Research funding, promotions, and career trajectories are currently increasingly dependent on the emerging economy of publication and citations (EPC) across the globe. Such an economy encourages scholars to publish in international journals that are indexed in databases such as Scopus and Web of Science. These developments place an increased emphasis on the question of who is allowed to publish...

This article describes key requirements of effective health service management that emerge from a review of Australian developments in the respective roles of government and the market. From a public interest perspective, community and industry ownership and management of funds appear superior to market-driven health management approaches. The clear separation of public interest-based policy an...

Ch ap te r 8 I CT C ha lle ng es fo r t he A ra b W or ld Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to discuss ongoing developments in the Arab world in the areas of information and communication technology (ICT) and to highlight the obstacles to and present recommendations for further development. We looked at the environment as well as individual, business, and government variables in asses...

Because of heterogeneity across regions, economic policy measures are increasingly targeted at the regional level. As a result, the need for economic forecasts at a subnational level is rapidly increasing. The data available to compute regional forecasts is usually based on a pseudo-panel that consists of a limited number of observations over time, and a large number of areas (regions) strongly...

A review of the general and transportation plans of 123 cities across the nation shows that the term “center” is used in connection with various geographic levels--region, city, subregion, town, community, and village. Generally, no matter the geographic level, the center is described as the densest part of an area, characterized by compact, mixed-use development, multiple transit options and e...

Systemic sclerosis (SSc), previously known as progressive systemic sclerosis, is a form of scleroderma and a multisystem connective tissue disease which can impact on every aspect of anesthetic care, especially airway management. In this review we outline clinical manifestations and current medical treatment of the disease, and general principles of anesthetizing these patients. We focus on the...

This paper reports the findings of two studies on the socio-economic impacts of the regional spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) in Catalonia, and Lombardia, and then compares the developments in these two regions with those in other nine advanced regional SDIs to explore the extent to which the findings reported for the two detailed case-studies could be generalised. The significance of this p...

Background: Rapidly increasing residential electricity demand has made raising energy efficiency an important policy issue in controlling electricity demand. Methods: This study uses a stochastic frontier model to estimate the residential electricity demand function and analyse electricity energy efficiency levels and their determinants using regional data on Japan. Results: The results confirm...

Regional Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models provide enhanced detail for forecast quantities such as cloud cover, visibility and rainfall. Previous work at the Met Office has shown that improving the humidity analysis through the assimilation of AMSU radiances improves the accuracy of these quantities. This paper highlights several new developments in the assimilation of AMSU-B radiances ...

Recent developments in echocardiographic imaging technology and processing enabled the quantification of myocardial motion and deformation in a clinical setting. Echocardiographic strain (-rate) imaging provides a relatively easy way to study myocardial deformation. However, although (local) deformation is clearly linked to cardiac (dys-) function, it is important to understand how this informa...