many countries are turning their attention to the use of explicit financial incentives to drive desired improvements in healthcare performance. however, we have only a weak evidence-base to inform policy in this area. the research challenge is to generate robust evidence on what financial incentives work, under what circumstances, for whom and with what intended and unintended consequences.

To the Editor: W read with great interest the article by Peterman et al.1 and applaud their work in highlighting the value of implementation science and program evaluation. In their 4-year long evaluation of data in nearly 60 health jurisdictions, the implementation of STD performance measures was associated with little improvement in STD program performance. Seen as an intervention, performanc...

Monitoring network performance and status is a fundamental task for network operators as it directly impacts the quality of the offered services and hence user satisfaction. For this purpose a consolidated approach, which is largely adopted by network operators, is based on the so-called KPIs (key performance indicators). In this paper, we propose and discuss a set of KPIs to monitor network pe...

Recently, a new blind spectrum sensing technique based on signal space dimension estimation was developed for sensing the spectrum holes in the primary user’s bands. The mean idea of this technique is that the number of significant eigenvalues of the covariance matrix of the received signal is directly related to the presence/absence of data in the signal. In this paper, we study the collaborat...

We present a new approach for early performance prediction based on MSC speci ed systems in the context of SDL Our approach is integrated into existing design methodologies as proposed by commercial tool vendors where communication software is fully speci ed in SDL and the nal implementation is derived from there Obviously the structure of the SDL speci cation will in uence the performance of t...

Performance tuning in the embedded systems domain poses a new set of challenges for software and hardware designers. Techniques proven to work for general purpose architectures can not always be directly applied to the signal processor environment. Program analysis tools have been shown to be invaluable in the analysis of general purpose microprocessors. We anticipate that similar tools will be...

ABBREVIATIONS ADB — Asian Development Bank CAP — country assistance program CAPE — country assistance program evaluation CSP — country strategy and program DEC — Development Effectiveness Committee DG — director general DMC — developing member country DP — development partner EA — Executing Agency MDB — multilateral development bank MDG — Millennium Development Goal NGO — nongovernment organiza...

Current hardware for compute intensive tasks includes a large amount of processing faan optimized way. High performance computing (HPC) is always focused in solving challenging (or, at least, compute intensive) problems for which the response time is the priority. We have been working from two different but usually complementary research problems: a) updating and parallelizing legacy (HPC/numer...