Quantum Private Comparison of Equality Based on Five-Particle Cluster State

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Chang Yan; Zhang Shi-Bin; Wang Hai-Chun; Yan Li-Li; Han Gui-Hua; Sheng Zhi-Wei; Huang Yuan-Yuan; Suo Wang; Xiong Jin-Xin; Zhang Wen-Bo

2016-01-01

A protocol for quantum private comparison of equality (QPCE) is proposed based on five-particle cluster state with the help of a semi-honest third party (TP). In our protocol, TP is allowed to misbehave on its own but can not conspire with either of two parties. Compared with most two-user QPCE protocols, our protocol not only can compare two groups of private information (each group has two users) in one execution, but also compare just two private information. Compared with the multi-user QPCE protocol proposed, our protocol is safer with more reasonable assumptions of TP. The qubit efficiency is computed and analyzed. Our protocol can also be generalized to the case of 2N participants with one TP. The 2N-participant protocol can compare two groups (each group has N private information) in one execution or just N private information. (paper)

Private randomness expansion with untrusted devices

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Colbeck, Roger; Kent, Adrian

2011-01-01

Randomness is an important resource for many applications, from gambling to secure communication. However, guaranteeing that the output from a candidate random source could not have been predicted by an outside party is a challenging task, and many supposedly random sources used today provide no such guarantee. Quantum solutions to this problem exist, for example a device which internally sends a photon through a beamsplitter and observes on which side it emerges, but, presently, such solutions require the user to trust the internal workings of the device. Here, we seek to go beyond this limitation by asking whether randomness can be generated using untrusted devices-even ones created by an adversarial agent-while providing a guarantee that no outside party (including the agent) can predict it. Since this is easily seen to be impossible unless the user has an initially private random string, the task we investigate here is private randomness expansion. We introduce a protocol for private randomness expansion with untrusted devices which is designed to take as input an initially private random string and produce as output a longer private random string. We point out that private randomness expansion protocols are generally vulnerable to attacks that can render the initial string partially insecure, even though that string is used only inside a secure laboratory; our protocol is designed to remove this previously unconsidered vulnerability by privacy amplification. We also discuss extensions of our protocol designed to generate an arbitrarily long random string from a finite initially private random string. The security of these protocols against the most general attacks is left as an open question.

Private randomness expansion with untrusted devices

Science.gov (United States)

Colbeck, Roger; Kent, Adrian

2011-03-01

Randomness is an important resource for many applications, from gambling to secure communication. However, guaranteeing that the output from a candidate random source could not have been predicted by an outside party is a challenging task, and many supposedly random sources used today provide no such guarantee. Quantum solutions to this problem exist, for example a device which internally sends a photon through a beamsplitter and observes on which side it emerges, but, presently, such solutions require the user to trust the internal workings of the device. Here, we seek to go beyond this limitation by asking whether randomness can be generated using untrusted devices—even ones created by an adversarial agent—while providing a guarantee that no outside party (including the agent) can predict it. Since this is easily seen to be impossible unless the user has an initially private random string, the task we investigate here is private randomness expansion. We introduce a protocol for private randomness expansion with untrusted devices which is designed to take as input an initially private random string and produce as output a longer private random string. We point out that private randomness expansion protocols are generally vulnerable to attacks that can render the initial string partially insecure, even though that string is used only inside a secure laboratory; our protocol is designed to remove this previously unconsidered vulnerability by privacy amplification. We also discuss extensions of our protocol designed to generate an arbitrarily long random string from a finite initially private random string. The security of these protocols against the most general attacks is left as an open question.

Private randomness expansion with untrusted devices

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Colbeck, Roger; Kent, Adrian, E-mail: rcolbeck@perimeterinstitute.ca, E-mail: a.p.a.kent@damtp.cam.ac.uk [Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, 31 Caroline Street North, Waterloo, ON N2L 2Y5 (Canada)

2011-03-04

Randomness is an important resource for many applications, from gambling to secure communication. However, guaranteeing that the output from a candidate random source could not have been predicted by an outside party is a challenging task, and many supposedly random sources used today provide no such guarantee. Quantum solutions to this problem exist, for example a device which internally sends a photon through a beamsplitter and observes on which side it emerges, but, presently, such solutions require the user to trust the internal workings of the device. Here, we seek to go beyond this limitation by asking whether randomness can be generated using untrusted devices-even ones created by an adversarial agent-while providing a guarantee that no outside party (including the agent) can predict it. Since this is easily seen to be impossible unless the user has an initially private random string, the task we investigate here is private randomness expansion. We introduce a protocol for private randomness expansion with untrusted devices which is designed to take as input an initially private random string and produce as output a longer private random string. We point out that private randomness expansion protocols are generally vulnerable to attacks that can render the initial string partially insecure, even though that string is used only inside a secure laboratory; our protocol is designed to remove this previously unconsidered vulnerability by privacy amplification. We also discuss extensions of our protocol designed to generate an arbitrarily long random string from a finite initially private random string. The security of these protocols against the most general attacks is left as an open question.

Using structured decision making with landowners to address private forest management and parcelization: balancing multiple objectives and incorporating uncertainty

Science.gov (United States)

Paige F. B. Ferguson; Michael J. Conroy; John F. Chamblee; Jeffrey Hepinstall-Cymerman

2015-01-01

Parcelization and forest fragmentation are of concern for ecological, economic, and social reasons. Efforts to keep large, private forests intact may be supported by a decision-making process that incorporates landowners’ objectives and uncertainty. We used structured decision making (SDM) with owners of large, private forests in Macon County, North Carolina....

How private are Europe's private forests?

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nichiforel, Liviu; Keary, Kevin; Deuffic, Philippe

2018-01-01

Private forests are widespread in Europe providing a range of ecosystem services of significant value to society, and there are calls for novel policies to enhance their provision and to face the challenges of environmental changes. Such policies need to acknowledge the importance of private...... across jurisdictions, we constructed an original Property Rights Index for Forestry encompassing five rights domains (access, withdrawal, management, exclusion and alienation). We documented substantial variation of the private forest owners' rights, and notably to i) make decisions in operational...... management and the formulation of management goals, ii) withdraw timber resources from their forest, and iii) exclude others from the use of forest resources. We identified broad relations between the scope for decision making of private forest owners and jurisdictions' former socio-political background...

The Montreal Protocol treaty and its illuminating history of science-policy decision-making

Science.gov (United States)

Grady, C.

2017-12-01

The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, hailed as one of the most effective environmental treaties of all time, has a thirty year history of science-policy decision-making. The partnership between Parties to the Montreal Protocol and its technical assessment panels serve as a basis for understanding successes and evaluating stumbles of global environmental decision-making. Real-world environmental treaty negotiations can be highly time-sensitive, politically motivated, and resource constrained thus scientists and policymakers alike are often unable to confront the uncertainties associated with the multitude of choices. The science-policy relationship built within the framework of the Montreal Protocol has helped constrain uncertainty and inform policy decisions but has also highlighted the limitations of the use of scientific understanding in political decision-making. This talk will describe the evolution of the scientist-policymaker relationship over the history of the Montreal Protocol. Examples will illustrate how the Montreal Protocol's technical panels inform decisions of the country governments and will characterize different approaches pursued by different countries with a particular focus on the recently adopted Kigali Amendment. In addition, this talk will take a deeper dive with an analysis of the historic technical panel assessments on estimating financial resources necessary to enable compliance to the Montreal Protocol compared to the political financial decisions made through the Protocol's Multilateral Fund replenishment negotiation process. Finally, this talk will describe the useful lessons and challenges from these interactions and how they may be applicable in other environmental management frameworks across multiple scales under changing climatic conditions.

Quantum Private Comparison of Equality Based on Five-Particle Cluster State

Science.gov (United States)

Chang, Yan; Zhang, Wen-Bo; Zhang, Shi-Bin; Wang, Hai-Chun; Yan, Li-Li; Han, Gui-Hua; Sheng, Zhi-Wei; Huang, Yuan-Yuan; Suo, Wang; Xiong, Jin-Xin

2016-12-01

A protocol for quantum private comparison of equality (QPCE) is proposed based on five-particle cluster state with the help of a semi-honest third party (TP). In our protocol, TP is allowed to misbehave on its own but can not conspire with either of two parties. Compared with most two-user QPCE protocols, our protocol not only can compare two groups of private information (each group has two users) in one execution, but also compare just two private information. Compared with the multi-user QPCE protocol proposed, our protocol is safer with more reasonable assumptions of TP. The qubit efficiency is computed and analyzed. Our protocol can also be generalized to the case of 2N participants with one TP. The 2N-participant protocol can compare two groups (each group has N private information) in one execution or just N private information. Supported by NSFC under Grant Nos. 61402058, 61572086, the Fund for Middle and Young Academic Leaders of CUIT under Grant No. J201511, the Science and Technology Support Project of Sichuan Province of China under Grant No. 2013GZX0137, the Fund for Young Persons Project of Sichuan Province of China under Grant No. 12ZB017, and the Foundation of Cyberspace Security Key Laboratory of Sichuan Higher Education Institutions under Grant No. szjj2014-074

Public Schools: Make Them Private.

Science.gov (United States)

Friedman, Milton

1997-01-01

A voucher system enabling parents to choose freely the schools their children attend is the most feasible way to improve education. Vouchers will encourage privatization. That will unleash the drive, imagination, and energy of competitive free enterprise to revolutionize the education process. Government schools will be forced to improve to retain…

Mobile Virtual Private Networking

Science.gov (United States)

Pulkkis, Göran; Grahn, Kaj; Mårtens, Mathias; Mattsson, Jonny

Mobile Virtual Private Networking (VPN) solutions based on the Internet Security Protocol (IPSec), Transport Layer Security/Secure Socket Layer (SSL/TLS), Secure Shell (SSH), 3G/GPRS cellular networks, Mobile IP, and the presently experimental Host Identity Protocol (HIP) are described, compared and evaluated. Mobile VPN solutions based on HIP are recommended for future networking because of superior processing efficiency and network capacity demand features. Mobile VPN implementation issues associated with the IP protocol versions IPv4 and IPv6 are also evaluated. Mobile VPN implementation experiences are presented and discussed.

A family of multi-party authentication protocols

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Cremers, C.J.F.; Mauw, S.

2006-01-01

We introduce a family of multi-party authentication protocols and discuss six novel protocols, which are members of this family. The first three generalize the well-known Needham-Schroeder-Lowe public-key protocol, the Needham-Schroeder private-key protocol, and the Bilateral Key Exchange protocol.

Making sense of site declarations: Canadian declarations under article 2.a. (iii) of the Additional Protocol

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Cameron, J.K.; Benjamin, R.; Ghosh, A.

2001-01-01

to bear on site definition, including presence or absence of natural barriers, regulatory control of the SSAC over the geographic area declared and control of the owner or operator over the site. While the IAEA is not supposed to be concerned with different owners/operators or private/lease arrangements in its analysis of the activities associated with the site, these are real concerns when the State guarantees the IAEA access to all places on a site. Fourth, and finally, when the boundaries of a site have been delineated, the description has to be clearly communicated to the IAEA. The procedure by which this was done for Canada in its initial declaration to the IAEA will be described. The paper will present how Canada applied the above four factors against three sample sites in Canada: (1) one major research site in Canada; (2) one complicated multi-facility site involving several multi-unit Candu reactors and waste management facilities; and (3) one unique fuel fabrication facility. Considered against the factors above, the paper will describe how an island-approach for the first two sites was dismissed in favour of a single-integrated site but how an island approach was adopted for a third site in light of practical considerations. To conclude the section on site definition, the paper will also review a gamut of possibilities for site definition, in light of Canadian experiences, including use of single room and single building provisions as espoused in the IAEA's Guidelines and Format Document (August 1997) for preparing Additional Protocol Declarations. Site definition is an important aspect of making declarations pursuant to Article 2.a.(iii) but it is less than half the task when considered against the information that is sought under the Additional Protocol on the buildings on that site. SSAC experiences relating to the assistance provided to the Canadian nuclear industry in preparing these declarations will be reviewed in this paper. There was a real need to

Study protocol of a cluster randomized controlled trial evaluating the efficacy of a comprehensive pressure ulcer prevention programme for private for-profit nursing homes.

Science.gov (United States)

Kwong, Enid Wai-yung; Lee, Paul Hong; Yeung, Kwan-mo

2016-01-18

Because the demand for government-subsidized nursing homes in Hong Kong outstrips the supply, the number of for-profit private nursing homes has been increasing rapidly. However, the standard of care in such homes is always criticized. Pressure ulcers are a major long-term care issue that is closely associated with the quality of care delivered in nursing home settings. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of a pressure ulcer prevention programme for residents in private for-profit nursing homes. This is a two-arm cluster randomized controlled trial with an estimated sample size of 1088 residents and 74 care staff from eight for-profit private nursing homes. Eligible nursing homes will be those classified as category A2 homes in the Enhanced Bought Place Scheme (EBPS), having a capacity of around 130-150 beds, and no structured PU prevention protocol and/or programmes in place. Care staff will be health workers, personal care workers, and nurses who are front-line staff providing direct care to residents. Eight nursing homes will be randomly assigned to either an experimental or control group. The experimental group will be provided with an intensive training programme and will be involved in the implementation of a 16-week pressure ulcer prevention protocol, while the control group will deliver the usual pressure ulcer prevention care. The study outcomes are the pressure ulcer prevention knowledge and skills of the care staff and the prevalence and incidence of pressure ulcers. Data on the knowledge and skills of care staff, and prevalence of pressure ulcer will be collected at the base line, and then at the 8(th) week and at completion of the implementation of the protocol. The assessment of the incidence of pressures will start from before the commencement of the intensive training course to the end of the implementation of the protocol. In view of the negative impact of pressure ulcers, it is important to have an effective and evidence

A Decision-Making Model to Attract Private Sector Investors into BOT and BOO Water and Sanitation Projects

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Elnaz Abbaszadeh

2017-03-01

Full Text Available Economic development in any country depends on a multitude of factors, among which infrastructure construction projects constitute a major part. Included in this category are large-scale water supply and sanitation schemes that are commonly state-owned and require large allocations from the public funds. Article 214 of the 5th National Development Plan of the Islamic Republic of Iran mandates the Government to employ such public-private partnership tools as BOT (Build-Operate-Transfer and BOO (Build-Own-Operate as the means towards attracting private sector participation to ensure enhanced the efficiency and effectiveness of infrastructure projects. It is the objective of the present study to survey and identify the challenges facing such schemes based on the assessment of the contractual criteria and conditions commonly practiced in water and sanitation projects. The results are expected to lead to the development of a decision-making model that will encourage the private sector’s decision-makers to invest in these projects. Information was collected in two stages. The first stage involved a review of model contracts and interviews with water and sanitation experts. The data thus obtained was subjected to analysis using the SPSS software, which yielded 14 indices as the major components of the public-private partnership contracts used in the industry. In a second stage, the indices were tabulated and prepared in the form of a questionnaire which was presented to experts who were asked to assign weight scores of 1 to 10 to each of the indices. Ranking and scoring was accomplished using the TOPSIS method. Finally, the Pareto diagram was used to select the 10 more important indices which were further divided into two major and minor categories of indices. A model was then developed for scoring by the private sector investment advisors to help them in their decision-making process regarding BOD and BOO water and sanitation projects. The model

Biodiversity gains from efficient use of private sponsorship for flagship species conservation.

