INTRODUCTION The consequences of poor access and quality of healthcare services in developing countries are widely recognised by international agencies such as WHO. Moreover, with the HIV/AIDS pandemic wreaking havoc in sub-Saharan Africa, availability of trained physicians is essential for providing antiretroviral treatment to large numbers of individuals. Owing to emigration of physicians and...

Human consumption is depleting the Earth's natural resources and impairing the capacity of life-supporting ecosystems. Humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively over the past 50 years than during any other period, primarily to meet increasing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fibre and fuel. Such consumption, together with world population increasing from 2.6 billion in 1...

I shall brie y evaluate the common claim that ethically acceptable population policies must let individuals to decide freely on the number of their children. I shall ask, Ž rst, what exactly is the relation between population policies that we Ž nd intuitively appealing, on the one hand, and population policies that maximize procreative freedom, on the other, and second, what is the relation be...

The Australian Government is about to release Australia’s first sustainable population policy. Sustainable population growth, among other things, implies sustainable energy demand. Current modelling of future energy demand both in Australia and by agencies such as the International Energy Agency sees population growth as one of the key drivers of energy demand. Simply increasing the demand for ...

We study the asymptotic optimal control of multi-class restless bandits. A restless bandit isa controllable stochastic process whose state evolution depends on whether or not the bandit ismade active. Since finding the optimal control is typically intractable, we propose a class of prioritypolicies that are proved to be asymptotically optimal under a global attractor property an...

We present a framework for modeling the spread of pathogens throughout a population and generating policies that minimize the impact of those pathogens on the population. This framework is used to study the spread of human viruses between cities via airplane travel. It combines agent-based simulation, mathematical analysis, and an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) optimizer. The goal of this study is...