Service Quality Effects of Incentive Regulation on Access Service in Telecommunications in the United States

Incentive regulation in the form of price caps was adopted for interstate access service in 1991 as a way to provide local exchange carriers with an incentive to improve their productive efficiency. An issue that has arisen with the adoption of price cap regulation is whether deterioration in service quality for interstate access service has been an unintended consequence. The analysis in this paper uses several different measures of service quality, including the average installation interval, the percent of commitments met, total trouble reports, and the average repair interval for both switched access service and special access service, to investigate empirically whether there has been a decline in service quality between 1991 and 2000. The results are conclusive. Overall service quality has fallen. To rectify the situation, a proposal is offered to adjust the price cap index to penalize LECs who fail to provide an acceptable level of aggregate service quality.     

Correlates of outcome following acute glutethimide overdosage

Potential predictors of outcome following acute glutethimide overdosage were assessed in 63 patients hospitalized with this diagnosis at a large urban medical center between 1962 and 1975. Their mean age was 34 years (range, 15 to 84 years) and 62% were female. Assisted ventilation was required in 59% of cases, and 32% developed hypotension. Six patients died, including all three aged 60 years or older. Multiple regression analysis confirmed that age was the major identifiable determinant of survival, regardless of other factors. Among identifiable determinants of coma grade, glutethimide dose, glutethimide plasma concentration, and coingestion of barbiturates were the most important. An ingested dose of 10 g or more, or a plasma concentration exceeding 30 microgram/ml, was almost always associated with deep coma. However, a relatively small ingested dose or a low plasma level by no means ruled out development of serious intoxication, particularly in those patients who also ingested barbiturates. Thus elderly individuals are at high risk for fatal outcome following glutethimide overdosage and should receive priority for intensive care and monitoring. Glutethimide dose, plasma concentration, and history of coingestion of barbiturates are of value in predicting development of deep coma. These items of information should be obtained on admission whenever possible.     

Ratification of the 1992 Climate Change Convention: What Determines Legislative Delay?

The authors use a proportional hazards framework toinvestigate the impact of various countrycharacteristics on the duration of time taken toratify the United Nations Framework Convention onClimate Change (FCCC). The most significant findingsare that the conditional probability of ratificationis positively related to total CO₂ emissions andthe presence of civil liberties. The finding foremissions indicates that large, polluting countrieswere under great political pressure to ratify theFCCC. The latter finding is consistent with earlierresearch that found that democratic freedoms raisedthe probability of signing the Montreal Protocol.     

Beyond COVID-19: Five commentaries on expert knowledge,executive action,and accountability in governance and public administration

Several Canadian and international scholars offer commentaries on the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for governments and public service institutions, and fruitful directions for public administration research and practice. This first suite of commentaries focuses on the executive branch, variously considering: the challenge for governments to balance demands for accountability and learning while rethinking policy mixes as social solidarity and expert knowledge increasingly get challenged; how the policy-advisory systems of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and United Kingdom were structured and performed in response to the COVID-19 crisis; whether there are better ways to suspend the accountability repertoires of Parliamentary systems than the multiparty agreement struck by the minority Liberal government with several opposition parties; comparing the Canadian government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Global Financial Crisis and how each has brought the challenge of inequality to the fore; and whether the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated or disrupted digital government initiatives, reinforced traditional public administration values or more open government.     

Bacterial Degradation of Risperidone and Paliperidone in Decomposing Blood

The stability of two benzisoxazole antipsychotics was determined in vitro in decomposing porcine blood inoculated with bacteria, utilizing a high‐performance liquid chromatography with ultraviolet and fluorescence detection method for drug quantitation. Stability experiments for risperidone and paliperidone were conducted at 7, 20 and 37°C for 4 days using sterile and bacterially inoculated porcine blood. The drugs were stable in sterile blood at each temperature and in inoculated blood at 7°C, but degraded significantly in inoculated blood at 20 and 37°C. Complete loss occurred within 2 days when incubated at 37°C. The benzisoxazole‐cleaved degradation products for both drugs were identified as 2‐hydroxybenzoyl‐risperidone and 2‐hydroxybenzoyl‐paliperidone utilizing liquid chromatography quadrupole‐time‐of‐flight mass spectrometry and accurate mass measurements. The degradation products have been found in postmortem case studies, including one case where risperidone and paliperidone were not detected, indicating complete conversion can occur in situ.     

Inter- and intra-subject variability in ethanol pharmacokinetic parameters: effects of testing interval and dose

Calculation of a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) at the time of an offence by forward or back-extrapolation, using population average values for ethanol pharmacokinetic parameters or a single estimate of individual specific parameters, ignores the possibility of inter- and intra-subject variability. In order to estimate inter- and intra-subject variability in the elimination rate and absorption rate, BAC was measured over time in 12 male volunteers on 4 occasions. Subjects received 0.44 g kg(-1) body weight of ethanol on the first study day, and 0.70 g kg(-1) body weight on subsequent study days 1, 11 and 12 weeks later, to enable comparisons in variability over short and long time periods and when the same or different doses were administered. Evidence of both inter- and intra-subject variability was found, with inter-subject variability substantially smaller than intra-subject variability when the dose varied. Forensically important differences in pharmacokinetic parameters were observed within individuals between occasions. These findings could have an important impact on medico-legal issues related to ethanol pharmacokinetics.