Science.gov (United States)

Bennett, Joseph R; Maloney, Richard; Possingham, Hugh P

2015-04-22

To address the global extinction crisis, both efficient use of existing conservation funding and new sources of funding are vital. Private sponsorship of charismatic 'flagship' species conservation represents an important source of new funding, but has been criticized as being inefficient. However, the ancillary benefits of privately sponsored flagship species conservation via actions benefiting other species have not been quantified, nor have the benefits of incorporating such sponsorship into objective prioritization protocols. Here, we use a comprehensive dataset of conservation actions for the 700 most threatened species in New Zealand to examine the potential biodiversity gains from national private flagship species sponsorship programmes. We find that private funding for flagship species can clearly result in additional species and phylogenetic diversity conserved, via conservation actions shared with other species. When private flagship species funding is incorporated into a prioritization protocol to preferentially sponsor shared actions, expected gains can be more than doubled. However, these gains are consistently smaller than expected gains in a hypothetical scenario where private funding could be optimally allocated among all threatened species. We recommend integrating private sponsorship of flagship species into objective prioritization protocols to sponsor efficient actions that maximize biodiversity gains, or wherever possible, encouraging private donations for broader biodiversity goals. © 2015 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.

Quantum private comparison with d-level single-particle states

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Yu, Chao-Hua; Guo, Gong-De; Lin, Song

2013-01-01

In this paper, a quantum private comparison protocol with d-level single-particle states is proposed. In the protocol, a semi-honest third party is introduced to help two participants compare the size relationship of their secrets without revealing them to any other people. It is shown that the protocol is secure in theory. Moreover, the security of the protocol in real circumstance is also discussed. (paper)

Implementation of Quantum Private Queries Using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Wang Chuan; Hao Liang; Zhao Lian-Jie

2011-01-01

We present a modified protocol for the realization of a quantum private query process on a classical database. Using one-qubit query and CNOT operation, the query process can be realized in a two-mode database. In the query process, the data privacy is preserved as the sender would not reveal any information about the database besides her query information, and the database provider cannot retain any information about the query. We implement the quantum private query protocol in a nuclear magnetic resonance system. The density matrix of the memory registers are constructed. (general)

Shareholders' reactions to announcements of acquisitions of private firms : Do target and bidder markets make a difference?

NARCIS (Netherlands)

von Eije, Henk; Wiegerinck, Helene

We study announcement effects of cross-border acquisitions of private firms on short-term bidders stock market returns in the European Union. We assume that the development status of the target market and the governance within the bidder market make a difference. Investors of bidding companies react

Secure quantum private comparison

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Yang Yuguang; Cao Weifeng; Wen Qiaoyan

2009-01-01

We propose a two-party quantum private comparison protocol using single photons, in which two distrustful parties can compare whether their secrets are equal with the help of a third party (TP). Any information about the values of their respective secrets will not be leaked out even with a compromised TP. Security is also discussed.

Secure quantum private comparison

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Yang Yuguang [College of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing 100124 (China); Cao Weifeng [College of Electric and Information Engineering, Zhengzhou University of Light Industry, Zhengzhou 450002 (China); Wen Qiaoyan [State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876 (China)], E-mail: yangyang7357@bjut.edu.cn

2009-12-15

We propose a two-party quantum private comparison protocol using single photons, in which two distrustful parties can compare whether their secrets are equal with the help of a third party (TP). Any information about the values of their respective secrets will not be leaked out even with a compromised TP. Security is also discussed.

Performance Analysis of Secure and Private Billing Protocols for Smart Metering

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Tom Eccles

2017-11-01

Full Text Available Traditional utility metering is to be replaced by smart metering. Smart metering enables fine-grained utility consumption measurements. These fine-grained measurements raise privacy concerns due to the lifestyle information which can be inferred from the precise time at which utilities were consumed. This paper outlines and compares two privacy-respecting time of use billing protocols for smart metering and investigates their performance on a variety of hardware. These protocols protect the privacy of customers by never transmitting the fine-grained utility readings outside of the customer’s home network. One protocol favors complexity on the trusted smart meter hardware while the other uses homomorphic commitments to offload computation to a third device. Both protocols are designed to operate on top of existing cryptographic secure channel protocols in place on smart meters. Proof of concept software implementations of these protocols have been written and their suitability for real world application to low-performance smart meter hardware is discussed. These protocols may also have application to other privacy conscious aggregation systems, such as electronic voting.

Mobilizing private finance to drive an energy industrial revolution

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Mathews, John A.; Kidney, Sean; Mallon, Karl; Hughes, Mark

2010-01-01

While uptake of renewable energies as a solution to climate change is widely discussed, the issue of public vs. private financing is not yet adequately explored. The debates over the Kyoto Protocol and its successor, culminating in the COP15 Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009, maintained a strong preference for public over private financing. Yet it is also clear to most observers that the energy revolution will never happen without the involvement of private finance to drive private investment. In this Viewpoint, we discuss the ways in which private financing could be mobilized to drive the energy industrial revolution that is needed if climate change mitigation is to succeed.

How would the privatization of Hydro-Quebec make Quebecers richer?

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Garcia, C.

2009-02-01

In 1962, a total of 46 companies shared Quebec's electricity production, involving no less than 9,710 megawatts of power. The 4 companies that controlled 85 per cent of this power were Hydro-Quebec, Aluminum Company of Canada (Alcan), Shawinigan Water and Power Company and the Gatineau Power Company. At the time, electricity rates also varied considerably throughout Quebec, being extremely high in regions far from Montreal, which hindered potential industrial development in those areas. This report discussed the privatization of Hydro-Quebec and how it could make Quebecers richer. The report discussed the early days of electricity in Quebec and outlined the reasons that led Quebec to nationalize the production and distribution of electricity and to entrust its management to Hydro-Quebec. A summary of the developments undertaken to enable Hydro-Quebec to substantially boost its exports to the United States following liberalization of the American market toward the end of the twentieth century was also provided. A comparison group of companies in the United States involved in the production, transmission and distribution of electricity was also presented in order to analyze Hydro-Quebec's performance from various standpoints. Other topics that were addressed in the report included operational efficiency; use of capital; the experience of the United Kingdom; the rise in electricity rates; a strategy for privatization; the public offering; and protecting Quebec electricity consumers. The role of the Quebec government and of Hydro-Quebec were also examined. Electricity exports and electricity and aluminum smelters were also assessed. The report noted that Hydro-Quebec's annual profit would shrink from $2,882 million to $709 million if it had to pay the market price for the electricity it obtains from Churchill Falls. 23 tabs., 1 fig., 2 appendices

XPIR : Private Information Retrieval for Everyone

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Aguilar-Melchor Carlos

2016-04-01

Full Text Available A Private Information Retrieval (PIR scheme is a protocol in which a user retrieves a record from a database while hiding which from the database administrators. PIR can be achieved using mutuallydistrustful replicated databases, trusted hardware, or cryptography. In this paper we focus on the later setting which is known as single-database computationally- Private Information Retrieval (cPIR. Classic cPIR protocols require that the database server executes an algorithm over all the database content at very low speeds which impairs their usage. In [1], given certain assumptions, realistic at the time, Sion and Carbunar showed that cPIR schemes were not practical and most likely would never be. To this day, this conclusion is widely accepted by researchers and practitioners. Using the paradigm shift introduced by lattice-based cryptography, we show that the conclusion of Sion and Carbunar is not valid anymore: cPIR is of practical value. This is achieved without compromising security, using standard crytosystems, and conservative parameter choices.

Advanced Internet Protocols, Services, and Applications

CERN Document Server

Oki, Eiji; Tatipamula, Mallikarjun; Vogt, Christian

2012-01-01

Today, the internet and computer networking are essential parts of business, learning, and personal communications and entertainment. Virtually all messages or transactions sent over the internet are carried using internet infrastructure- based on advanced internet protocols. Advanced internet protocols ensure that both public and private networks operate with maximum performance, security, and flexibility. This book is intended to provide a comprehensive technical overview and survey of advanced internet protocols, first providing a solid introduction and going on to discu

Experimental quantum private queries with linear optics

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

De Martini, Francesco; Giovannetti, Vittorio; Lloyd, Seth; Maccone, Lorenzo; Nagali, Eleonora; Sansoni, Linda; Sciarrino, Fabio

2009-01-01

The quantum private query is a quantum cryptographic protocol to recover information from a database, preserving both user and data privacy: the user can test whether someone has retained information on which query was asked and the database provider can test the amount of information released. Here we discuss a variant of the quantum private query algorithm that admits a simple linear optical implementation: it employs the photon's momentum (or time slot) as address qubits and its polarization as bus qubit. A proof-of-principle experimental realization is implemented.

THE FEATURES OF THE PROCEDURE FOR MAKING THE DECISION ON THE IMPLEMENTATION OF PROJECTS THE PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

M. Vorobiova

2018-01-01

Full Text Available The procedure for making a decision on the implementation of public-private partnership, which has developed in Ukraine was examined in the article. Three consecutive stages of preparation for the implementation of projects of partnership between the state and business were сomprehensively considered. The main disadvantages of each stage were determined and suggestions for their improvement were given.

Virtual private network (VPN)

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Caskey, Susan

2006-01-01

A virtual private network (VPN) is the essential security feature that allows remote monitoring systems to take advantage of the low communications cost of the internet. This paper introduces the VPN concept and summarizes the networking and security principles. The mechanics of security, for example, types of encryption and protocols for exchange of keys between partners, are explained. Important issues for partners in different countries include the interoperability and mutual accreditations of systems. (author)

Appropriating Public Private Partnership in Senior High School Program: A Socio-Cultural Approach to Policy Making

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Peter G. Romerosa

2018-05-01

Full Text Available The implementation of the Senior High School program in the Philippines illuminates the State’s response to the changing landscape of the global market economy. Its salient features focus on the additional two year-senior high school program which highlights the development of middle level skills for national development and global competitiveness. In order to concretize the implementation of the program, the State entered into collaboration with the private schools which is commonly known as Public Private Partnership (PPP. In this collaboration, the government provides the guidelines and financing while the private educational institutions provide the academic service. Framed from a socio-cultural approach to policy making in education, this study aimed to unpack a particular implementation of PPP of a private institution in an urban area, examine the institutional policies that were created in response to PPP, and interrogate the impacts of these policies on micro social processes. Using interviews and focus group discussions for methodology, the researcher drew narratives and insights from on-the-ground actors. Further, the investigation looked into how authorized policy actors (school administrators and nonauthorized policy actors (teachers, parents, and students are appropriating policies within the operational framework of the PPP in the implementation of the senior high school program. The results demonstrated that multi- layered appropriation and exercise of the agency were explicitly and implicitly deployed in diverse social spaces by actors as a pragmatic and creative response to the new educational arrangement. The paper provides a lens to further develop under-standing on how policy appropriation and production from the local context can inform institutional approaches in facilitating relevant student experience within the realm of PPP in education.

The colombian private sector and climate change: the road from kyoto

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Olander, Jacob

1998-02-01

Because of its profound economic implications, the Kyoto Protocol merits careful study and active, continued participation on the part of the Colombian private sector. The article presents a brief summary of the main elements of the Protocol and its implications for Colombian business. For the business sector in Colombia, Joint implementation has been a key theme in motivating interest and participation on the issue of climate change. Now, after Kyoto, a new instrument has been created, the Clean Development Mechanism, which may permit international investment in forestry and energy projects that reduce greenhouse gas GHG- emissions. The Kyoto Protocol reduces the risk that Colombia need to assume new emissions reductions commitments, and in this new phase it is logical to focus on the opportunities created by the Protocol and the Framework Convention, especially the Clean Development Mechanism. Colombian business leaders should continue to participate actively in the international negotiations that will establish the rules of the game and in the development of private projects in industry, energy and forestry that capture

Public-private interactions in global food safety governance.

Science.gov (United States)

Lin, Ching-Fu

2014-01-01

In response to an apparent decline in global food safety, numerous public and private regulatory initiatives have emerged to restore public confidence. This trend has been particularly marked by the growing influence of private regulators such as multinational food companies, supermarket chains and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), who employ private standards, certification protocols, third-party auditing, and transnational contracting practices. This paper explores how the structure and processes of private food safety governance interact with traditional public governance regimes, focusing on Global Good Agricultural Practices (GlobalGAP) as a primary example of the former. Due to the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of public regulation in the face of global problems, private governance in food safety has gradually replaced states' command-and-control regulation with more flexible, market-oriented mechanisms. The paper concludes by emphasizing the importance of constructive regime interaction instead of institutional boundary building to global food safety governance. Public and private ordering must each play a role as integral parts of a larger, dynamic and evolving governance complex.

Economics of "essential use exemptions" for metered-dose inhalers under the Montreal Protocol.

Science.gov (United States)

DeCanio, Stephen J; Norman, Catherine S

2007-10-01

The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer has led to rapid reductions in the use of ozone-depleting substances worldwide. However, the Protocol provides for "essential use exemptions" (EUEs) if there are no "technically and economically feasible" alternatives. An application that might qualify as an "essential use" is CFC-powered medical metered-dose inhalers (MDIs) for the treatment of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and the US and other nations have applied for exemptions in this case. One concern is that exemptions are necessary to ensure access to medications for low-income uninsureds. We examine the consequences of granting or withholding such exemptions, and conclude that government policies and private-sector programs are available that make it economically feasible to phase out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in this application, thereby furthering the global public health objectives of the Montreal Protocol without compromising the treatment of patients who currently receive medication by means of MDIs.

The Interface of Clinical Decision-Making With Study Protocols for Knowledge Translation From a Walking Recovery Trial.

Science.gov (United States)

Hershberg, Julie A; Rose, Dorian K; Tilson, Julie K; Brutsch, Bettina; Correa, Anita; Gallichio, Joann; McLeod, Molly; Moore, Craig; Wu, Sam; Duncan, Pamela W; Behrman, Andrea L

2017-01-01

Despite efforts to translate knowledge into clinical practice, barriers often arise in adapting the strict protocols of a randomized, controlled trial (RCT) to the individual patient. The Locomotor Experience Applied Post-Stroke (LEAPS) RCT demonstrated equal effectiveness of 2 intervention protocols for walking recovery poststroke; both protocols were more effective than usual care physical therapy. The purpose of this article was to provide knowledge-translation tools to facilitate implementation of the LEAPS RCT protocols into clinical practice. Participants from 2 of the trial's intervention arms: (1) early Locomotor Training Program (LTP) and (2) Home Exercise Program (HEP) were chosen for case presentation. The two cases illustrate how the protocols are used in synergy with individual patient presentations and clinical expertise. Decision algorithms and guidelines for progression represent the interface between implementation of an RCT standardized intervention protocol and clinical decision-making. In each case, the participant presents with a distinct clinical challenge that the therapist addresses by integrating the participant's unique presentation with the therapist's expertise while maintaining fidelity to the LEAPS protocol. Both participants progressed through an increasingly challenging intervention despite their own unique presentation. Decision algorithms and exercise progression for the LTP and HEP protocols facilitate translation of the RCT protocol to the real world of clinical practice. The two case examples to facilitate translation of the LEAPS RCT into clinical practice by enhancing understanding of the protocols, their progression, and their application to individual participants.Video Abstract available for more insights from the authors (see Supplemental Digital Content 1, available at: http://links.lww.com/JNPT/A147).

Understanding Public-Private Collaboration Configurations for International Information Infrastructures

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Klievink, A.J.

Collaboration between the public and the private sector is seen as an instrument to make governance smarter, more effective, and more efficient. However, whereas there is literature on public-private collaboration, very little of it addresses how these collaborations can be shaped to make use of the

Understanding Public-Private Collaboration Configurations for International Information Infrastructures

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Klievink, A.J.

