After inhalational anthrax was diagnosed in a Connecticut woman on November 20, 2001, postexposure prophylaxis was recommended for postal workers at the regional mail facility serving the patient's area. Although environmental testing at the facility yielded negative results, subsequent testing confirmed the presence of Bacillus anthracis. We distributed questionnaires to 100 randomly selected ...

BACKGROUND Epidemiological research often requires collection of data from a representative sample of the community or recruitment of specific groups through broad community approaches. The population coverage of traditional survey methods such as mail-outs to residential addresses, and telephone contact via public directories or random-digit-dialing is declining and survey response rates are f...

he change in the postal sector over the past 20 years and in particular the are transforming the postal services industries such as institutional, market and ents. Taking the argument from here this paper defines the four major response erators all across the world to analyse how different firms and countries are enges of increased competition and changing consumer behaviour, also in ing libera...

The increasing importance of service sector has caused greater interest of both scientific community and practitioners in examining new service development (NSD) and understanding the necessary conditions of successful service innovation. Significant changes happened in the Postal sector during the last decades forces postal organizations to think in terms of service innovation, quality of serv...

STUDY OBJECTIVE The aim was to investigate two possible sources of bias inherent in using a household based postal questionnaire, the "proxy effect", inaccurate reporting about characteristics of others, and the "saliency principle", reporting of only the most salient features. This is of importance in surveys concerned with screening the population to identify individuals with certain characte...

Combining the outputs from several postal address readers (PARs) is a promising approach for improving the performances of mailing address recognition systems. In this paper, this problem is solved using the Transferable Belief Model, an uncertain reasoning framework based on Dempster-Shafer belief functions. Applying this framework to postal address recognition implies defining the frame of di...

Filipi N. Silva, Cesar H. Comin1,∗ Thomas K. DM. Peron, Francisco A. Rodrigues, Cheng Ye, Richard C. Wilson, Edwin Hancock, and Luciano da F. Costa Instituto de Física de São Carlos, Universidade de São Paulo, São Carlos, São Paulo, Brazil Departamento de Matemática Aplicada e Estatística, Instituto de Ciências Matemáticas e de Computação, Universidade de São Paulo, Caixa Postal 668,13560-970 S...

Bayesian networks are formal graphical languages for representation and communication of decision scenarios requiring reasoning under uncertainty. We will analyze Bayesian networks and outline their advantages and disadvantages. Based on these assumptions we discuss transport decision scenarios under uncertainty. A transport planning approach like the postal delivery demonstrates a good framewo...

Using a ‘process’ based conception of absorptive capacity, this paper reports the findings from an ethnography of organizational learning conducted within the marketing department of the UK’s postal provider, Royal Mail. Through vignettes of two contrasting marketing projects undertaken in conjunction with external partners, the results show that interorganizational learning is supported by inf...