BACKGROUND Priority-setting decisions are based on an important, but not sufficient set of values and thus lead to disagreement on priorities. Accountability for Reasonableness (AFR) is an ethics-based approach to a legitimate and fair priority-setting process that builds upon four conditions: relevance, publicity, appeals, and enforcement, which facilitate agreement on priority-setting decisio...

BACKGROUND While much is now known about how to assess the competence of medical practitioners in a controlled environment, less is known about how to measure the performance in practice of experienced doctors working in their own environments. The performance of doctors depends increasingly on how well they function in teams and how well the health care system around them functions. METHODS ...

This article shows how funding research on Alzheimer's disease became a priority for the British Medical Research Council (MRC) in the late 1970s and 1980s, thanks to work that isolated new pathological and biochemical markers and showed that the disease affected a significant proportion of the elderly population. In contrast to histories that focus on the emergence of new and competing theorie...

BACKGROUND Nearly 3 billion people worldwide rely on solid fuel combustion to meet basic household energy needs. The resulting exposure to air pollution causes an estimated 4.5% of the global burden of disease. Large variability and a lack of resources for research and development have resulted in highly uncertain exposure estimates. OBJECTIVE We sought to identify research priorities for exp...

The contributions of this paper are threefold. First, a solution to the problem of prioritized mutual exclusion in a distributed system is proved correct. This protocol is based on fewer requirements than prioritized extensions of other protocols and outperforms other protocols with an average complexity of (log n) and a worst-case complexity of O(n) messages for n nodes. Second, the concept of...

Real-Time Mach provides real-time thread and real-time synchronization facilities. A real-time thread can be created for a periodic or aperiodic activity with a timing constraint. Threads can be synchronized among them using a real-time version of the monitor based synchronization mechanism with a suitable locking protocol. In Real-Time Mach, we have implemented several locking policies, such a...

In recent years, real-time operating systems began to support the resource reservation paradigm. This technique has proved to be very effective in providing QoS to both, real-time and legacy applications, ensuring that the temporal misbehavior of an application does not affect any other (temporal isolation). However, resource sharing in a reservation system is still not well understood, and can...

A limitation in the design of the interface of C++ standard priority queues is addressed. The use of priority queues in Dijkstra’s shortest path search algorithm is used as an example. Priority queues are often implemented using heaps. There is a problem, as it may be necessary to change the priority of an element while it is in the queue, but finding the element from within a heap is costly. T...

When thinking about priority setting in access to healthcare resources, decision-making requires that cost-effectiveness is balanced against medical ethics. The burden of disease has emerged as an important approach to the assessment of health needs for political decision-making. However, the disability adjusted life years approach hides conceptual and methodological issues regarding the claims...