Most countries have acceded to at least one global or regional covenant or treaty confirming the right to health. After years of international discussions on human rights, many governments are now moving towards practical implementation of their commitments. A practical example may be of help to those governments who aim to translate their international treaty obligations into practice. WHO's E...

Organic Computing (OC) is an upcoming research area with strong relationships to the ideas and concepts of agent-based systems. Therefore, in this paper we will have a closer look at agent systems, organic computing systems (as well as autonomic computing systems) and state commonalities and examine divergences between them. We then propose a common view on these technologies and show how they ...

Nonlinear diffusion filtering and wavelet shrinkage are two methods that serve the same purpose, namely discontinuity-preserving denoising. In this chapter we give a survey on relations between both paradigms when space-discrete or fully discrete versions of nonlinear diffusion filters are considered. For the case of space-discrete diffusion, we show equivalence between soft Haar wavelet shrink...

There exists a gap between what a human user wants in mind and what (s)he could get from the information retrieval (IR) systems by his/her queries. We say an IR system is perfect if it could always provide the users with what they want in their minds if available in corpus, and optimal if it could present to the users what it finds in an optimal way. In this paper, we empirically study how far ...

We extracted bacterial isolates of similar colony morphology from spatially located soil samples within 1 ha of old-growth forest. The same soil samples were used to prepare growth medium. Each isolate was then cultured in each medium and its growth recorded. There was no overall tendency for isolates to grow more successfully in their home site (i.e., the medium derived from the soil sample fr...