An Advanced Distributed Learning environment needs to extend beyond technical drivers to pedagogical and organizational dimensions that focus on the interaction between the learner and the learning environment. In fact, effective e-learning resources can not only be used to compliment faceto-face education or replace the classroom for distance education, but can facilitate the integration of st...

The increasing threat inherent to counterfeited drugs requires coordinated effort among multiple actors with diverging interests. Although multiple initiatives exist, no comprehensive and promising development and diffusion of a commonly applicable and interoperable solution has taken place so far. Agreeing on standards is an essential step on the road to a successful initiative on drug counter...

Living organisms are constantly exposed to changing environmental stimuli and insults; dynamic adaptation is crucial for survival. The ability of cells to sense their surrounding environment and respond in an appropriate manner is essential for the normal functioning of every living organism, and although cells are constantly exposed to numerous stimuli, they are usually able to accurately iden...

Differences in Quality of Life Estimates Using Rents and Home Values Quality of life differences across areas can be measured by differences in “real wages”, where real wages are computed as nominal wages adjusted for the cost of living. Computing cost of living differences involves several important issues, including how housing prices should be measured. Previous researchers typically have us...

Guided by the assumption that the preferences for a particular type of living arrangement are influenced by values of privacy and the level of needs/resources among the elderly, this study investigates how the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the Korean elderly are associated with their preferences for independent living over coresidence with their children. A logit model analys...

Objective measurement of daily steps was used to assess whether children (n = 2,076) in Years 1, 5 and 10 who reported walking to or from school were more active and more likely to reach recommended step targets than those who were driven or took public transport to school. Walking to school was associated with higher school-day steps in older children (16,238 vs 15,275 for Year 5 male p < .05,...

The rise in the average age and the decrease in the rate of births, cause the phenomenon called population ageing, which rises a number of issues. The oncoming shortage of caregivers and the strong desire of the older adults to live in their own homes originated an increasing interest in Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). AAL encompasses technical systems to support people in their daily routines. ...

Being able to measure time, whether directly or indirectly, is a significant advantage for an organism. It permits it to predict regular events, and prepare for them on time. Thus, clocks are ubiquitous in biology. In the present paper, we consider the most minimal abstract pure clocks and investigate their characteristics with respect to their ability to measure time. Amongst other, we find fu...

As can be seen from the title, this article consists of two distinguishable questions: The first, concerns the possibility of defining entropy, and the second, concerns the applicability of the Second Law. In most cases, writers intertwine the two concepts on entropy and the Second Law 1,2 . In fact, most people define the Second Law as “the law of increasing entropy.” 1-2 This is unfortunately...

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