The presentation is about the design of the backbone of the Estonian governmental information systems X-Road. The system is already ten years old and has proven to be useful and reliable. The presentation describes the vision of the system, the requirements analysis process and the technical design decisions. The vision was to create a web-services based unified access to all governmental regis...

In the last decade, caseloads in AFDC/TANF have shifted dramatically up, then down. Existing studies fail to explain the changes well. Also, they do not reveal the policies behind the changes, nor the important role of governmental quality in shaping welfare reform. In this study, I use cross-sectional models based on states, measure welfare reform policies directly using program data, and rela...

aligning financial incentives (fis) to health policy goals is becoming increasingly popular. in many cases, such initiatives have failed to deliver anticipated benefits. attributing this to the actions of self-interested and resistant professionals is not an entirely helpful approach. it is important to avoid simplistic assumptions to build knowledge of how and why schemes are implemented in pr...

In modern societies, the proportion of women who delay childbearing beyond the age of 35 years has greatly increased in recent decades. They are falsely reassured by popular beliefs that advances in new reproductive technologies can compensate for the age-related decline in fertility. Yet age remains the single most important determinant of male and female fertility, either natural or treated. ...

BACKGROUND This study examines whether social age deadlines exist for childbearing in women and men, how they vary across countries, whether they are lower than actual biological deadlines and whether they are associated with childbearing at later ages and the availability of assisted reproduction techniques (ARTs). METHODS This study is based on the European Social Survey, Round 3 (2006-2007...

Assessment is considered as one of the fundamental elements in the field of foreign language acquisition. In order for communication take place, adequate number of vocabulary is needed to be known by the learners. The salient role of vocabulary in the field of foreign language acquisition resulted in the publication of several hundreds of papers and dozens of books. Due to the dominant role of ...

STUDY OBJECTIVE The aim was to study the influence of childbearing pattern on the incidence of breast cancer and uterine corpus cancer. DESIGN This was an ecological study of birth cohorts of women. SETTING The study was population based, involving the whole of Norway. PARTICIPANTS The participants were Norwegian women born between 1890 and 1944. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS Age specif...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To investigate the association between the spatial concentration of deprived households and teenage non-marital childbearing. Associations with area deprivation are tested before and after allowing for levels of personal deprivation. DESIGN AND SETTING The individual data are derived from the 2% sample of anonymised records (SAR) from the census of 1991 in Great Britain, and a...