2015-01-01

Collaboration between the public and the private sector is seen as an instrument to make governance smarter, more effective, and more efficient. However, whereas there is literature on public-private collaboration, very little of it addresses how these collaborations can be shaped to make use of the

Open source system OpenVPN in a function of Virtual Private Network

Science.gov (United States)

Skendzic, A.; Kovacic, B.

2017-05-01

Using of Virtual Private Networks (VPN) can establish high security level in network communication. VPN technology enables high security networking using distributed or public network infrastructure. VPN uses different security and managing rules inside networks. It can be set up using different communication channels like Internet or separate ISP communication infrastructure. VPN private network makes security communication channel over public network between two endpoints (computers). OpenVPN is an open source software product under GNU General Public License (GPL) that can be used to establish VPN communication between two computers inside business local network over public communication infrastructure. It uses special security protocols and 256-bit Encryption and it is capable of traversing network address translators (NATs) and firewalls. It allows computers to authenticate each other using a pre-shared secret key, certificates or username and password. This work gives review of VPN technology with a special accent on OpenVPN. This paper will also give comparison and financial benefits of using open source VPN software in business environment.

Private sector development

International Development Research Centre (IDRC) Digital Library (Canada)

Small businesses can be an important vehicle for .... Small and medium enterprises make up most of private businesses in the. Middle East ... Small businesses can drive more equi- table growth. ... patterns affect job creation and the demand ...

Public-private mix for DOTS implementation: what makes it work?

Science.gov (United States)

Lönnroth, Knut; Uplekar, Mukund; Arora, Vijay K; Juvekar, Sanjay; Lan, Nguyen T N; Mwaniki, David; Pathania, Vikram

2004-08-01

To compare processes and outcomes of four public-private mix (PPM) projects on DOTS implementation for tuberculosis (TB) control in New Delhi, India; Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam; Nairobi, Kenya; and Pune, India. Cross-project analysis of secondary data from separate project evaluations was used. Differences among PPM project sites in impact on TB control (change in case detection, treatment outcomes and equity in access) were correlated with differences in chosen intervention strategies and structural conditions. The analysis suggests that an effective intervention package should include the following provider-side components: (1) orienting private providers (PPs) and the staff of the national TB programme (NTP); (2) improving the referral and information system through simple practical tools; (3) the NTP adequately supervising and monitoring PPs; and (4) the NTP providing free anti-TB drugs to patients treated in the private sector. Getting such an intervention package to work requires that the NTP be strongly committed to supporting, supervising and evaluating PPM projects. Further, using a local nongovernmental organization or a medical association as an intermediary may facilitate collaboration. Investing time and effort to ensure that sufficient dialogue takes place among all stakeholders is important to help build trust and achieve a high level of agreement.

Tuberculosis Notification by Private Sector' Physicians in Tehran.

Science.gov (United States)

Ahmadi, Ayat; Nedjat, Saharnaz; Gholami, Jaleh; Majdzadeh, Reza

2015-01-01

A small proportion of physicians adhere to tuberculosis (TB) notification regulations, particularly in the private sector. In most developing countries, the private sector has dominance over delivering services in big cities. In such circumstances deviation from the TB treatment protocol is frequently happening. This study sought to estimate TB notification in the private sector and settle on determinants of TB notification by private sector physicians. A population-based study has been conducted; private physicians at their clinics were interviewed. The total number of 443 private sectors' physicians has been chosen by the stratified random sampling method. Appropriate descriptive analysis was used to describe the study's participants. Logistic regression was used for bivariable and multivariable analysis. The response rate of the study was 90.06 (399%). Among responders, who had stated that they were suspicious of TB over the recent year, 62 (16.45%) stated that they reported cases of TB at least once during the same period. Having reporting requirements and the number of visited patients was significantly related to TB suspicious (odds ratio = 2.84, confidence interval: 1.62-5, P private sector by simple and quick interventions. It seems that a considerable fraction of private sector physicians, not all of them, will notify TB if they are provided with primary information and primary resources. To optimize the TB notification, however, intersectoral interventions are more likely to be successful.

Performance comparison of secure comparison protocols

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Kerschbaum, F.; Biswas, D.; Hoogh, de S.J.A.

2009-01-01

Secure multiparty computation (SMC) has gained tremendous importance with the growth of the Internet and e-commerce, where mutually untrusted parties need to jointly compute a function of their private inputs. However, SMC protocols usually have very high computational complexities, rendering them

Blind quantum computation protocol in which Alice only makes measurements

Science.gov (United States)

Morimae, Tomoyuki; Fujii, Keisuke

2013-05-01

Blind quantum computation is a new secure quantum computing protocol which enables Alice (who does not have sufficient quantum technology) to delegate her quantum computation to Bob (who has a full-fledged quantum computer) in such a way that Bob cannot learn anything about Alice's input, output, and algorithm. In previous protocols, Alice needs to have a device which generates quantum states, such as single-photon states. Here we propose another type of blind computing protocol where Alice does only measurements, such as the polarization measurements with a threshold detector. In several experimental setups, such as optical systems, the measurement of a state is much easier than the generation of a single-qubit state. Therefore our protocols ease Alice's burden. Furthermore, the security of our protocol is based on the no-signaling principle, which is more fundamental than quantum physics. Finally, our protocols are device independent in the sense that Alice does not need to trust her measurement device in order to guarantee the security.

Semantics and logic for security protocols

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Jacobs, B.P.F.; Hasuo, I.

2009-01-01

This paper presents a sound BAN-like logic for reasoning about security protocols with theorem prover support. The logic has formulas for sending and receiving messages (with nonces, public and private encryptions, etc.), and has both temporal and epistemic operators (describing the knowledge of

Private sector participation in power sector in India

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Ranganathan, V.

1992-01-01

The Indian Government is currently thinking of allowing private sector to participate in power sector inviting private sector to generate electricity mainly from coal. The main motivation is resource mobilization from private sector, since the Plan funds are diverted to rural development away from power sector; and yet the massive expansion has to be financed. The paper analyzes the inherent difficulties and contradictions in the Government's proposal, such as co-existence of high cost private power and low cost public power, the potential goal-conflicts of private and public utilities and the constraints in raising finance. It suggests a different model in order to make the privatization proposition feasible. 12 refs

Energy privatization in the Middle East

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Tetreault, M.A.

1997-01-01

The issue of energy privatization in the Middle East was discussed with particular examples from Kuwait. The development of Kuwait's domestic political institutions is unique in the Arab Gulf which makes privatization more complicated than in other Middle Eastern countries. The major issue in Kuwait is whether foreign investors and domestic private investors will be allowed equity participation in oil and gas production projects. It was suggested that the answer depends on general assessments of national financial and state security interests and on individual case judgements respecting each potential partnership. Historically, one of the main reasons for nationalization of private investment in oil and gas in the Middle East was the desire of governments to increase state revenues. Nationalization permitted states to set prices and production levels themselves and to keep the difference between costs and prices instead of sharing it with corporate owners. However, nationalization is not without its problems as indicated by the difficulties encountered by governments in trying to make the the OPEC-managed hydrocarbon regime work. The three main reasons for the current willingness of Middle Eastern governments to consider re-admitting private companies as equity participants in their energy industries, namely market share and terms of access, interstate disputes, and desire to minimize corruption, were also discussed. It was suggested that these are strong arguments that support taking another look at privatization as a strategy that is in the long-term interest of Middle Eastern oil producing states. 19 refs

Public Policy Exceptions in European Private Law : A New Research Project

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Colombi Ciacchi, Aurelia

2014-01-01

Public policy exceptions arguably exist in all fields of private and commerciallaw, not only in private international law but also in substantive law. In substantive private law, the term 'public policy exception' could be used to indicate general illegality rules that make an act of private

The Nagoya Protocol – Justice in the Making?- Comment

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Doris Schroeder

2013-09-01

Full Text Available Ratification of the Nagoya Protocol seems to be a long drawn out process for many parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, delaying the Protocol's entering into force. This short paper suggests that four innovative elements of the Protocol may require time-consuming consideration prior to implementation: the Global Multilateral Benefit-Sharing Mechanism and the encouragement of Transboundary Co-operation; the reference to human pathogens, the reference to food security and affordable access to treatments and finally the demand to accommodate customary laws of indigenous peoples. At the same time, these four elements are essential to achieving global justice in access and benefit sharing regulations and therefore highly welcome.

European Market Making and Policy Duplication

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Frankel, Christian

2013-01-01

This paper argues that private regulation has been essential to the making of the common European market. The distinction between negative and positive integration, usually used to understand the making of the common European market, only gives us part of the picture, as it focuses on public...... authorities and the regulation issued by them, and tends to ignore private authorities. A focus on private regulation is suggested to enlarge the focus on positive and negative integration, and this is used in an analysis of EU's removal of barriers to trade from 1958 to 2000. The paper shows that private...... regulation in the form of technical standardisation has become essential to European market making....

Probability of error in information-hiding protocols

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Chatzikokolakis, K.; Palamidessi, C.; Panangaden, P.

2007-01-01

Randomized protocols for hiding private information can fruitfully be regarded as noisy channels in the information-theoretic sense, and the inference of the concealed information can be regarded as a hypothesis-testing problem. We consider the Bayesian approach to the problem, and investigate the

District decision-making for health in low-income settings: a case study of the potential of public and private sector data in India and Ethiopia

Science.gov (United States)

Bhattacharyya, Sanghita; Berhanu, Della; Taddesse, Nolawi; Srivastava, Aradhana; Wickremasinghe, Deepthi; Schellenberg, Joanna

2016-01-01

Many low- and middle-income countries have pluralistic health systems where private for-profit and not-for-profit sectors complement the public sector: data shared across sectors can provide information for local decision-making. The third article in a series of four on district decision-making for health in low-income settings, this study shows the untapped potential of existing data through documenting the nature and type of data collected by the public and private health systems, data flow and sharing, use and inter-sectoral linkages in India and Ethiopia. In two districts in each country, semi-structured interviews were conducted with administrators and data managers to understand the type of data maintained and linkages with other sectors in terms of data sharing, flow and use. We created a database of all data elements maintained at district level, categorized by form and according to the six World Health Organization health system blocks. We used content analysis to capture the type of data available for different health system levels. Data flow in the public health sectors of both counties is sequential, formal and systematic. Although multiple sources of data exist outside the public health system, there is little formal sharing of data between sectors. Though not fully operational, Ethiopia has better developed formal structures for data sharing than India. In the private and public sectors, health data in both countries are collected in all six health system categories, with greatest focus on service delivery data and limited focus on supplies, health workforce, governance and contextual information. In the Indian private sector, there is a better balance than in the public sector of data across the six categories. In both India and Ethiopia the majority of data collected relate to maternal and child health. Both countries have huge potential for increased use of health data to guide district decision-making. PMID:27591203

Outsourcing in private healthcare organisations: a Greek perspective.

Science.gov (United States)

Moschuris, Socrates J; Kondylis, Michael N

2007-01-01

The purpose of this paper is to present a study carried out to investigate the extent of outsourcing, the decision-making process, the impact of outsourcing, and the future trend of outsourcing in private healthcare organisations in Greece. A survey instrument was designed and mailed to a random sample of 100 private healthcare organisations in Greece. A total of 25 usable questionnaires were received, representing a response rate of 25 percent. The survey instrument focused on the extent to which private healthcare organisations outsource services, the decision-making process for choosing an external service provider, the impact of outsourcing, and the future trend of outsourcing. Private healthcare organisations in Greece outsource a variety of activities. Cost savings, customisation, and customer satisfaction are the main factors affecting the outsourcing decision. The cooperation with a contract service provider has led to an improvement in customer satisfaction and to a cost reduction. Most users are highly satisfied with the performance of these companies and believe that there will be a future increase in the usage of these services. The paper provides a framework regarding outsourcing in private healthcare organisations. This research fills the gap in the area of outsourcing in private healthcare organisations in Greece.

A Review and Assessment of Privatization in Canada

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Aidan R. Vinning

2012-01-01

Full Text Available Most privatizations in Canada occurred in the 10-year period from the mid-1980s to the mid1990s, and while many of the remaining candidates are both politically and economically problematic, the Harper government has signalled its renewed interest in more privatizations. This paper, written by two of Canada’s leading experts on the subject, comprehensively assesses hard data from the earlier privatizations in Canada, including sectors such as energy, transport and telecommunications. They find that the overall impacts have been largely positive, in many cases impressively so. Key economic indicators such as capital expenditures, dividends, tax revenues and sales per employee tended to increase, while others such as employment initially fell, only to rise again over the long term. Ultimately, most of the privatized firms continue to operate efficiently, making them positive contributors to Canadians’ social welfare through the provision of increased economic opportunities, higher profits and taxes. Drawing on lessons learned, the authors propose a common-sense framework to guide future privatizations and ensure all Canadians derive the maximum possible benefits from them. No Canadian government has ever formulated such a plan for a privatization regime, making this paper a must-read for anyone with a stake in the future of Canadian business.

Decision making in organisations: A comparison between the private and public sector Ákvarðanataka skipulagsheilda. Samanburður einkafyrirtækja og opinberra stofnana

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ingi Rúnar Eðvarðsson

2010-12-01

Full Text Available The aim of the paper is to examine the process of decision-making among public administrators and answer the question of whether this differs from the way decisions is arrived at in the private sector. Interviews were conducted at three private companies and three public institutions. The results indicate that the administrators of public bodies and private enterprises appear to use similar methods in their decision-making process. The differences which were revealed relate to the size of the companies or institutions in question, rather than to form of ownership; i.e. the larger the operation, the more people are involved in the decision-making process. An analysis of the interviews reveals that the administrators of public bodies have a weaker mandate to make decisions than is the case in private enterprises, especially with regard to matters involving strategy. Otherwise there is little difference between small private businesses and small public institutions - their management often apply the rational approach and bounded rationality model to solve problems. The decision making process is very similar in larger private businesses and public institutions. Decisions take longer to make in public institutions where more momentous issues are involved, such as the construction of new buildings and strategy formation, in which case the process is characterised by staged decisions, often resulting in compromises between parties with contrasting interests. It should also be mentioned that many kinds of state legislation, e.g. relating to equal opportunities, information act and public employees, as well as strategies of district councils, often restrict the decision-making authority of public administrators. Such restraints do not apply to the same extent to private sector management. The consequences of the economic collapse exercised a considerably stronger impact on decision-making among public administrators than was the case with their

The Characteristics of Decision-Making Factors on the Purchase of Private Cars Taking Account of the Motives and Needs of Customers

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Danylenko Yevhen S.

2018-03-01

Full Text Available A characterization of decision-making factors on purchase of private cars taking account of the motives and needs of customers is provided. The demographic, macroeconomic, socio-cultural, marketing and technical factors, as well as the motives and needs of customers are considered. According to the author’s classification of needs the influence of factors on different groups of needs is analyzed: obligatory; desirable, but not mandatory; prestigious; trend; class; dominant, etc. The author brings forward the idea that the researched factors evoke a number of emotions in buyers: confusion, doubt, joy, tide of happiness, confidence, reliability, sense of protection, domination, authority, etc. During the purchase of private cars there is a rush of happiness and pleasure in women more often, than in men. But men more likely than women feel satisfied with the purchase, which is based on their simple attitude to money as a mediator of the buying and selling process. Studying the reaction of customers to the influence of various factors provides automakers and dealers with creation of the most favorable conditions for making purchases in their car center.

