Crowdfunding represents an attractive new option for funding research projects, especially for students and early-career scientists or in the absence of governmental aid in some countries. The number of successful science-related crowdfunding campaigns is growing, which demonstrates the public's willingness to support and participate in scientific projects. Putting together a crowdfunding campa...

Compositional studies comparing transgenic crops with non-transgenic crops are almost universally required by governmental regulatory bodies to support the safety assessment of new transgenic crops. Here we discuss the assumptions that led to this requirement and lay out the theoretical and empirical evidence suggesting that such studies are no more necessary for evaluating the safety of transg...

Methods Efforts have focused on hand hygiene improvement using a three-pronged approach: 1) raising awareness of HCAI among health professionals and solutions for its prevention; 2) securing political commitment at governmental level to make HCAI prevention a health priority; 3) developing a range of technical tools to support hand hygiene programmes at the facility level, according to the WHO ...

The paper presents a process modelling-based Requirements Engineering Framework, where advanced requirements engineering techniques are combined with software quality modelling approaches to better assist and drive analysts and stakeholders to an early definition and validation of the desired system functionality and quality attributes, while supporting the redesign of the application context t...

An unfunded social security system faces the major risk, sometimes referred to as ”political risk”, that future generations do not agree to contribute as much as expected. In order to account properly for this risk, the paper considers a political process in which the support to the system is asked from each new born generation. The analysis is conducted in an overlapping generations economy th...

An unfunded Social Security system faces the major risk, sometimes referred to as ”political risk”, that future generations do not agree to contribute. In order to account properly for this risk, the paper considers a political process in which the support to the system is asked from each new born generation. The analysis is conducted in an overlapping generations economy that is subject to mac...

Collectors of confidential data, such as governmental agencies, hospitals, or search engine providers, can be pressured to permit data to be used for purposes other than that for which they were collected. To support the data curators, we initiate a study of pan-private algorithms; roughly speaking, these algorithms retain their privacy properties even if their internal state becomes visible to...

The Improbability Scale (IS) is proposed as a way of communicating to the general public the improbability (and by implication, the probability) of events predicted as the result of scientific research. Through the use of the Improbability Scale, the public will be able to evaluate more easily the relative risks of predicted events and draw proper conclusions when asked to support governmental ...

BACKGROUND Access to medicines and the development of a strong national pharmaceutical industry are two longstanding pillars of health policy in Brazil. This is reflected in a clear emphasis by Brazil's Federal Government on improving access to medicine in national health plans and industrial policies aimed at promoting domestic pharmaceutical development. This research proposes that such polic...