An organization is made up of people interacting for common objectives, in a given structure (may be rather formal in the case of a company, an administration, or an institution, or rather informal in the case of an interest community or a practice community), in an internal environment, and with an external environment. Based on definitions of Grundstein (2004) and O’Leary (1998), we define kn...

The debate over direct-to-consumer (DTC) screening companies intensi ed recently as Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy organization, sent letters to 20 hospitals on June 19, 2014, urging their leadership to sever business relationships with HealthFair, a prominent DTC screening company. Public Citizen states that HealthFair’s “heavily promoted, community-wide cardiovascular health screening pr...

Opaque communications between groups of data processors leave individuals out of touch with the circulation and use of their personal information. Empowering individuals in this regard requires supplying them — or auditors on their behalf — with clear data handling guarantees. We introduce an inference model providing individuals with global (organization-wide) accountability guarantees which t...

Economic performance is one of the major goals of any company. This involes important decisions to optimize the allocation of cash resources, ie labor, raw materials, energy, capital equipment, etc.. The objectives of the organization can be measured as effectiveness (the extent to which objectives have been met) or as efficiency (the extent to which objectives have been achieved in the availab...

The deadliest Ebola outbreak the world has ever seen is currently ravaging West Africa, despite the concerted efforts of the World Health Organization and many national governments. The current picture is troubling, but not altogether unexpected. Ebola was initially identified in 1976, and since that time, few drugs have been developed to combat it. The same is true for myriad other dangerous i...

OBJECTIVE To test the effectiveness of a programme aimed at reducing the risky use of alcohol and alcohol-related HIV risk and increase help-seeking behaviour among a sample of municipal employees in the Western Cape Province, South Africa. METHODS A clustered randomised controlled trial was conducted in 2011-2012 among 325 employees. The eight hour intervention, Team Awareness (TA), addressi...

either evenly-balanced sex ratios or sex ratios in favour of females, as in states like Kerala and Manipur. In the Northwest sex ratios have been far more imbalanced against females among specific land-owning communities (such as Rajputs, Jats, Gujjars) and relatively more balanced among almost all have shifted to a deficit of females and are slowly moving towards the all-India pattern. Lower s...