Privatization and Political Power in Representative Democracy

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hansen, Morten Balle

One of the main endeavors within ”New Public Management” (NPM) since the 1980s has been to encourage various forms of privatization in the public sector. In recent years, the involvement of private players in the provision of services in Danish municipalities has thus been increased, which makes...... it important to study the consequences of this development. In the present article, privatization is understood as the use of private service providers to provide services and focus is on what privatization means for the power of local political players. The point of departure is an expectation that a high...... degree of privatization can have far-reaching consequences for the distribution of local political power. This is illustrated empirically by a questionnaire survey of 896 municipal leaders. The main findings are that the local political actors generally have less power in municipalities with high degrees...

Small public private partnerships

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Koch, Christian; Jensen, Jesper Ole

2009-01-01

Public Private Partnerships (PPP) are frequently mobilized as a purchasing form suitable for large infrastructure projects. And it is commonly assumed that transaction costs linked to the establishment of PPP make them prohibitive in small sizes. In a Danish context this has been safeguarded by t...

Implementing an ultrasound-based protocol for diagnosingappendicitis while maintaining diagnostic accuracy

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Van Atta, Angela J.; Baskin, Henry J.; Maves, Connie K.; Dansie, David M.; Rollins, Michael D.; Bolte, Robert G.; Mundorff, Michael B.; Andrews, Seth P.

2015-01-01

The use of ultrasound to diagnose appendicitis in children is well-documented but not universally employed outside of pediatric academic centers, especially in the United States. Various obstacles make it difficult for institutions and radiologists to abandon a successful and accurate CT-based imaging protocol in favor of a US-based protocol. To describe how we overcame barriers to implementing a US-based appendicitis protocol among a large group of nonacademic private-practice pediatric radiologists while maintaining diagnostic accuracy and decreasing medical costs. A multidisciplinary team of physicians (pediatric surgery, pediatric emergency medicine and pediatric radiology) approved an imaging protocol using US as the primary modality to evaluate suspected appendicitis with CT for equivocal cases. The protocol addressed potential bias against US and accommodated for institutional limitations of radiologist and sonographer experience and availability. Radiologists coded US reports according to the probability of appendicitis. Radiology reports were compared with clinical outcomes to assess diagnostic accuracy. During the study period, physicians from each group were apprised of the interim US protocol accuracy results. Problematic cases were discussed openly. A total of 512 children were enrolled and underwent US for evaluation of appendicitis over a 30-month period. Diagnostic accuracy was comparable to published results for combined US/CT protocols. Comparing the first 12 months to the last 12 months of the study period, the proportion of children achieving an unequivocal US result increased from 30% (51/169) to 53% (149/282) and the proportion of children undergoing surgery based solely on US findings increased from 55% (23/42) to 84% (92/109). Overall, 63% (325/512) of patients in the protocol did not require a CT. Total patient costs were reduced by $30,182 annually. We overcame several barriers to implementing a US protocol. During the study period our

Implementing an ultrasound-based protocol for diagnosingappendicitis while maintaining diagnostic accuracy

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Van Atta, Angela J. [University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, UT (United States); Baskin, Henry J.; Maves, Connie K.; Dansie, David M. [Primary Children' s Hospital, Department of Radiology, Salt Lake City, UT (United States); Rollins, Michael D. [University of Utah School of Medicine, Department of Surgery, Division of Pediatric Surgery, Salt Lake City, UT (United States); Bolte, Robert G. [University of Utah School of Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, Division of Pediatric Emergency Medicine, Salt Lake City, UT (United States); Mundorff, Michael B.; Andrews, Seth P. [Primary Children' s Hospital, Systems Improvement, Salt Lake City, UT (United States)

2015-05-01

The use of ultrasound to diagnose appendicitis in children is well-documented but not universally employed outside of pediatric academic centers, especially in the United States. Various obstacles make it difficult for institutions and radiologists to abandon a successful and accurate CT-based imaging protocol in favor of a US-based protocol. To describe how we overcame barriers to implementing a US-based appendicitis protocol among a large group of nonacademic private-practice pediatric radiologists while maintaining diagnostic accuracy and decreasing medical costs. A multidisciplinary team of physicians (pediatric surgery, pediatric emergency medicine and pediatric radiology) approved an imaging protocol using US as the primary modality to evaluate suspected appendicitis with CT for equivocal cases. The protocol addressed potential bias against US and accommodated for institutional limitations of radiologist and sonographer experience and availability. Radiologists coded US reports according to the probability of appendicitis. Radiology reports were compared with clinical outcomes to assess diagnostic accuracy. During the study period, physicians from each group were apprised of the interim US protocol accuracy results. Problematic cases were discussed openly. A total of 512 children were enrolled and underwent US for evaluation of appendicitis over a 30-month period. Diagnostic accuracy was comparable to published results for combined US/CT protocols. Comparing the first 12 months to the last 12 months of the study period, the proportion of children achieving an unequivocal US result increased from 30% (51/169) to 53% (149/282) and the proportion of children undergoing surgery based solely on US findings increased from 55% (23/42) to 84% (92/109). Overall, 63% (325/512) of patients in the protocol did not require a CT. Total patient costs were reduced by $30,182 annually. We overcame several barriers to implementing a US protocol. During the study period our

On the Bayes risk in information-hiding protocols

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Chatzikokolakis, K.; Palamidessi, C.; Panangaden, P.

2008-01-01

Randomized protocols for hiding private information can be regarded as noisy channels in the information-theoretic sense, and the inference of the concealed information can be regarded as a hypothesis-testing problem. We consider the Bayesian approach to the problem, and investigate the probability

Private quantum computation: an introduction to blind quantum computing and related protocols

Science.gov (United States)

Fitzsimons, Joseph F.

2017-06-01

Quantum technologies hold the promise of not only faster algorithmic processing of data, via quantum computation, but also of more secure communications, in the form of quantum cryptography. In recent years, a number of protocols have emerged which seek to marry these concepts for the purpose of securing computation rather than communication. These protocols address the task of securely delegating quantum computation to an untrusted device while maintaining the privacy, and in some instances the integrity, of the computation. We present a review of the progress to date in this emerging area.

Private States, Quantum Data Hiding, and the Swapping of Perfect Secrecy

Science.gov (United States)

Christandl, Matthias; Ferrara, Roberto

2017-12-01

An important contribution to the understanding of quantum key distribution has been the discovery of entangled states from which secret bits, but no maximally entangled states, can be extracted [Horodecki et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 200501 (2005), 10.1103/PhysRevLett.94.200501]. The construction of those states was based on an intuition that the quantum mechanical phenomena of data hiding and privacy might be related. In this Letter we firmly connect these two phenomena and highlight three aspects of this result. First, we simplify the definition of the secret key rate. Second, we give a formula for the one-way distillable entanglement of certain private states. Third, we consider the problem of extending the distance of quantum key distribution with help of intermediate stations, a setting called the quantum key repeater. We show that for protocols that first distill private states, it is essentially optimal to use the standard quantum repeater protocol based on entanglement distillation and entanglement swapping.

Private law

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

working and researching in the key areas of law, security and privacy in IT, international trade and private law. Now, in 2010 and some seven conferences later, the event moves to Barcelona and embraces for the first time the three conference tracks just described. The papers in this work have all been...... blind reviewed and edited for quality. They represent the contributions of leading academics, early career researchers and others from an increasing number of countries, universities and institutions around the world. They set a benchmark for discussion of the current issues arising in the subject area...... and continue to offer an informed and relevant contribution to the policy making agenda. As Chair of the Conference Committee, I am once more very proud to endorse this work "Private Law: Rights, Duties & Conflicts" to all those seeking an up to date and informed evaluation of the leading issues. This work...

To implicate the private sector in funding: The Kyoto mechanisms and SUMO policies

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Leguet, Benoit; Morel, Romain

2015-01-01

Internationally set objectives in the fight against climate change cannot be reached without funding from the private sector. Public money, a scarce resource, must be used as best possible, in particular when it has a leverage effect on private funding. In this respect, feedback from the Kyoto Protocol's clean development mechanism is of interest. On the eve of the 2015 Paris Climate Conference, we must ramp up the mobilization of private resources. Smart unconventional monetary (SUMO) policies could help us toward this goal. Several countries have adopted such policies to cope with macro-economic circumstances or systemic risks. Is the destabilization of the climate not a risk of this sort?

District decision-making for health in low-income settings: a case study of the potential of public and private sector data in India and Ethiopia.

Science.gov (United States)

Bhattacharyya, Sanghita; Berhanu, Della; Taddesse, Nolawi; Srivastava, Aradhana; Wickremasinghe, Deepthi; Schellenberg, Joanna; Iqbal Avan, Bilal

2016-09-01

Many low- and middle-income countries have pluralistic health systems where private for-profit and not-for-profit sectors complement the public sector: data shared across sectors can provide information for local decision-making. The third article in a series of four on district decision-making for health in low-income settings, this study shows the untapped potential of existing data through documenting the nature and type of data collected by the public and private health systems, data flow and sharing, use and inter-sectoral linkages in India and Ethiopia. In two districts in each country, semi-structured interviews were conducted with administrators and data managers to understand the type of data maintained and linkages with other sectors in terms of data sharing, flow and use. We created a database of all data elements maintained at district level, categorized by form and according to the six World Health Organization health system blocks. We used content analysis to capture the type of data available for different health system levels. Data flow in the public health sectors of both counties is sequential, formal and systematic. Although multiple sources of data exist outside the public health system, there is little formal sharing of data between sectors. Though not fully operational, Ethiopia has better developed formal structures for data sharing than India. In the private and public sectors, health data in both countries are collected in all six health system categories, with greatest focus on service delivery data and limited focus on supplies, health workforce, governance and contextual information. In the Indian private sector, there is a better balance than in the public sector of data across the six categories. In both India and Ethiopia the majority of data collected relate to maternal and child health. Both countries have huge potential for increased use of health data to guide district decision-making. © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford

On the Performance of the Cache Coding Protocol

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Behnaz Maboudi

2018-03-01

Full Text Available Network coding approaches typically consider an unrestricted recoding of coded packets in the relay nodes to increase performance. However, this can expose the system to pollution attacks that cannot be detected during transmission, until the receivers attempt to recover the data. To prevent these attacks while allowing for the benefits of coding in mesh networks, the cache coding protocol was proposed. This protocol only allows recoding at the relays when the relay has received enough coded packets to decode an entire generation of packets. At that point, the relay node recodes and signs the recoded packets with its own private key, allowing the system to detect and minimize the effect of pollution attacks and making the relays accountable for changes on the data. This paper analyzes the delay performance of cache coding to understand the security-performance trade-off of this scheme. We introduce an analytical model for the case of two relays in an erasure channel relying on an absorbing Markov chain and an approximate model to estimate the performance in terms of the number of transmissions before successfully decoding at the receiver. We confirm our analysis using simulation results. We show that cache coding can overcome the security issues of unrestricted recoding with only a moderate decrease in system performance.

A hybrid technique for private location-based queries with database protection

KAUST Repository

Ghinita, Gabriel

2009-01-01

Mobile devices with global positioning capabilities allow users to retrieve points of interest (POI) in their proximity. To protect user privacy, it is important not to disclose exact user coordinates to un-trusted entities that provide location-based services. Currently, there are two main approaches to protect the location privacy of users: (i) hiding locations inside cloaking regions (CRs) and (ii) encrypting location data using private information retrieval (PIR) protocols. Previous work focused on finding good trade-offs between privacy and performance of user protection techniques, but disregarded the important issue of protecting the POI dataset D. For instance, location cloaking requires large-sized CRs, leading to excessive disclosure of POIs (O(|D|) in the worst case). PIR, on the other hand, reduces this bound to , but at the expense of high processing and communication overhead. We propose a hybrid, two-step approach to private location-based queries, which provides protection for both the users and the database. In the first step, user locations are generalized to coarse-grained CRs which provide strong privacy. Next, a PIR protocol is applied with respect to the obtained query CR. To protect excessive disclosure of POI locations, we devise a cryptographic protocol that privately evaluates whether a point is enclosed inside a rectangular region. We also introduce an algorithm to efficiently support PIR on dynamic POI sub-sets. Our method discloses O(1) POI, orders of magnitude fewer than CR- or PIR-based techniques. Experimental results show that the hybrid approach is scalable in practice, and clearly outperforms the pure-PIR approach in terms of computational and communication overhead. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Automatic Validation of Protocol Narration

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Bodei, Chiara; Buchholtz, Mikael; Degano, Pierpablo

2003-01-01

We perform a systematic expansion of protocol narrations into terms of a process algebra in order to make precise some of the detailed checks that need to be made in a protocol. We then apply static analysis technology to develop an automatic validation procedure for protocols. Finally, we...

Quantum solution to a class of two-party private summation problems

Science.gov (United States)

Shi, Run-Hua; Zhang, Shun

2017-09-01

In this paper, we define a class of special two-party private summation (S2PPS) problems and present a common quantum solution to S2PPS problems. Compared to related classical solutions, our solution has advantages of higher security and lower communication complexity, and especially it can ensure the fairness of two parties without the help of a third party. Furthermore, we investigate the practical applications of our proposed S2PPS protocol in many privacy-preserving settings with big data sets, including private similarity decision, anonymous authentication, social networks, secure trade negotiation, secure data mining.

VPN (Virtual Private Network) Performance Measurements

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Calderon, Calixto; Goncalves, Joao G.M.; Sequeira, Vitor [Joint Research Centre, Ispra (Italy). Inst. for the Protection and Security of the Citizen; Vandaele, Roland; Meylemans, Paul [European Commission, DG-TREN (Luxembourg)

2003-05-01

Virtual Private Networks (VPN) is an important technology allowing for secure communications through insecure transmission media (i.e., Internet) by adding authentication and encryption to the existing protocols. This paper describes some VPN performance indicators measured over international communication links. An ISDN based VPN link was established between the Joint Research Centre, Ispra site, Italy, and EURATOM Safeguards in Luxembourg. This link connected two EURATOM Safeguards FAST surveillance stations, and used different vendor solutions hardware (Cisco router 1720 and Nokia CC-500 Gateway). To authenticate and secure this international link, we have used several methods at the different levels of the seven-layered ISO network protocol stack (i.e., Callback feature, CHAP - Challenge Handshake Protocol - authentication protocol). The tests made involved the use of different encryption algorithms and the way session secret keys are periodically renewed, considering these elements influence significantly the transmission throughput. Future tests will include the use of a wide variety of wireless media transmission and terminal equipment technologies, in particular PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) and Notebook PCs. These tests aim at characterising the functionality of VPNs whenever field inspectors wish to contact headquarters to access information from a central archive database or transmit local measurements or documents. These technologies cover wireless transmission needs at different geographical scales: roombased level Bluetooth, floor or building level Wi-Fi and region or country level GPRS.

Private Animal Welfare Standards—Opportunities and Risks

Science.gov (United States)

Röcklinsberg, Helena

2018-01-01

Simple Summary In all European countries, farmers keeping animals must comply with European and national animal welfare legislation. Each government has a responsibility to make sure that the legislation is complied with by the farmers. However, during the last decades it has become increasingly common that private organisations, such as the industry, farmers’ organisations, or animal welfare organisations, develop additional animal welfare regulations (‘private standards’) that the farmers also need to comply with. These private standards have the opportunity to improve animal welfare above the legislative level, however, in our study we have shown that this is not always the case and that all of these different private standards, in addition to the legislation, makes it difficult to get an overview of the animal welfare regulation and control arena. For the sake of the farmers, the animal welfare inspectors, the consumers, and the animals we conclude that it is important that policymakers consider this arena as a whole and not their own regulation as a single phenomenon. Abstract The current shift moves the governance of animal welfare away from the government towards the private market and the consumers. We have studied the intentions, content, and on-farm inspection results from different sets of animal welfare legislation and private standards with an aim to highlight the most important opportunities and risks identified in relation to the trend of increasingly relying on private standards for safeguarding or improving farm animal welfare. Our results show that different focuses, intentions, animal welfare requirements, inspection methods (i.e., methods for measuring and evaluating the compliance with a regulation), and inspection results, together with the use of vague wordings and a drive towards more flexible regulations does certainly not facilitate the interpretation and implementation of animal welfare regulations, especially not in relation to

Development of a program theory for shared decision-making: a realist review protocol.

