BACKGROUND Health policies are important instruments for improving population health. However, experience suggests that policies designed for the whole population do not always benefit the most vulnerable. Participation of vulnerable groups in the policy-making process provides an opportunity for them to influence decisions related to their health, and also to exercise their rights. This paper ...

the matrix functions appear in several applications in engineering and sciences. the computation of these functions almost involved complicated theory. thus, improving the concept theoretically seems unavoidable to obtain some new relations and algorithms for evaluating these functions. the aim of this paper is proposing some new reciprocal for the function of block anti diagonal matrices. more...

Abstract. Based on temporal difference method in neuro-dynamic programming, an adaptive policy for finite state Markov decision processes with the average reward is constructed under the minorization condition. We estimate the value function by a learning iteration algorithm. And the adaptive policy is specified as an ε-forced modification of the greedy policy for the estimated value and the es...

This article presents an integrated ecologic and economic model to study landscape and land use change, using the Spatial Analysis Modelling Tool (SAMT). The study involves integrating these models to analyse landscape and land use changes in Quillow region of North East Germany. Different price and premium scenarios were implemented to indicate the likely effect of policy change. Results of th...

Most of the recent literature on the achievement effects of school size has examined school and district performance. These studies have demonstrated substantial benefits of smaller school and district size in impoverished settings. To date, however, no work has adequately examined the relationship of size and socioeconomic status (SES) with students as the unit of analysis. One study, however,...

Optimization applications often depend upon a huge number of uncertain parameters. In many contexts, however, the amount of relevant data per parameter is small, and hence, we may have only imprecise estimates. We term this setting – where the number of uncertainties is large, but all estimates have fixed and low precision – the “small-data, large-scale regime.” We formalize a model for this re...

The present study is to indicate that the comparison between sectoral production multipliers of an input-output (I/O) model and a social accounting matrix (SAM) framework is almost impossible without taking into account accounting balances and theoretical considerations. Theoretically, the I/O model provides the Leontief’s production function, on the basis of which sectoral output multiplier ca...

In the 1980s, the US government encouraged the cooperation of industries with universities in order to bridge funding gaps and cope with global competitive markets through legislations that allow universities to start spin-off businesses and to generate profits from patents. At the turn of the century, university partnerships with the private sector have greatly increased through research grant...

In order to examine the relationship between school size and achievement, a study was conducted using longitudinal achievement data from North Carolina for three separate cohorts of public school students (one elementary, one middle and one high school). Results revealed several interactions between size and student characteristics, all of which indicated that the achievement gaps typically exi...