in the recent decades, urbanization has affected social, economical, cultural, political and physical aspects of human life-style. presentation of sustainable development as one of the goals of the third millennium is derived from the effects of cities on earth and on different aspects of human life. undoubtedly, talking about sustainability and sustainable development would be impossible witho...

Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) face unique challenges since it must achieve a double bottom line— outreach and sustainability. So is microfinance worthwhile or worthless? The proper performance measurement framework here is a better way to judge this than a simple measure of numbers. This paper seeks to present, to MFIs, a new rigorous performance measurement framework that incorporates the b...

Diffusion processes in networks are increasingly used to model the spread of information and social influence. In several applications in computational sustainability such as the spread of wildlife, infectious diseases and traffic mobility pattern, the observed data often consists of only aggregate information. In this work, we present new models that generalize standard diffusion processes to ...

0

E-learning is increasingly integrated in the society culture and in business world via e-university and e-training. Goals, needs, characteristics of learners are very different. Indeed, providing adaptive system is critical for the e-learning sustainability. Nevertheless, many recent studies have shown that, on one hand, adaptivity is concretely deficient in elearning systems, on the other hand...

OBJECTIVE To identify strategies to facilitate the sustainability of a quality and safety improvement collaborative: the Safer Patients Initiative (SPI) and its successes. DESIGN A qualitative interview study with a repeated sample at two time points. SETTING Twenty organizations participating in the SPI programme in the UK. PARTICIPANTS Twenty principal SPI programme coordinators took pa...

Sustainability of wildlife harvests is critical but difficult to assess. Evaluations of sustainability typically combine modelling with the measurement of underlying abundances. For many taxa harvested in developing countries, however, abundances are near-impossible to survey and a lack of detailed ecological information impedes the reliability of models. In such cases, repeated surveys of the ...

This paper examines the vertical integration level of environmentally sustainable and non-sustainable companies. The first part develops the theoretical foundation for linking sustainability strategies to organizational structure. The second part empirically examines the vertical integration level of 144 sustainability-focused companies in 9 different industries. The results demonstrate that su...

The social dimension of sustainable development has most often been neglected when developing future scenarios, or, at best, been dealt with as a framework condition for successful environmental sustainability strategies. However, given the long-disputed trade-off between social and environmental improvements in a market economy, environmental and social criteria must be developed and incorpora...