Many nations have undergone changes in health care financing and services. The public notices policy changes in health care and frequently bears new and unexpected costs or barriers to care unwillingly. This paper presents data from surveys of about 1,000 adults conducted during April-June 1998 in each of five countries--Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States-...

Knowledge management relies – willingly or unwillingly – on three components: organizational structures, communities of practice, and material settings. In an organization, those three components are interdependent, that is, each of them enters into the composition of the others. They are also resistant to each other, which means that each of them marks the limits of the others‟ action. This re...

Abstract This paper starts out from the observation that recent official bioeconomy strategies and policy concepts are markedly more moderate in their promises of economic growth compared to high-flying expectations a ‘biotech revolution’ promoted around turn millennium. We argue this stepwise process moderation is partly due series ‘reality checks’ which various strands research on have (willi...

In a proxy signature scheme, a user delegates his/her signing capability to another user in such a way that the latter can sign messages on behalf of the former. In this paper, we first propose a provably secure proxy signature scheme, which is based on a two-party Schnorr signature scheme. Then, we extend this basic scheme into designated-verifier proxy signatures (DVPS). More specifically, we...

Western governments to legitimize a new and sometimes controversial security agenda. The use of humanitarian reasons to justify international military interventions, combined with the fact that the governments involved in these military operations are usually also the main financiers of the humanitarian system, has led to revived discussions among international humanitarian organizations and NG...

Possession by a spirit or demon or God is an age old phenomenon which is still being reported from many countries all over the world. Possession syndrome is defined as an episodic disruption of behavior dur ing which it is presumed tha t the subject 's personality has been replaced by that of a spirit or God (Wintrob, 1973 ; Wijesinghe et al., 1976). I ts manifestations, purpose and consequence...

Small and middle size enterprises (SMEs) are the mainstream of the fluid power industry in China. They are involved unwillingly in the information world but lack of plenty of weapons to fight in the nowadays market. The web based product design system of hydraulic systems is discussed in the article, which is supposed to provide SMEs of fluid power to sharp their innovation ability to survive t...

The paper Rational Drug Therapy by Mathur el al.(1) made interesting reading. The authors have given very useful suggestions for curbing the problem of irrational drug use. However, most of these suggestions are based on the 'policing' approach which, we are afraid, may not succeed in country like ours. Unfortunately, our legal system leaves a lot of loop holes (albiet in good faith) which are ...

Histidine-rich peptides are commonly used in recombinant protein production as purification tags, allowing the one-step affinity separation of the His-tagged proteins from the extracellular media or cell extracts. Genetic engineering makes feasible the post-purification His-tag removal by inserting, between the tag and the main protein body, a target site for trans-acting proteases or a self-pr...

Reports on seemingly caring mothers, who at the same time fabricate or provoke clinical symptoms in their children and subsequently expose them to potentially harmful medical procedures, are hardly believable at first sight. Nevertheless the steadily growing number of reports on this kind of child abuse, known as Munchausen-by-proxy syndrome, points to a significant number of undetected cases. ...