Fair allocation of scarce medical resources during emergency situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic is a highly challenging task. The has revealed that age was invoked criterion in terms granting access to treatment some European Union countries Italy. This paper analyses whether or not use chronological alone might be justified for any differential event scarcity. seeks demonstrate older per...

Current corpus-based machine translation techniques do not work very well when given scarce linguistic resources. To examine the gap between human and machine translators, we created an experiment in which human beings were asked to translate an unknown language into English on the sole basis of a very small bilingual text. Participants performed quite well, and debriefings revealed a number of...

In this paper we introduce a generalization of the best basis wavelet packet method which selects a suboptimal best basis out of a restricted library of wavelet packet bases. For a given image this restricted library is generated by a 2D separable multiresolution analysis which discriminates branches of the resulting quadtree structured representation of the image according to a measure of ener...

Pandemics and acute emergencies raise pressing medical, ethical and organisational challenges. These include global governance, priority setting, triaging of patients, allocation of scarce resources and restricting individual liberty in the interests of public health. We will focus particularly on an issue of direct relevance to all respiratory team members, i.e. what is the duty of the healthc...

A patchwork of groups and programs are working to improve the situation. Local hospitals raise funds for individual patients as do charitable groups, like the Cancer Patients Aid Association in India. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and local health authorities work with drug companies to donate drugs or slash prices. Clinical trial networks are testing low-cost treatment strategies. And ...

Economics is the study of optimal use of scarce resources to promote social welfare. Of particular interest has been the role of prices in achieving a socially optimal allocation of resources through co-ordinating the actions of self-seeking individuals in a decentralized economy. Alternative notions of economic equilibrium and their efficiency properties are sketched. Finally, some of the basi...