Science.gov (United States)

Groot, Gary; Waldron, Tamara; Carr, Tracey; McMullen, Linda; Bandura, Lori-Ann; Neufeld, Shelley-May; Duncan, Vicky

2017-06-17

The practicality of applying evidence to healthcare systems with the aim of implementing change is an ongoing challenge for practitioners, policy makers, and academics. Shared decision- making (SDM), a method of medical decision-making that allows a balanced relationship between patients, physicians, and other key players in the medical decision process, is purported to improve patient and system outcomes. Despite the oft-mentioned benefits, there are gaps in the current literature between theory and implementation that would benefit from a realist approach given the value of this methodology to analyze complex interventions. In this protocol, we outline a study that will explore: "In which situations, how, why, and for whom does SDM between patients and health care providers contribute to improved decision making?" A seven step iterative process will be described including preliminary theory development, establishment of a search strategy, selection and appraisal of literature, data extraction, analysis and synthesis of extracted results from literature, and formation of a revised program theory with the input of patients, physicians, nurse navigators, and policy makers from a stakeholder session. The goal of the realist review will be to identify and refine a program theory for SDM through the identification of mechanisms which shape the characteristics of when, how, and why SDM will, and will not, work. PROSPERO CRD42017062609.

The case for a network protocol isolation layer

KAUST Repository

Il Choi, Jung

2009-01-01

Network protocols are typically designed and tested individually. In practice, however, applications use multiple protocols concurrently. This discrepancy can lead to failures from unanticipated interactions between protocols. In this paper, we argue that sensor network communication stacks should have an isolation layer, whose purpose is to make each protocol\\'s perception of the wireless channel independent of what other protocols are running. We identify two key mechanisms the isolation layer must provide: shared collision avoidance and fair channel allocation. We present an example design of an isolation layer that builds on the existing algorithms of grant-to-send and fair queueing. However, the complexities of wireless make these mechanisms insufficient by themselves. We therefore propose two new mechanisms that address these limitations: channel decay and fair cancellation. Incorporating these new mechanisms reduces the increase in end-to-end delivery cost associated with concurrently operating two protocols by more than 60%. The isolation layer improves median protocol fairness from 0.52 to 0.96 in Jain\\'s fairness index. Together, these results show that using an isolation layer makes protocols more efficient and robust. Copyright 2009 ACM.

Culture, Motivation, and Vocational Decision-Making of Australian Senior High School Students in Private Schools

Science.gov (United States)

Jung, Jae Yup; McCormick, John; Gregory, Gary; Barnett, Kerry

2011-01-01

The purpose of this study was to investigate the roles of culture and motivation in the occupational decisions of senior high school students attending private schools. A theoretical framework guided the study. A questionnaire was administered to 492 Grade 11 students attending a stratified random sample of six independent (private) schools…

Public interest in the private sphere: how far into the home can local policy-making reach?

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Palm, Jenny (Linkoeping Univ., Dept. of Technology and Social Change, Linkoeping (Sweden))

2009-07-01

Environmental problems in the energy system largely originate from everyday activities and choices. The home is a 'node' of daily life and is often seen as our private sphere. However, the privacy of the home can be contested in relation to local policies in general and energy and environmental policies in particular. This paper discusses the private/public divide in energy policies and how this divide appears to Swedish municipal energy consultants. By analyzing the actions of several energy consultants and their efforts to influence households as well as how households perceive this guidance, we can gauge how far policy instruments have penetrated the private sphere. Municipal energy consultants are careful in providing advice to the households: they preserve a rather large 'no-trespassing' area to avoid interfering in peoples' private sphere. Households can accept information, even individually tailored information, but will not accept requests to do certain things. Authorities can inform but not tell people how to act: the decision is still the householders'. Looking at exactly how both households and consultants reason about energy efficiency and the public/private divide, we can discern tendencies for what were earlier considered private concerns to be increasingly perceived as common or public concerns. Energy consultants are trying to find ways to influence family lifestyle while householders are requesting individual inspections and want the consultants to keep individual records of family energy use, not regarding this information as too private. Swedish regulations, however, are hampering this development and delaying the urgent need for changes in both technologies used and energy-related behaviours.

Job Satisfaction in Public and Private Schools

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Dahler-Larsen, Peter; Foged, Søren Kjær

2017-01-01

is that dissimilar functional areas are studied which makes it difficult to isolate effects of privatization as such. We respond to these challenges by carrying out an empirical analysis of job satisfaction among teachers who teach Danish to immigrants. The teachers work in comparable schools, carry out the same...... task, and are subject to the same performance management system, but some of the schools are public, some are private, and some have been subject to competitive tendering. We demonstrate that competition has a greater impact than ownership upon job satisfaction. We also show that one of the key...... mechanisms which translate competition into reduced job satisfaction relates to changing relations between managers and employees. Advocates and opponents of privatization alike should pay more attention to specific aspects and mechanisms related to privatization, in particular the element of competition....

Privatization considerations of environmental remediation of DOE wastes

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Zocher, M.A.; Paananen, O.H.; Kost, K.

1997-01-01

The US Department of Energy (DOE) is in the process of privatizing the application of environmental cleanup technologies to remediate nuclear waste within the DOE complex. These wastes are the legacy of the production of nuclear materials during the cold war era. It is anticipated that the privatization strategy will result in more efficient and less expensive approaches to the cleanup of DOE wastes. Similar privatization initiatives have the potential to achieve increased efficiency and cost savings at sites under the Department of Defense (DOD) and other Federal agencies. The DOE is privatizing a major, complex portion of the Tank Waste Remediation System (TWRS) Program at the Hanford nuclear reservation located in eastern Washington State. This effort will involve private companies that will design, permit, construct, operate, and finally deactivate waste treatment facilities that will be owned entirely by the private sector. The DOE will purchase treated waste products on a unit cost basis from the facilities after supplying the vendors with waste from the tank farm at Hanford. The privatization of selected United States and international Government functions involve decisions that are based on accurate and valid cost information. Private firms are beginning to privatize certain corporate activities so that they may concentrate business activities along main product or mission lines. In either the public or private sector, many aspects of cost engineering are utilized to make prioritization a success

Quantum private query with perfect user privacy against a joint-measurement attack

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Yang, Yu-Guang, E-mail: yangyang7357@bjut.edu.cn [College of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing 100124 (China); State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100093 (China); Liu, Zhi-Chao [College of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing 100124 (China); Li, Jian [School of Computer, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876 (China); Chen, Xiu-Bo [Information Security Center, State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, 100876 (China); Zuo, Hui-Juan [College of Mathematics and Information Science, Hebei Normal University, Shijiazhuang 050024 (China); Zhou, Yi-Hua; Shi, Wei-Min [College of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing 100124 (China)

2016-12-16

The joint-measurement (JM) attack is the most powerful threat to the database security for existing quantum-key-distribution (QKD)-based quantum private query (QPQ) protocols. Wei et al. (2016) [28] proposed a novel QPQ protocol against the JM attack. However, their protocol relies on two-way quantum communication thereby affecting its real implementation and communication efficiency. Moreover, it cannot ensure perfect user privacy. In this paper, we present a new one-way QPQ protocol in which the special way of classical post-processing of oblivious key ensures the security against the JM attack. Furthermore, it realizes perfect user privacy and lower complexity of communication. - Highlights: • A special classical post-processing ensures the security against the JM attack. • It ensures perfect user privacy. • It ensures lower complexity of communication. Alice's conclusive key rate is 1/6.

Quantum private query with perfect user privacy against a joint-measurement attack

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Yang, Yu-Guang; Liu, Zhi-Chao; Li, Jian; Chen, Xiu-Bo; Zuo, Hui-Juan; Zhou, Yi-Hua; Shi, Wei-Min

2016-01-01

The joint-measurement (JM) attack is the most powerful threat to the database security for existing quantum-key-distribution (QKD)-based quantum private query (QPQ) protocols. Wei et al. (2016) [28] proposed a novel QPQ protocol against the JM attack. However, their protocol relies on two-way quantum communication thereby affecting its real implementation and communication efficiency. Moreover, it cannot ensure perfect user privacy. In this paper, we present a new one-way QPQ protocol in which the special way of classical post-processing of oblivious key ensures the security against the JM attack. Furthermore, it realizes perfect user privacy and lower complexity of communication. - Highlights: • A special classical post-processing ensures the security against the JM attack. • It ensures perfect user privacy. • It ensures lower complexity of communication. Alice's conclusive key rate is 1/6.

The case for a network protocol isolation layer

KAUST Repository

Il Choi, Jung; Kazandjieva, Maria A.; Jain, Mayank; Levis, Philip

2009-01-01

Network protocols are typically designed and tested individually. In practice, however, applications use multiple protocols concurrently. This discrepancy can lead to failures from unanticipated interactions between protocols. In this paper, we argue that sensor network communication stacks should have an isolation layer, whose purpose is to make each protocol's perception of the wireless channel independent of what other protocols are running. We identify two key mechanisms the isolation layer must provide: shared collision avoidance and fair channel allocation. We present an example design of an isolation layer that builds on the existing algorithms of grant-to-send and fair queueing. However, the complexities of wireless make these mechanisms insufficient by themselves. We therefore propose two new mechanisms that address these limitations: channel decay and fair cancellation. Incorporating these new mechanisms reduces the increase in end-to-end delivery cost associated with concurrently operating two protocols by more than 60%. The isolation layer improves median protocol fairness from 0.52 to 0.96 in Jain's fairness index. Together, these results show that using an isolation layer makes protocols more efficient and robust. Copyright 2009 ACM.

Future Of Privatized Warfare

Science.gov (United States)

2016-05-26

including Bosnia, Ukraine, Chile , and others made up the largest portion of private contractors in Iraq.43 Mercenary...56 movements, schools are now advocating “diversity rather than unity” and make “little effort to inculcate immigrants in American culture...identities are becoming increasingly important as a result of failures to assimilate new immigrants . Huntington highlights that immigrants from Mexico

Exposure to hot and cold environmental conditions does not affect the decision making ability of soccer referees following an intermittent sprint protocol.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Lee eTaylor

2014-05-01

Full Text Available Soccer referees enforce the laws of the game and the decisions they make can directly affect match results. Fixtures within European competitions take place in climatic conditions that are often challenging (e.g. Moscow ~ -5oC, Madrid ~30oC. Effects of these temperatures on player performance are well documented; however, little is known how this environmental stress may impair cognitive performance of soccer referees and if so, whether exercise exasperates this. The present study aims to investigate the effect of cold (COLD; 5oC, 40% relative humidity (RH, hot (HOT; 30oC, 40% RH and temperate (CONT; 18oC, 40% RH conditions on decision making during soccer specific exercise. On separate occasions within each condition, thirteen physically active males; either semi-professional referees or semi-professional soccer players completed three 90 min intermittent treadmill protocols that simulated match play, interspersed with 4 computer delivered cognitive tests to measure vigilance and dual task capacity. Core and skin temperature, heart rate, rating of perceived exertion and thermal sensation were recorded throughout the protocol. There was no significant difference between conditions for decision making (p > 0.05 despite significant differences in measured physiological variables (skin temperature = HOT 34.5 ± 5.1°C; CONT 31.2 ± 0.1°C and COLD 26.7 ± 0.5°C; p < 0.05. It is hypothesised that the lack of difference observed in decision making ability between conditions was due to the exercise protocol used, as it may not have elicited an appropriate and valid soccer specific internal load to alter cognitive functioning.

Exposure to hot and cold environmental conditions does not affect the decision making ability of soccer referees following an intermittent sprint protocol.

Science.gov (United States)

Taylor, Lee; Fitch, Natalie; Castle, Paul; Watkins, Samuel; Aldous, Jeffrey; Sculthorpe, Nicholas; Midgely, Adrian; Brewer, John; Mauger, Alexis

2014-01-01

Soccer referees enforce the laws of the game and the decisions they make can directly affect match results. Fixtures within European competitions take place in climatic conditions that are often challenging (e.g., Moscow ~ -5°C, Madrid ~30°C). Effects of these temperatures on player performance are well-documented; however, little is known how this environmental stress may impair cognitive performance of soccer referees and if so, whether exercise exasperates this. The present study aims to investigate the effect of cold [COLD; -5°C, 40% relative humidity (RH)], hot (HOT; 30°C, 40% RH) and temperate (CONT; 18°C, 40% RH) conditions on decision making during soccer specific exercise. On separate occasions within each condition, 13 physically active males; either semi-professional referees or semi-professional soccer players completed three 90 min intermittent treadmill protocols that simulated match play, interspersed with 4 computer delivered cognitive tests to measure vigilance and dual task capacity. Core and skin temperature, heart rate, rating of perceived exertion (RPE) and thermal sensation (TS) were recorded throughout the protocol. There was no significant difference between conditions for decision making in either the dual task (interaction effects: FALSE p = 0.46; MISSED p = 0.72; TRACKING p = 0.22) or vigilance assessments (interaction effects: FALSE p = 0.31; HIT p = 0.15; MISSED p = 0.17) despite significant differences in measured physiological variables (skin temperature: HOT vs. CONT 95% CI = 2.6 to 3.9, p decision making ability between conditions was due to the exercise protocol used, as it may not have elicited an appropriate and valid soccer specific internal load to alter cognitive functioning.

Medical student teaching in the private sector - An overlooked opportunity?

Science.gov (United States)

Galletly, Cherrie A; Turnbull, Carol; Goldney, Robert

2016-04-01

One in four psychiatric beds in Australia are located in the private sector, and more than half of Australian psychiatrists undertake private work. However, nearly all medical student teaching in psychiatry takes place in public hospitals. This paper explores the learning opportunities in the private sector. We report the South Australian experience; medical students have been taught in Ramsay Health Care (SA) Mental Health facilities for more than 23 years. Our experience demonstrates that clinical teaching in private hospitals is sustainable and well accepted by students, patients and clinicians. The private sector has the capacity to make a much greater contribution to medical student training in psychiatry. © The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists 2016.

The Power of Partnerships: A Private-Sector Perspective

OpenAIRE

Niebur, Bill

2009-01-01

The world food crisis, exacerbated by accelerating climate change and the global financial crisis, requires that agricultural scientists solve ever more complex problems. Public–private partnerships will play a more critical role in developing agricultural technologies for developing nations to improve farm productivity and alleviate global hunger. In order to make public–private partnerships work, we must move from the ‘sector mentality’ and focus on combinatorial solutions resolving the mos...

