Background Government policy measures have a key role to play in the prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). The Caribbean, a middle-income region, has the highest per capita burden of NCDs in the Americas. Our aim was to examine policy development and implementation between the years 2000 and 2013 on NCD prevention and control in Barbados, and to investigate factors promotin...

It has been estimated that over 700 million people still do not have enough food to eat on a daily basis and that more than 2 billion are subsisting on diets that lack the essential vitamins and minerals required for normal growth and development and to prevent premature death and disabilites such as blindness and mental retardation. At the same time, millions more suffer from chronic diseases ...

Governments have paid great attention to the results of happiness research. In many countries, the object of government policy is no longer taken to be development in terms of raising GNP. Their focus has shifted to a National Index of Happiness. This paper analyses whether such an aggregate Happiness Index is a better guide to development than GNP or other indices of development. We argue that...

the field of cognitive psychology has increasingly provided scientific insights to explore how humans are subject to unconscious sources of evidentiary bias, leading to errors that can affect judgement and decision-making. increasingly these insights are being applied outside the realm of individual decision-making to the collective arena of policy-making as well. a recent editorial in this jou...

The Advisory Committee on Antimicrobial Resistance and Healthcare Associated Infection (ARHAI) was created at the height of the incidence of Clostridium difficile infection (CDI). This article describes the role of ARHAI in the evaluation of laboratory testing for CDI, a related consultation on the legal requirements for manufacturers of in vitro diagnostic medical devices, a CDI healthcare bun...

The Information Security Policy (ISP) of an organisation is expected to specify for employees their behaviour towards security, and the security ethos of the organisation. However, there are a wide range of opinions and expertise that should be considered by organisations when developing an ISP. This paper aims to identify the stakeholders that should be utilised in an ISP development process a...

This paper explores how language policy affects the socio-economic development of nation states through two channels: the individual’s exposure to and (in reference to an individual’s mother tongue) linguistic distance from the official language. In a cross-country framework the paper first establishes a robust and sizeable negative relationship between an official language that is distant from...

It has become increasingly important to support agile organizations with easily re-configurable work environments. This paper describes the ongoing work on a framework for personalizing the dynamic behavior of contextaware workspaces. The framework promotes the development of futuristic workspaces that support people's work practices in an unobtrusive, contextaware, and personalized manner. The...

First, we briefly explore issues of infrastructures of information polity, informatisation of public administration, civic networking, regulation, information inequalities and ‘digital divide.’ Next, we sketch the perspectives of a socially accountable policy for the new ICTs and we conclude with the value of ‘democratic rationalisation.’ It is generally accepted (Dutton, 1996) that the develop...

The paper evaluates several potential public policies to increase research and development (R&D) investments with the goal of introducing innovations to reduce harmful industrial emissions. The policies – new preinnovation taxes, more stringent emissions regulations, promotion of cooperative R&D, promotion of outside financing from other companies and from the public, diplomacy to encourage emi...