BACKGROUND Effective leadership is of prime importance in any organization and it goes through changes based on accepted health promotion and behavior change theory. Although there are many leadership styles, transformational leadership, which emphasizes supportive leadership behaviors, seems to be an appropriate style in many settings particularly in the health care and educational sectors whi...

In Croatian medical laboratories (ML), external quality assessment (EQA) has a long tradition of almost half of a century. At national level, EQA is provided by Croatian Centre for Quality Assessment in Laboratory Medicine (CROQALM) which is a part of Croatian Society of Medical Biochemistry and Laboratory Medicine.
This case study aimed to summarize the main challenges, which are set to CROQAL...

Received: 7 May 2003 Revised: 7 December 2004 Accepted: 22 May 2005 Online publication date: 18 December 2005 Abstract Both theoretical and empirical studies of professional service employee standardization preferences are relatively scarce. Using responses from 398 employees of an international public relations firm, this study finds that employees from high power distance, high uncertainty av...

The paper describes alternative ways for the use of XML in public administration and gives examples of the use in Finland. A challenge for getting XML into use is in the XML standardization. XML standardization levels and types in public administration are introduced. The RASKE methodology developed in long-term collaboration of the Finnish Parliament and ministries with the University of Jyväs...

Standards play an important role within information and communication technology as it becomes networked and complex. No single model has yet been developed to address how successful standards emerge. We propose a dynamic process model of standardization that integrates separate lines of inquiry to standardization activities including Simon’s theory of artifact design (D), Weick’s concept of se...

We describe a variation of the Prêt-à-Voter voting protocol that keeps the same ballot layout but borrows and slightly modifies the underlying cryptographic primitives from Punchscan, which is based on bit commitments. By using unconditionally hiding bit commitments, our protocol obtains unconditional privacy. We suggest a way to make cheating on the computational binding bit commitments imposs...

The laboratory criteria that define patients with antiphospholipid syndrome (APS) include lupus anticoagulant (LAC), anticardiolipin antibodies and anti-β2 glycoprotein I antibodies (aβ2GPI). All assays show methodological shortcomings and the combination of the three tests, each with different sensitivity and specificity, and hence, differences in clinical utility make the laboratory diagnosis...

The Helios voting scheme is well studied including formal proofs for verifiability and ballot privacy. However, depending on its version, the scheme provides either participation privacy (hiding who participated in the election) or verifiability against malicious bulletin board (preventing election manipulation by ballot stuffing), but not both at the same time. It also does not provide receipt...

A task common to nearly all types of election auditing is that of human auditors physically counting ballots by hand. This task, fundamental to the goal of accuracy in an audit, can be a source of error. While somewhat basic in its nature, the process of counting can be strongly influenced by many procedural and legal factors. In the current study, we examine how specific group counting procedu...

BACKGROUND Construction of electrochemical impedance sensors by the self-assembly technique has become a promising strategy for the 'label-free' detection of protein-ligand interactions. However, previous impedance sensors are devoid of an inherent electrochemical signal, which limits the standardization of the sensors for protein recognition in a reproducible manner. RESULTS We designed and ...