Countries in the Balkan region use pharmaco-economic data for decisions about the inclusion of new pharmaceuticals into their positive drug lists, but no predefined frameworks are used and resources for health technology assessment (HTA) are limited. The goal of this analysis is to investigate into possible development directions for the HTA system in the region, and provide some practical reco...

We introduce endogenous directed technical change into numerical integrated climate and development policy assessment. We distinguish expenditures on innovation (R&D) and imitation (international technology spillovers) and consider the role of capital investment in creating and implementing new technologies. Our main contribution is to calibrate and numerically solve the model and to examine th...

Economic development in Taiwan over the past four decades has been characterized by rapid growth, export expansion, stable prices, full employment, and fairly equitable income distribution. In the natural course of its development, the economy underwent significant long-term changes in terms of production, trade, and employment. Although the two oil crises of the 1970s had short-term impacts on...

As the number of cores on a chip increases, power consumed by the communication structures takes significant portion of the overall power-budget. As technology scales to deep sub-micron processes, leakage power becomes increasingly significant as compared to dynamic power. In this paper, we design a power-aware switch including three operating modes, and they are normal mode, lease-line mode, a...

The first quarter of 2004 found French public research laboratories in unprecedented turmoil, partly from the budget cuts made since 2002, and partly from 550 permanent civil service jobs being turned into fixed-term contract appointments. It is this latter minimal cost-saving measure around which the debate has crystallized. For the government, it reflected an aim to see greater diversificatio...

BACKGROUND The European Community has made a commitment to colorectal cancer (CRC) screening, but regional considerations may affect the design of national screening programs. We developed a decision analytic model tailored to a pilot screening program for high-risk persons in Spain with the aim of informing public policy decisions. MATERIALS AND METHODS We constructed a decision analytic Mar...

TODAY, THE UNITED STATES IS ONLY ONE DECADE REmoved from what was then a forecast of difficult meager times for the national investment in medical and scientific research. In 1995, the US House of Representatives budget resolution called for a cut in funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of 5% for fiscal year (FY) 1996 and a freeze on NIH funding through FY 2000. However, the NIH ...

In this paper, we present an implementation of real-time video tracking on a novel reconfigurable multi-core architecture capable of reacting to changing workload while minimizing the number of active cores. The system is comprised of multiple processor cores executing sequential software threads, and hardware cores implemented in an FPGA executing dynamically reconfigurable hardware threads. S...

Mesh compression is an important task in geometry processing. It exploits geometric coherence of the data to reduce the amount of space needed to store a surfacemesh.Most techniques perform compression employing a uniform data quantization over the whole surface. Research in shape perception, however, suggests that there are parts of the mesh that are visually more relevant than others. We pres...

This article introduces the lazy matroid problem, which captures the goal of saving time or money in certain task selection scenarios. We are given a budget B and a matroid M with weights on its elements. The problem consists in finding an independent set F of minimum weight. In addition, F is feasible if its augmentation with any new element x implies that either F + x exceeds B or F + x is de...