Controllable quantum private queries using an entangled Fibonacci-sequence spiral source

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Lai, Hong, E-mail: honglaimm@163.com [School of Computer and Information Science, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715 (China); Department of Computing, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109 (Australia); School of Science, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876 (China); Orgun, Mehmet A. [Department of Computing, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109 (Australia); Pieprzyk, Josef [School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD 4000 (Australia); Xiao, Jinghua [School of Science, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876 (China); Xue, Liyin [Corporate Analytics, The Australian Taxation Office, Sydney NSW 2000 (Australia); Jia, Zhongtian, E-mail: ise_jiazt@ujn.edu.cn [Provincial Key Laboratory for Network Based Intelligent Computing, University of Jinan, Jinan 250022 (China)

2015-10-23

Highlights: • Alice can easily control the size of a block by adjusting the parameter m rather than a high-dimension oracle. • The case of Alice knowing an exact multi-bit message can be realized deterministically. • Our protocol provides broad measures of protection against errors caused by the effect of noise. • Our protocol can greatly save both quantum and classical communication and exhibit some advantages in security. • Our protocol is scalable and flexible, and secure against quantum memory attacks by Alice. - Abstract: By changing the initial values in entangled Fibonacci-sequence spiral sources in Simon et al.'s (2013) experimental setup [13], we propose a controllable quantum private query protocol. Moreover, our protocol achieves flexible key expansion and even exhibits secure advantages during communications because of the following observations. We observe the close relationships between Lucas numbers and the first kind of Chebyshev maps, and the Chebyshev maps and k-Chebyshev maps; by adjusting the parameter m in k-Chebyshev maps, Alice and Bob can obtain their expected values of the key blocks and database respectively.

Controllable quantum private queries using an entangled Fibonacci-sequence spiral source

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Lai, Hong; Orgun, Mehmet A.; Pieprzyk, Josef; Xiao, Jinghua; Xue, Liyin; Jia, Zhongtian

2015-01-01

Highlights: • Alice can easily control the size of a block by adjusting the parameter m rather than a high-dimension oracle. • The case of Alice knowing an exact multi-bit message can be realized deterministically. • Our protocol provides broad measures of protection against errors caused by the effect of noise. • Our protocol can greatly save both quantum and classical communication and exhibit some advantages in security. • Our protocol is scalable and flexible, and secure against quantum memory attacks by Alice. - Abstract: By changing the initial values in entangled Fibonacci-sequence spiral sources in Simon et al.'s (2013) experimental setup [13], we propose a controllable quantum private query protocol. Moreover, our protocol achieves flexible key expansion and even exhibits secure advantages during communications because of the following observations. We observe the close relationships between Lucas numbers and the first kind of Chebyshev maps, and the Chebyshev maps and k-Chebyshev maps; by adjusting the parameter m in k-Chebyshev maps, Alice and Bob can obtain their expected values of the key blocks and database respectively

A case for evaluating sensor network protocols concurrently

KAUST Repository

Gnawali, Omprakash; Guibas, Leonidas; Levis, Philip

2010-01-01

Researchers typically evaluate and compare protocols on the testbeds by running them one at a time. This methodology ignores the variation in link qualities and wireless environment across these experiments. These variations can introduce significant noise in the results. Evaluating two protocols concurrently, however, suffers from inter-protocol interactions. These interactions can perturb performance even under very light load, especially timing and timing sensitive protocols. We argue that the benefits of running protocols concurrently greatly outweigh the disadvantages. Protocols rarely run in isolation in real networks, and so considering such interactions is valuable. Although the wireless environment is still uncontrolled, concurrent evaluations make comparisons fair and more statistically sound. Through experiments on two testbeds, we make the case for evaluating and comparing low data-rate sensor network protocols by running them concurrently. Copyright 2010 ACM.

Private Giving to Colleges Is up, but Fewer Alumni Make Donations

Science.gov (United States)

Strout, Erin

2006-01-01

Colleges in the US raised a collective US$25.6-billion in private donations during the 2005 fiscal year, which is a 4.9% increase from the previous year, but the proportion of alumni who made gifts fell again. The wealth was also not evenly distributed, with the increase in giving to just the top ten institutions accounting for half of the total…

[Computerized clinical protocol for occlusion].

Science.gov (United States)

Salsench, J; Ferrer, J; Nogueras, J

1988-11-01

In making a protocol it is necessary that all members of the team who are going to collect information have the same unity of criterion about the different variables that compose it. The drawing up of this document is as much or more necessary than the protocol itself. In this work we all data collected in the protocol and we give the explanations of each concept.

Private health insurance: implications for developing countries.

Science.gov (United States)

Sekhri, Neelam; Savedoff, William

2005-02-01

Private health insurance is playing an increasing role in both high- and low-income countries, yet is poorly understood by researchers and policy-makers. This paper shows that the distinction between private and public health insurance is often exaggerated since well regulated private insurance markets share many features with public insurance systems. It notes that private health insurance preceded many modern social insurance systems in western Europe, allowing these countries to develop the mechanisms, institutions and capacities that subsequently made it possible to provide universal access to health care. We also review international experiences with private insurance, demonstrating that its role is not restricted to any particular region or level of national income. The seven countries that finance more than 20% of their health care via private health insurance are Brazil, Chile, Namibia, South Africa, the United States, Uruguay and Zimbabwe. In each case, private health insurance provides primary financial protection for workers and their families while public health-care funds are targeted to programmes covering poor and vulnerable populations. We make recommendations for policy in developing countries, arguing that private health insurance cannot be ignored. Instead, it can be harnessed to serve the public interest if governments implement effective regulations and focus public funds on programmes for those who are poor and vulnerable. It can also be used as a transitional form of health insurance to develop experience with insurance institutions while the public sector increases its own capacity to manage and finance health-care coverage.

Private regulation in EU better regulation : Past performance and future promises

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Verbruggen, Paul

The promotion of private regulation is frequently part of better regulation programmes. Also the Better Regulation programme of the European Union (EU) initiated in 2002 advocated forms of private regulation as important means to improve EU law-making activities. However, for various reasons the

District decision-making for health in low-income settings: a qualitative study in Uttar Pradesh, India, on engaging the private health sector in sharing health-related data

Science.gov (United States)

Gautham, Meenakshi; Spicer, Neil; Subharwal, Manish; Gupta, Sanjay; Srivastava, Aradhana; Bhattacharyya, Sanghita; Avan, Bilal Iqbal; Schellenberg, Joanna

2016-01-01

Health information systems are an important planning and monitoring tool for public health services, but may lack information from the private health sector. In this fourth article in a series on district decision-making for health, we assessed the extent of maternal, newborn and child health (MNCH)-related data sharing between the private and public sectors in two districts of Uttar Pradesh, India; analysed barriers to data sharing; and identified key inputs required for data sharing. Between March 2013 and August 2014, we conducted 74 key informant interviews at national, state and district levels. Respondents were stakeholders from national, state and district health departments, professional associations, non-governmental programmes and private commercial health facilities with 3–200 beds. Qualitative data were analysed using a framework based on a priori and emerging themes. Private facilities registered for ultrasounds and abortions submitted standardized records on these services, which is compulsory under Indian laws. Data sharing for other services was weak, but most facilities maintained basic records related to institutional deliveries and newborns. Public health facilities in blocks collected these data from a few private facilities using different methods. The major barriers to data sharing included the public sector’s non-standardized data collection and utilization systems for MNCH and lack of communication and follow up with private facilities. Private facilities feared information disclosure and the additional burden of reporting, but were willing to share data if asked officially, provided the process was simple and they were assured of confidentiality. Unregistered facilities, managed by providers without a biomedical qualification, also conducted institutional deliveries, but were outside any reporting loops. Our findings suggest that even without legislation, the public sector could set up an effective MNCH data sharing strategy with

Optimal Rate Private Information Retrieval from Homomorphic Encryption

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Kiayias Aggelos

2015-06-01

Full Text Available We consider the problem of minimizing the communication in single-database private information retrieval protocols in the case where the length of the data to be transmitted is large. We present first rate-optimal protocols for 1-out-of-n computationallyprivate information retrieval (CPIR, oblivious transfer (OT, and strong conditional oblivious transfer (SCOT. These protocols are based on a new optimalrate leveled homomorphic encryption scheme for large-output polynomial-size branching programs, that might be of independent interest. The analysis of the new scheme is intricate: the optimal rate is achieved if a certain parameter s is set equal to the only positive root of a degree-(m + 1 polynomial, where m is the length of the branching program. We show, by using Galois theory, that even when m = 4, this polynomial cannot be solved in radicals. We employ the Newton-Puiseux algorithm to find a Puiseux series for s, and based on this, propose a Θ (logm-time algorithm to find an integer approximation to s.

Private savings and financial modernization in Mexico, 1988-95

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Julio Lopez G.

2000-09-01

Full Text Available The evolution of private savings has attracted a lot of attention in the controversy about the origins of Mexico's 1995 crisis. In this paper the authors analyze the evolution of private savings in Mexico using the theory of effective demand as a framework and making use of econometric estimates. In this context, they analyze the impact of the financial reforms, and in particular the effect of liberalization and deregulation of the financial system on private savings in Mexico from 1980 to 1995. The authors formulate an explanation of the determinants of private savingsand the impact of the strategy of "financial modernization" on private savings, by specifying a model that allows to identify the influence of monetary and credit policies on savings. Then they carry out econometric estimates that lend empirical support to the main conclusions of the theoretical analysis. Their econometric work confirm notably that private savings has been low due to a series of changes in monetary policy that favored the contraction of private demand and led to greater foreign indebtedness.

A Virtual Private Local PCN Ring Network Based on ATM VP Cross—Connection

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

LinBin; MaYingjun; 等

1995-01-01

Avirtual private local PCNring network (VPLPR)is proposed .VPLPR is a virtual logic ring seuved for digital cordless telephone system and it works on ATM VP cross-connection mechanism.Full-distributed data bases are organized for visitor location registers(VLR)and home location register(HLR).The signaling protocols are compatible upward to B-ISDN. The architecture and some of the main characteristics of VPLPR are given.How to configure the ATM VP cross-connection ring is described.And then a protocol conversion between STM frames and ATMcells in base station controller(BSC)is presented.

A European legal method? On European private law and scientific method

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Hesselink, M.

2009-01-01

This article examines the relationship between European private law and scientific method. It argues that a European legal method is a good idea. Not primarily because it will make European private law scholarship look more scientific, but because a debate on the method of a normative science

Public vs. Private (and beyond)

Science.gov (United States)

Poliniak, Susan

2012-01-01

Different types of schools make for different experiences. Pros and cons abound, whether one teaches at a public, private, magnet, or charter school. Although it's certainly true that some individual schools may offer better environments for music education than others, no type of school is categorically the "best." Still, it can be instructive to…

Getting Digital Assets from Public-Private Partnership Research Projects through "The Valley of Death," and Making Them Sustainable.

Science.gov (United States)

Aartsen, Wendy; Peeters, Paul; Wagers, Scott; Williams-Jones, Bryn

2018-01-01

Projects in public-private partnerships, such as the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), produce data services and platforms (digital assets) to help support the use of medical research data and IT tools. Maintaining these assets beyond the funding period of a project can be a challenge. The reason for that is the need to develop a business model that integrates the perspectives of all different stakeholders involved in the project, and these digital assets might not necessarily be addressing a problem for which there is an addressable market of paying customers. In this manuscript, we review four IMI projects and the digital assets they produced as a means of illustrating the challenges in making digital assets sustainable and the lessons learned. To progress digital assets beyond proof-of-concept into widely adopted tools, there is a need for continuation of multi-stakeholder support tailored to these assets. This would be best done by implementing a structure similar to the accelerators that are in place to help transform startup businesses into growing and thriving businesses. The aim of this article is to highlight the risk of digital asset loss and to provoke discussion on the concept of developing an "accelerator" for digital assets from public-private partnership research projects to increase the chance that digital assets will be sustained and continue to add value long after a project has ended.

Perempuan Gianyar dan Belenggu Ranah Publik dan Privat

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ni Made Ras Amanda Gelgel

2016-04-01

Full Text Available Abstract Women’s roles in political and social world have been looked down by the society. The patriarchy system adhered by the Balinese people make women’s position subordinated to men. Even though women have big roles not just in private sector but also in public sector, Balinese’s women still think they do not have big contribution in their family. It is also happening in Gianyar, Bali. People in Gianyar Bali have a strict Balinese’s culture that make women have more role besides the other women in Indonesia. The research problem is what are women’s perception about their role in private and public sectors? The research was based on quantitative method by using questionnaire to 400 sample in Gianyar Bali. Research came out that women in Gianyar were spending their time dealing with household job and customary matters. They did not have time for themselves and consider themselves remain in the subordinated position. Women in Gianyar live under high hegemonic of their roles both in private and public spheres.

A secure RFID authentication protocol for healthcare environments using elliptic curve cryptosystem.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhao, Zhenguo

2014-05-01

With the fast advancement of the wireless communication technology and the widespread use of medical systems, the radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has been widely used in healthcare environments. As the first important protocol for ensuring secure communication in healthcare environment, the RFID authentication protocols derive more and more attentions. Most of RFID authentication protocols are based on hash function or symmetric cryptography. To get more security properties, elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC) has been used in the design of RFID authentication protocol. Recently, Liao and Hsiao proposed a new RFID authentication protocol using ECC and claimed their protocol could withstand various attacks. In this paper, we will show that their protocol suffers from the key compromise problem, i.e. an adversary could get the private key stored in the tag. To enhance the security, we propose a new RFID authentication protocol using ECC. Detailed analysis shows the proposed protocol not only could overcome weaknesses in Liao and Hsiao's protocol but also has the same performance. Therefore, it is more suitable for healthcare environments.

Fault-tolerant quantum cryptographic protocols with collective detection over the collective amplitude damping channel

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Huang, Wei; Su, Qi; Li, Yan-Bing; Sun, Ying

2014-01-01

In this paper, a quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol, which can be immune to collective amplitude damping noise, is proposed with collective detection strategy. Then a multi-party quantum secret sharing (MQSS) protocol and a quantum private comparison (QPC) protocol are introduced as two applications of the proposed QKD protocol. Except for one participant who is responsible for preparing and measuring quantum states, the rest of the users in each of these protocols only need to perform certain unitary operations due to the utilization of collective detection. Therefore, in addition to the advantage of being secure against collective amplitude damping noise, the proposed protocols still have the advantages of higher qubit efficiency and lower cost for implementation. Moreover, the security of these protocols is guaranteed by theorems on quantum operation discrimination. (papers)

Private sector joins family planning effort.

Science.gov (United States)

1989-12-01

Projects supported by the Directorate for Population (S&T/POP) of the U.S. Agency for International Development and aimed at increasing for-profit private sector involvement in providing family planning services and products are described. Making products commercially available through social-marketing partnerships with the commercial sector, USAID has saved $1.1 million in commodity costs from Brazil, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Indonesia, and Peru. Active private sector involvement benefits companies, consumers, and donors through increased corporate profits, healthier employees, improved consumer access at lower cost, and the possibility of sustained family planning programs. Moreover, private, for-profit companies will be able to meet service demands over the next 20 years where traditional government and donor agency sources would fail. Using employee surveys and cost-benefit analyses to demonstrate expected financial and health benefits for businesses and work forces, S&T/POP's Technical Information on Population for the Private Sector (TIPPS) project encourages private companies in developing countries to invest in family planning and maternal/child health care for their employees. 36 companies in 9 countries have responded thus far, which examples provided from Peru and Zimbabwe. The Enterprise program's objectives are also to increase the involvement of for-profit companies in delivering family planning services, and to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of private volunteer organizations in providing services. Projects have been started with mines, factories, banks, insurance companies, and parastatals in 27 countries, with examples cited from Ghana and Indonesia. Finally, the Social Marketing for Change project (SOMARC) builds demand and distributes low-cost contraceptives through commercial channels especially to low-income audiences. Partnerships have been initiated with the private sector in 17 developing countries, with examples provided from

Improving the Authentication Scheme and Access Control Protocol for VANETs

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Wei-Chen Wu

2014-11-01

Full Text Available Privacy and security are very important in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs. VANETs are negatively affected by any malicious user’s behaviors, such as bogus information and replay attacks on the disseminated messages. Among various security threats, privacy preservation is one of the new challenges of protecting users’ private information. Existing authentication protocols to secure VANETs raise challenges, such as certificate distribution and reduction of the strong reliance on tamper-proof devices. In 2011, Yeh et al. proposed a PAACP: a portable privacy-preserving authentication and access control protocol in vehicular ad hoc networks. However, PAACP in the authorization phase is breakable and cannot maintain privacy in VANETs. In this paper, we present a cryptanalysis of an attachable blind signature and demonstrate that the PAACP’s authorized credential (AC is not secure and private, even if the AC is secretly stored in a tamper-proof device. An eavesdropper can construct an AC from an intercepted blind document. Any eavesdropper can determine who has which access privileges to access which service. For this reason, this paper copes with these challenges and proposes an efficient scheme. We conclude that an improving authentication scheme and access control protocol for VANETs not only resolves the problems that have appeared, but also is more secure and efficient.

