+. Most prior analyses of the costs of REDD+ have focused on the opportunity costs of foregone alternative uses of forest land.

Breast MRI: patterns of utilization and impact on patient management in the community hospital setting.

Objective: The objective of our study was to investigate the indications for breast magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, in our community hospital, determine how many probably benign MRI findings were malignant at follow-up, determine how many cancers were identified by MRI in screening patients, and evaluate the utility of MRI for surgical planning and problem-solving.

Materials And Methods: Five hundred twenty-eight contrast-enhanced MRI's of the breast in 434 patients were retrospectively reviewed. MRI images/reports were compared to surgical pathology reports and the results of follow-up studies.

Analyses of multilayered dental ceramics subjected to biaxial flexure tests.

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to formulate explicitly the equation to relate the biaxial strength of multilayered dental ceramics to the fracture load for multilayered discs subjected to biaxial flexure tests.

Methods: Analytical modeling showed that the solutions for multilayered discs subjected to biaxial flexure tests could be obtained from the existing solutions for monolayered systems by replacing the neutral surface position and the flexural rigidity of monolayers with those of multilayers. Finite element analyses were performed on porcelain/zirconia bilayered discs subjected to piston-on-ring and ring-on-ring tests to verify the analytical results.