How does the degree of political decentralization in a country affect the quality of its government? Greater political decentralization might make governments more honest and efficient by bringing officials “closer to the people”, forcing them to compete for mobile capital, and facilitating the satisfaction of diverse local tastes. On the other hand, it might create coordination problems or roa...

In recent years, cell phones have played an increasingly important role in rapidly-developing global telecommunication services. At present, mobile business develops very fast. However, the development in other mobile service fields, such as public service, mobile medical service, etc, is still in its infant stage. Drawing on the experience of the ‘doctor workstation project’ which is cooperate...

We focus on determining the impacts of government programs on farms’ technical inefficiency levels. We use Kumbhakar’s (2002) stochastic frontier model that accounts for both production risks and risk preferences. Our theoretical framework shows that decoupled government transfers are likely to increase (decrease) DARA (IARA) farmers’ production inefficiencies if variable inputs are risk decrea...

In our analysis of e-political participation among a 2003-random sample survey of 478 respondents drawn from Iowa, Pennsylvania and Colorado, six blocks of variables were entered: (1) socio-demographic (2) place effects, (3) voting, (4) technology use (VCR, cell phone, etc.) and computer apathy, (5) attitudes toward technology and (6) specific uses of the internet. In the final block, younger a...

We focus on determining the impacts of government programs on farms’ technical inefficiency levels. We use Kumbhakar’s (2002) stochastic frontier model that accounts for both production risks and risk preferences. Our theoretical framework shows that decoupled government transfers are likely to increase (decrease) DARA (IARA) farmers’ production inefficiencies if variable inputs are risk decrea...

BACKGROUND Community-Based Rehabilitation (CBR) is a multi-sectoral approach working to equalize opportunities and include people with disability in all aspects of community life. Reliable and internationally comparable data needed to monitor and evaluate CBR are scarce, partially due to the absence of standardized indicators. The objective of this manuscript is to describe the collaborative de...

The success of the electronics industry over the last decade in developing the mass consumer market for computers, cellphones and other personal electronic equipment has been phenomenal. Society must now finds ways of safely and economically recovering the materials that are embedded in these products. This will require significant investment by governments, industry and individuals, in technol...

This paper presents a case study about the development of MT systems for two Baltic governments. The governments of Latvia and Lithuania presented Tilde with a need to expand their communication to reach multilingual citizens. In order to meet this need, Tilde collected a vast amount of domain-specific data and trained MT system to produce high-quality translation. In the process, Tilde identif...

Emerging trends in the health-related use of cell phones include the proliferation of mobile health applications for the care and monitoring of patients with chronic diseases and the rise in cell phone usage by Latinos and African Americans in the United States. This article reviews public policy in four areas with the goal of improving the care of patients belonging to culturally and linguisti...

mobile commerce is whatever electronic transfer or transaction via a mobile modem through a mobile net in which the true value or advance payment is done for goods, services or information. a mobile payment system should be beneficial for all related persons. for a payment system to be a successful system, end-user, seller, exporter and operators should see a additional value in it. end-user pr...