A Composed Protocol of Quantum Identity Authentication Plus Quantum Key Distribution Based on Squeezed States

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Zhang Sheng; Wang Jian; Tang Chaojing; Zhang Quan

2011-01-01

It is established that a single quantum cryptography protocol usually cooperates with other cryptographic systems, such as an authentication system, in the real world. However, few protocols have been proposed on how to combine two or more quantum protocols. To fill this gap, we propose a composed quantum protocol, containing both quantum identity authentication and quantum key distribution, using squeezed states. Hence, not only the identity can be verified, but also a new private key can be generated by our new protocol. We also analyze the security under an optimal attack, and the efficiency, which is defined by the threshold of the tolerant error rate, using Gaussian error function. (general)

Perancangan Small Private Space Pada Interior Public Space Di Perpustakaan Universitas Kristen Petra Surabaya

OpenAIRE

Lucky Basuki, Holiman Chandra Yusita Kusumarini

2013-01-01

Lifestyle of modern people use some time to move out of residence (public space) makes the most of the private activities can not be fulfilled. It is an idea and the idea of creating a space that can meet the needs of the private in public spaces with small dimensions. Private space in the design of the library is housed in Petra Christian University Surabaya as space scope of small private space (minimal private space dimension). The creation of small private space in the interior of the lib...

Public And Private Leadership And Performance Management

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Christine (Mihaescu Demeter

2013-05-01

Full Text Available The aim of this article is to make a comparing between the private and public leadership. We analyze (1 whether there are differences between public and private sector leadership based on some variables related to job complexity of a manager (including the managerial behaviour, job autonomy, and job clarity, decision-making vs policymaking process and the stakeholders vs political influence, and (2 to assess the degree of their effects on the managerial competences and performance management. Our study is conducted from the Romanian perspective on public organizations. As the methodology used, in order to identify the perception on political influence in Romanian public administration we conducted a survey among civil servants at central and local level. Our research is based on the empirical analysis of the relevant literature in public administration, leadership and organizational performance.

Locally decodable codes and private information retrieval schemes

CERN Document Server

Yekhanin, Sergey

2010-01-01

Locally decodable codes (LDCs) are codes that simultaneously provide efficient random access retrieval and high noise resilience by allowing reliable reconstruction of an arbitrary bit of a message by looking at only a small number of randomly chosen codeword bits. Local decodability comes with a certain loss in terms of efficiency - specifically, locally decodable codes require longer codeword lengths than their classical counterparts. Private information retrieval (PIR) schemes are cryptographic protocols designed to safeguard the privacy of database users. They allow clients to retrieve rec

The private sector, international development and NCDs

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Raynaud Olivier

2011-07-01

Full Text Available Abstract This article addresses an area that has been largely underserved by the development community, and one in which there is a particularly good opportunity for the private sector to take a lead in making a difference to employees, customers and local communities: chronic, non-communicable diseases (NCDs. It highlights the extent of the epidemic of NCDs in developing countries, sets out the 'business case' for the private sector to act on NCDs, and gives examples of initiatives by business to ensure that the healthy choice really is an easier choice for employees, consumers and local communities. It makes the case that, to be genuinely sustainable, businesses should be addressing health as a core part of what they do and, by working in partnership - as called for by the Millennium Development Goals - they can make a real difference and become part of the solution. Identifying ways in which this can be done should form a key part both of planning for, and action after, the UN High-level Meeting on NCDs, to be held in September 2011.

RISK ASSESSMENT MODELS OF PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP IN THE ROAD SECTOR

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

V. V. Gasilov

2013-01-01

Full Text Available This article studies the main potential models of public-private partnership; it gives evaluation of risks for these models, considering their distribution between members of partnership. It offers the mechanism of making an optimal choice of a public-private partnership model for projects of transport system development.

Temporary Operational Protocol for making safe and managing Orphaned or Seized Radioactive Sources

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

2013-01-01

This protocol outlines the arrangements to manage the safe interim storage of an orphaned radioactive source or of a source identified for seizure, pending its ultimate disposal. Such sources may be sources found outside of regulatory control, detected at a frontier or seized in the public interest. This includes a radioactive source arising from a CBRN, chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, incident, following neutralisation of any associated dispersal device and confirmation of the suspect object as radioactive. The arrangements in this protocol are meant to be consistent with and used in conjunction with relevant protocols to the Major Emergency Framework Document and may be revisited as necessary as those protocols are further developed

Assessment of private homes as spaces for the dying elderly

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Tulika Bhattacharyya

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Aim: This study makes an assessment of end-of-life care of the elderly in private homes in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. Participants and Methods: Primary data were collected from private homes which supported elder care through observation and semi-structured interviews with primary family caregivers of the elderly. Results: The study finds that the major factors preventing private homes from providing adequate care to the elderly were architecturally inadequate housing conditions, paucity of financial support, and scarcity of skilled caregivers. Besides, considerable neglect and domestic abuse of the elderly was also found in some private homes. In addition, the peripheral location of private homes within public health framework and inadequate state palliative policy, including stringent narcotic regulations, accentuated the problems of home care. Conclusion: The study concludes by questioning the rhetoric of private homes as spaces for the dying elderly in Kolkata and suggests remedial measures to improve their capacity to deliver care.

Generating Private Recommendations Efficiently Using Homomorphic Encryption and Data Packing

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Erkin, Zekeriya; Veugen, Thijs; Toft, Tomas

2012-01-01

Recommender systems have become an important tool for personalization of online services. Generating recommendations in online services depends on privacy-sensitive data collected from the users. Traditional data protection mechanisms focus on access control and secure transmission, which provide...... them under encryption to generate recommendations. By introducing a semitrusted third party and using data packing, we construct a highly efficient system that does not require the active participation of the user. We also present a comparison protocol, which is the first one to the best of our...... security only against malicious third parties, but not the service provider. This creates a serious privacy risk for the users. In this paper, we aim to protect the private data against the service provider while preserving the functionality of the system. We propose encrypting private data and processing...

Human Schedule Performance, Protocol Analysis, and the "Silent Dog" Methodology

Science.gov (United States)

Cabello, Francisco; Luciano, Carmen; Gomez, Inmaculada; Barnes-Holmes, Dermot

2004-01-01

The purpose of the current experiment was to investigate the role of private verbal behavior on the operant performances of human adults, using a protocol analysis procedure with additional methodological controls (the "silent dog" method). Twelve subjects were exposed to fixed ratio 8 and differential reinforcement of low rate 3-s schedules. For…

Raising funds for fusion concepts in the private sector

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Burnett, S.C.

1983-01-01

One potential advantage of compact fusion devices is the reduced time span from concept to commercialization. This, in turn, may make it possible to support such efforts with funds from the private sector. Other factors that are important for attracting funds include a unique (or clever) approach and a strong technical staff. The history of the GA Technology's ohmically heated toroidal experiment is briefly reviewed as an example of a privately funded project

Government Grants to Private Charities: Do They Crowd-Out Giving or Fundraising?

OpenAIRE

James Andreoni; A Abigail Payne

2001-01-01

When the government makes a grant to a private charitable organization, does it displace private giving? This is one of the fundamental policy questions in public finance, and much theoretical and empirical research has been devoted to understanding the relationship between private donations and government funding. Under the classic crowding-out hypothesis, donors let their involuntary tax contributions and substitute for their voluntary contributions. This paper raises the prospect of a seco...

Virtual private networks application in Nuclear Regulatory Authority of Argentina

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Glidewell, Donnie D.; Smartt, Heidi A.; Caskey, Susan A.; Bonino, Anibal D.; Perez, Adrian C.; Pardo, German R.; Vigile, Rodolfo S.; Krimer, Mario

2004-01-01

As the result of the existence of several regional delegations all over the country, a requirement was made to conform a secure data interchange structure. This would make possible the interconnection of these facilities and their communication with the Autoridad Regulatoria Nuclear (ARN) headquarters. The records these parts exchange are often of classified nature, including sensitive data by the local safeguards inspectors. On the other hand, the establishment of this network should simplify the access of authorized nuclear and radioactive materials users to the ARN databases, from remote sites and with significant trust levels. These requirements called for a network that should be not only private but also secure, providing data centralization and integrity assurance with a strict user control. The first proposal was to implement a point to point link between the installations. This proposal was deemed as economically not viable, and it had the disadvantage of not being easily reconfigurable. The availability of new technologies, and the accomplishment of the Action Sheet 11 under an agreement between Argentine Nuclear Regulatory Authority and the United States Department of Energy (DOE), opened a new path towards the resolution of this problem. By application of updated tunneling security protocols it was possible to project a manageable and secure network through the use of Virtual Private Networking (VPN) hardware. A first trial installation of this technology was implemented between ARN headquarters at Buenos Aires and the Southern Region Office at Bariloche, Argentina. This private net is at the moment under test, and it is planned to expand to more sites in this country, reaching for example to nuclear power plants. The Bariloche installation had some interesting peculiarities. The solutions proposed to them revealed to be very useful during the development of the network expansion plans, as they showed how to adapt the VPN technical requisites to the

Private hydropower projects: exporting the american experience

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Rogers, W.L.; Bourgeacq, J.P.

1991-01-01

This paper addresses different aspects of exporting the American knowledge and experience in the private development of small-scale hydropower projects. It details the 'export' and 'adaptation/translation' of American PURPA philosophy to other countries. The major stumbling blocks on the road to exportation are listed. The subject countries'market evaluation is explained, as well as methods for researching and gathering the necessary information on a specific country. Methods of choosing a target country are discussed, and the criteria necessary for making a choice are detailed. The subject of legal framework and privatization of power generation issues overseas and the ways and means to help the 'export of U.S. expertise' through U.S. Government programs are described. The subjects of financing and joint ventures with local entities are also included in this paper. Various scenarios for private development overseas are presented

Private and public decisions in social dilemmas

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Houser, Daniel; Montinari, Natalia; Piovesan, Marco

2012-01-01

impulse for several minutes in order to benefit others. In Public Condition children make decisions in public view of the group of other participants, while in Private Condition they have the possibility to decide privately. We find that children aged 9 and higher are better able to resist selfish......Are selfish impulses less likely to be pursued when decisions are publicly observable? Is the presence of peers a potential solution to social dilemmas? In this paper we report data on the self-control decisions of children aged 6 to 11 who participated in games that require one to resist a selfish...... impulses in public environments. Younger children, however, display no such effect. Further, we find self-control substantially impacted by group size. When decisions are public, self-control is better in larger groups, while in private condition the opposite holds....

Public Intentions for Private Spaces: Exploring Architects’ Tactics to Shape Shared Space in Private-Led Residential Development

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Saul Manuel Golden

2015-07-01

Full Text Available From the late 20th into the 21st centuries, the private market increasingly gained control from public authorities over strategic decisions affecting the quality of, and accessibility to, new urban development. This paper argues for architects to act more explicitly to promote greater open-ness and use-value, rather than more objectified and controlled exchange-value approaches to the public domain in private-led development. The paper analyses two London-based residential case studies and interviews with the architects about perceptions of, and approaches to, private-led development decision-making processes. It compares the individual practitioner’s experiences of architecture practice with explicit intentions to influence better quality shared city space, examining professional norms vis-à-vis commercial clients and wider society. The paper concludes that greater awareness of architects’ knowledge, skills, and a range of tactics to influence future shared environments can contribute to improved professional practice frameworks for more effective engagement in an increasingly globalised and privatised urban society.

BETWEEN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE. WOMEN RULE MUNICIPALITIES IN TLAXCALA, MEXICO

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Verónica Vázquez-García

2012-01-01

Full Text Available For public / private dichotomy in Western thought, the power is exercised in the public while private space is maintained as a domestic, apolitical and non-theorized. By contrast, for feminists it is an area of power that must be studied. The aim of this paper is to analyze the link between the public and private sphere from depth interviews with 14 mayors from Tlaxcala, Mexico. It discusses the various pressures to which women are subjected to assume public office and their slim chances of a far-reaching political career. We conclude that the social relations of private sector are vital to facilitate the participation of women in the audience, making it necessary to include in the definition of democracy.

When America Makes, America Works: A Successful Public Private 3D Printing (Postprint)

Science.gov (United States)

2016-09-01

tive community within a public-private partnership model to drive an innovation economy forward for the nation. Ad- ditive manufacturing is a game...plications. It also is an incredibly powerful teaching tool to reinvigorate Science, Technology, Engineering and Math - ematics—or STEM—education in the

Social Influences in Sequential Decision Making.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Markus Schöbel

Full Text Available People often make decisions in a social environment. The present work examines social influence on people's decisions in a sequential decision-making situation. In the first experimental study, we implemented an information cascade paradigm, illustrating that people infer information from decisions of others and use this information to make their own decisions. We followed a cognitive modeling approach to elicit the weight people give to social as compared to private individual information. The proposed social influence model shows that participants overweight their own private information relative to social information, contrary to the normative Bayesian account. In our second study, we embedded the abstract decision problem of Study 1 in a medical decision-making problem. We examined whether in a medical situation people also take others' authority into account in addition to the information that their decisions convey. The social influence model illustrates that people weight social information differentially according to the authority of other decision makers. The influence of authority was strongest when an authority's decision contrasted with private information. Both studies illustrate how the social environment provides sources of information that people integrate differently for their decisions.

Social Influences in Sequential Decision Making

Science.gov (United States)

Schöbel, Markus; Rieskamp, Jörg; Huber, Rafael

2016-01-01

People often make decisions in a social environment. The present work examines social influence on people’s decisions in a sequential decision-making situation. In the first experimental study, we implemented an information cascade paradigm, illustrating that people infer information from decisions of others and use this information to make their own decisions. We followed a cognitive modeling approach to elicit the weight people give to social as compared to private individual information. The proposed social influence model shows that participants overweight their own private information relative to social information, contrary to the normative Bayesian account. In our second study, we embedded the abstract decision problem of Study 1 in a medical decision-making problem. We examined whether in a medical situation people also take others’ authority into account in addition to the information that their decisions convey. The social influence model illustrates that people weight social information differentially according to the authority of other decision makers. The influence of authority was strongest when an authority's decision contrasted with private information. Both studies illustrate how the social environment provides sources of information that people integrate differently for their decisions. PMID:26784448

Social Influences in Sequential Decision Making.

Science.gov (United States)

Schöbel, Markus; Rieskamp, Jörg; Huber, Rafael

2016-01-01

People often make decisions in a social environment. The present work examines social influence on people's decisions in a sequential decision-making situation. In the first experimental study, we implemented an information cascade paradigm, illustrating that people infer information from decisions of others and use this information to make their own decisions. We followed a cognitive modeling approach to elicit the weight people give to social as compared to private individual information. The proposed social influence model shows that participants overweight their own private information relative to social information, contrary to the normative Bayesian account. In our second study, we embedded the abstract decision problem of Study 1 in a medical decision-making problem. We examined whether in a medical situation people also take others' authority into account in addition to the information that their decisions convey. The social influence model illustrates that people weight social information differentially according to the authority of other decision makers. The influence of authority was strongest when an authority's decision contrasted with private information. Both studies illustrate how the social environment provides sources of information that people integrate differently for their decisions.

