This teaching case features a situation at Belgacom, the leading telecommunications company in Belgium, end of April 2005. Wim Bouckenooghe, newly appointed finance director of Belgacom’s Network and IT division within the Fixed Line Services (FLS) segment, is troubled by the effectiveness of the selection of the discretionary IT projects, particularly the larger ones. He is especially concerne...

• Uniformity of growth. A county may grow by 10 percent in population, that growth may be very unevenly distributed around the county. In one extreme case, all the growth is in one township with no change in any of the other townships. Another extreme would have all townships growing at exactly the same rate of increase. We will use two measures—the range of growth rates and the coefcient of v...

OBJECTIVE To assess adolescents' satisfaction with reproductive health services in Mdantsane Township, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. METHOD A structured questionnaire was used to assess the levels of participants' satisfaction with reproductive health services. The sample consisted of 200 adolescents within the ages of 16 to 19 years. A response of "yes" indicated that the person was s...

Over the 14 years since economic reform began, and the restructuring of the economy to encourage international trade, a large number of township enterprises have been developed and put into operation in the Peoples Republic of China. From 1978 to 1991, the number of enterprises has increased 11.5 times; the number of employees has increased 2.4 times; the fixed assets have increased 13.7 times;...

BACKGROUND Many studies have examined the risk factors for HCC (including hepatitis B virus, hepatitis C virus, aflatoxin, retinol, cigarette smoking, and alcohol consumption). However, data from previous studies on the association between iron exposure, land subsidence, and HCC mortality/incidence were limited, especially in Taiwanese population. We aimed to explore the geographical distributi...

Quantitative analysis for the risk of human cancer from the ingestion of inorganic arsenic has been based on the reported cancer mortality experience in the blackfoot disease (BFD) -endemic area of southwest Taiwan. Linear regression analysis shows that arsenic as the sole etiologic factor accounts for only 21% of the variance in the village standardized mortality ratios for bladder and lung ca...

In this study, inductive coupled plasma-optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES) is employed for the evaluation of soil pollution for selected metals in the Vanderbijlpark area of South Africa. Soil samples investigated were collected from five different sites in the city based on their proximity to the industrial areas of Vanderbijlpark. Soil samples were collected from close to traffic robots,...

PROBLEM The Chinese central government launched the Health System Reform Plan in 2009 to strengthen disease control and health promotion and provide a package of basic public health services. Village doctors receive a modest subsidy for providing public health services associated with the package. Their beliefs about this subsidy and providing public health services could influence the quality ...

Workplace violence in Chinese township hospitals is a major public health problem. We identified the risk factors of healthcare workers' worry about experiencing workplace violence in 90 Chinese township hospitals and determined specific measures for differing stages of violence (based on crisis management theory). Participants were 440 general practitioners and 398 general nurses from Heilongj...

BACKGROUND The purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between fluoride ions in drinking water and the incidence of dental fluorosis in some endemic areas of Bongo District, Ghana. METHOD Two hundred children were randomly selected from various homes and taken through a questionnaire. Their teeth were examined for the detection of dental fluorosis using the Dean's specific in...