Imagining, Appropriating and Silencing : Street-working Children’s Strategies of Home-making in Public and Private Space

NARCIS (Netherlands)

ten Brinke, S.S.|info:eu-repo/dai/nl/370549449

2014-01-01

In this article I tackle two related and often held assumptions: the first being that children are ‘out of place’ when not in the private sphere and second that home is necessarily related to the private sphere. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork among street-working children in Cusco, Peru, I

The Economics of Private Practice versus Academia in Surgery.

Science.gov (United States)

Baimas-George, Maria; Fleischer, Brian; Korndorffer, James R; Slakey, Douglas; DuCoin, Christopher

2018-04-16

Residents often make career decisions regarding future practice without adequate knowledge to the realities of professional life. Currently there is a paucity of data regarding economic differences between practice models. This study seeks to illuminate the financial differences of surgical subspecialties between academic and private practice. Data were collected from the Association of American Medical College (AAMC) and the Medical Group Management Association's (MGMA) 2015 reports of average annual salaries. Salaries were analyzed for general surgery and 7 subspecialties. Fixed time of practice was set at 30 years. Assumptions included 5 years as assistant professor, 10 years as associate professor, and 15 years as full professor. Formula used: (average yearly salary) × [years of practice (30 yrs - fellowship/research yrs)] + ($50,000 × yrs of fellowship/research) = total adjusted lifetime revenue. As a full professor, academic surgeons in all subspecialties make significantly less than their private practice counterparts. The largest discrepancy is in vascular and cardiothoracic surgery, with full professors earning 16% and 14% less than private practitioners. Plastic surgery and general surgery are the only 2 disciplines that have similar lifetime revenues to private practitioners, earning 2% and 6% less than their counterparts' lifetime revenue. Academic surgeons in all surgical subspecialties examined earn less lifetime revenue compared to those in private practice. This difference in earnings decreases but remains substantial as an academic surgeon advances. With limited exposure to the diversity of professional arenas, residents must be aware of this discrepancy. Copyright © 2018 Association of Program Directors in Surgery. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Private or salaried practice: how do young general practitioners make their career choice? A qualitative study.

Science.gov (United States)

Kinouani, Shérazade; Boukhors, Gary; Luaces, Baptiste; Durieux, William; Cadwallader, Jean-Sébastien; Aubin-Auger, Isabelle; Gay, Bernard

2016-09-01

Young French postgraduates in general practice increasingly prefer salaried practice to private practice in spite of the financial incentives offered by the French government or local communities to encourage the latter. This study aimed to explore the determinants of choice between private or salaried practice among young general practitioners. A qualitative study was conducted in the South West of France. Semi-structured interviews of young general practitioners were audio-recorded until data saturation. Recordings were transcribed and then analyzed according to Grounded Theory by three researchers working independently. Sixteen general practitioners participated in this study. For salaried and private doctors, the main factors governing their choice were occupational factors: working conditions, need of varied scope of practice, quality of the doctor-patient relationship or career flexibility. Other factors such as postgraduate training, having worked as a locum or self-interest were also determining. Young general practitioners all expected a work-life balance. The fee-for-service scheme or home visits may have discouraged young general practitioners from choosing private practice. National health policies should increase the attractiveness of ambulatory general practice by promoting the diversification of modes of remuneration and encouraging the organization of group exercises in multidisciplinary medical homes and community health centers.

Privatization or the art of setting free; Privatisering of de kunst van het loslaten

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Teulings, C.N. [Tinbergen Instituut, Rotterdam (Netherlands); Bovenberg, A.L. [CentER, Universiteit van Tilburg, Tilburg (Netherlands); Van Dalen, H.P. [Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute NIDI, Den Haag (Netherlands)

2004-01-23

Background information is given on the subject of privatization, resulting in a number of recommendations for policy in the Netherlands in order to make privatization successful. Also it is discussed why privatization is a difficult process. [Dutch] De achtergronden van het verschijnsel privatisering worden geanalyseerd, uitmondend in een aantal beleidsaanbevelingen om privatiseringen te laten slagen. Ook wordt aangegeven waarom transitieprocessen lastig zijn.

Public lending to private hedge funds is inefficient, unstable, unconstitutional and unanimously disagreeable

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sankarshan Acharya

2016-06-01

Full Text Available Public funds include federally insured deposits held under the custody of private banks, central bank loans and taxpayer funds. The principal finding of this paper is that lending such public funds through a private banking system to private hedge funds allied with the banks is inefficient, unstable, fundamentally unfair (unconstitutional and unanimously disagreeable. This finding is akin to the unanimously agreeable safe central banking policy (Acharya, 1991-2016 which, in dynamic general equilibrium, (a eliminates federal guarantee of bank deposits, (b offers every business enterprise and household an option to keep in the central bank any part of its deposits it wants to be held absolutely safely, (c completely deregulates all private banks without any privilege to rob public or private wealth like too-big-to-fail or too-big-to-be-jailed status or the power of market making and clearing. Safe central banking is the only way to make private banks responsible to hold sufficient capital to attract uninsured private deposits like the trading houses currently do. The private banks will then have complete freedom to lend their uninsured deposits to private hedge funds. The Volker Rule (NYT, January 30, 2010, incorporated in the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, is an infeasible and unworkable band-aid for the moral-hazard driven systemic robbery of wealth creators wrought by the government-ordained private banking custody of public funds. The established systemic moral-hazard problem can be efficiently and constitutionally resolved only through unanimously agreeable safe central banking. Current proposals on overhauling of Fannie and Freddie made by various pundits of systemic robbery amount to a gargantuan amount of public lending to private hedge funds and, hence, inefficient, unstable, unconstitutional and unanimously disagreeable.

VMware private cloud computing with vCloud director

CERN Document Server

Gallagher, Simon

2013-01-01

It's All About Delivering Service with vCloud Director Empowered by virtualization, companies are not just moving into the cloud, they're moving into private clouds for greater security, flexibility, and cost savings. However, this move involves more than just infrastructure. It also represents a different business model and a new way to provide services. In this detailed book, VMware vExpert Simon Gallagher makes sense of private cloud computing for IT administrators. From basic cloud theory and strategies for adoption to practical implementation, he covers all the issues. You'll lea

Private Schools

Data.gov (United States)

Department of Homeland Security — This Private Schools feature dataset is composed of all Private elementary and secondary education features in the United States as defined by the Private School...

Harnessing the market: The opportunities and challenges of privatization

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

NONE

1997-01-01

The decision to privatize comes from a policy determination that the Government no longer needs particular assets or no longer needs to be in control of all the means by which products or services are obtained or delivered. Most broadly defined, privatization substitutes, in whole or in part, private market mechanisms for the traditional Government role as employer, financier, owner, operator, and/or regulator of a product or service. This definition admits a wide variety of actions, from innovative contractual arrangements to outright divestiture of activities or assets. But all of these actions share common objectives: to remove the agency from those activities that are not inherently governmental functions or core business lines; to improve the management of remaining activities; to reduce the costs of doing business; and to shift greater performance and financial risk to the private sector. This report by the Privatization Working Group provides an indepth analysis of the major issues that surround privatization within the Department of Energy (DOE). The report divides privatization initiatives at the DOE into three major types: divestiture of functions, contracting out, and asset transfers. It includes the results of a survey of the entire DOE system that identifies more than 200 potential privatization opportunities. The report also includes 13 case studies that explore actual DOE privatization efforts over the past 2 years. Additionally, it summarizes the key legal authorities that govern each of the three types of privatization opportunities in the DOE. The report makes a series of recommendations and outlines accompanying actions that will help the DOE seize the opportunities presented by privatization and confront its challenges.

The FBI is Leading the Way by Making the Private Sector an Integral Part of the Counterterrorism Homeland Security Enterprise

Science.gov (United States)

2012-09-01

This thesis discusses the building of a sustainable business process wherein the private sector is integrated into the homeland security apparatus...As the threat our nation and her allies face continues to evolve, so must our responses. Integrating the private sector into the homeland security...attack. The private sector brings with it a plethora of talents and resources. Because it has not traditionally been seen as a partner the private sector has

Computer Security: How private is “private”?

CERN Multimedia

Computer Security Team

2014-01-01

What a surprise it would be for you to discover that everyone at CERN can access your Windows “My Documents” folder or your AFS home-folder? Reading your private letters? Looking at your private photos?  Digging through your confidential documents? Would you be embarrassed? You would not be the first.   Unfortunately, if you are not careful when handling the access control settings of your AFS and DFS folders, you can easily make a mistake. The IT Department's AFS and DFS services provide you with all the means to protect your documents, but you are the only one who knows which documents should be made accessible to whom…  So be careful!!! Mistakes are easy to make, and have happened in the past! The settings on DFS are complex and usually inherit rights from parent folders, so small slip-ups can quickly spread to every other folder. The settings on AFS require special commands (“fs setacl”) instead of the &ldqu...

PRIVATE EQUITY INVESTMENTS IN HUNGARY AND THEFINANCIAL CRISIS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jeno Konecsny

2013-01-01

Full Text Available The Hungarian private equity market reacted quite sensitively to the 2008-2009financial crisis. Although not in an equaldegree and in the same year, but all ofthe market’s fundraising, investmentand exit segment suffered a decline.However, the distrustful economic environment also affected negatively thetraditional financial sources, making it more complicated to obtain bank loans. Asa result of this moderate credit supply, private equity and venture capitalinvestments became relatively more valuable. This was further strengthened bythe appearance and launch of the so-called hybrid funds in 2010.Although the paper focuses on the investment segment of the Hungarian privateequity market, as an introduction we also describe briefly Hungary’s macroenvironment in the recent years. The rest of the paper analyse private equityinvestments from different aspects.

Public private partnerships for climate change mitigation – An Indian case

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Tharun Dolla

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Cities are one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change poses serious threat to urban infrastructure, quality of life, and entire urban systems. Cities need to adopt an integrated approach for improvement of city services in order to adapt to climate change and reduce their greenhouse emissions. However, the magnitude of investment required to bridge the widening infrastructure service provision demand-supply gap along with the additional investment to mitigate climate change demands the need to look for innovative financing solutions. Private investments through public private partnership (PPP route offer an innovative mechanism for meet both the goals of infrastructure development and climate change mitigation. Private parties in PPP, however, focuses on the project economics only though they have the potential to provide innovative technical, financial and managerial solutions. The paper aims to answer the question how to integrate climate change mitigation objective in procurement process of PPP projects. The study has focused only on PPP projects in Municipal Solid Waste Management sector. The integration of climate change mitigation objective has been through design of a modified procurement protocol which promote private sector to devise project structure that fulfil both the objectives of climate change mitigation and provision of quality infrastructure services.

Understanding consumer and clinician preferences and decision making for rehabilitation following arthroplasty in the private sector.

Science.gov (United States)

Buhagiar, Mark A; Naylor, Justine M; Simpson, Grahame; Harris, Ian A; Kohler, Friedbert

2017-06-19

To understand private consumer and clinician preferences towards different rehabilitation modes following knee or hip arthroplasty, and identify factors which influence the chosen rehabilitation pathway. Mixed methods cross-sectional study involving 95 semi-structured interviews of consumers (patients and carers) and clinicians (arthroplasty surgeons, physiotherapists and rehabilitation physicians) in Sydney, Australia, during 2014-2015. Participants were asked about the acceptability of different modes of rehabilitation provision, and factors influencing their chosen rehabilitation pathway. Interviews were in person or via the telephone. Qualitative analysis software was used to electronically manage qualitative data. An analytical approach guided data analysis. Pre-operative preferences strongly influenced the type of rehabilitation chosen by consumers. Key factors that influenced this were both intrinsic and extrinsic, including; the previous experience of self or known others, the perceived benefits of the chosen mode, a sense of entitlement, the role of orthopaedic surgeons and influence of patient preference, a patient's clinical status post-surgery, the private hospital business model and insurance provider involvement. The acceptability of rehabilitation modes varied between clinician groups. No one rehabilitation mode provided following arthroplasty is singularly preferred by stakeholders. Factors other than the belief that a particular mode was more effective than another appear to dominate the pathway followed by private arthroplasty consumers, indicating evidence-based policies around rehabilitation provision may have limited appeal in the private sector.

Private prisons

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dimovski Darko

2014-01-01

Full Text Available The author, based on the circumstances that contributed to the creation of private prisons, has explained the historical development of private prisons in the United States and Great Britain. After that, the author has analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of the prison run by private companies. Namely, the author has, stating the benefits of private prisons (reduced overcrowding penitencijarnih institution, cheaper accommodation cost per prisoner, provide better services, the possibility of applying a new philosophy in the manner of execution of sentence, with modern Penitentiary program, with the aim of re-socialization and the reduction of recidivism and weaknesses of the private prisons (the question of legitimac, a chronic lack of space in the Penitentiary system is not solved, business-oriented policies of private prisons, less salaries, poor performance of the security service, worst food, weak enforcement of parole, lack of appropriate penitentiary program, wanted to draw attention to the professional public about controversy of the introduction private companies in the management structure of penitentiary institutions . As the Republic of Serbia is, constantly in the last twenty years, faced with the increasing number of inmates, as well as the chronic shortage of money, which affects on the situation in industrial areas of prisons, there are options to give licenses to private companies to manage prisons. Therefore, the author has paid special attention to potential problems of introducing private prisons in the penitentiary system in Serbia.

An entanglement concentration protocol for cluster states using ...

Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

Permanent link: http://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/pram/086/05/0973-0983 ... The purpose of this paper is a proposal on entanglement concentration protocol forcluster states. The protocol ... We also make a comparative numerical study of the residual entanglement left out after the execution of each step of the protocol.

Private sector participation in secondary education in Nigeria: Implications for national development

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Uyi Kizito Ehigiamusoe

2012-12-01

Full Text Available The study examines private sector participation in secondary education in Nigeria and its implications for national development. The population consisted all the providers and recipients of private secondary education in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT. Simple random sampling was used to select 200 providers and recipients of private secondary education across the six Area Councils in the FCT. An instrument designated Private Sector Participation in Secondary Education (PSPSE was used to collect data. The data were analysed using Chi-Square method to test for the acceptance or rejection of the study hypotheses. The findings revealed that the academic performance of students in private secondary schools is better than the academic performance of students in public secondary schools. The study further revealed that private secondary schools have better infrastructure than public secondary schools in Nigeria, but private secondary schools contribute less to the development of human resources than public schools in Nigeria. Recommendations are proffered to make private secondary education more viable and responsive to the needs of the society.

The Anatomy of Privatization Programme in Nigeria: Matters Arising

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Nneka Umera-Okeke

Key Words: Privatization, economic depression, corruption, inefficiency and ... of conditions that make them ever dependent on the imperialists for survival. It has .... competition in the internal and external markets and fear of large scale ...

Some aspects of the responsibility of state for actions in private war campaigns

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Romić Miodrag

2011-01-01

Full Text Available This paper discusses the circumstances under which the misconduct of private security sector might engage the responsibility of their state sponsors under international law. From an international law perspective, stastes cannot evade responsibility merely by hiring a private actor to carry out certain functions. The conduct of private security companies is, under certain circumstances, attributed to the state, making that state responsible for any violation of international law committed by private security companies personnel. Even where no such attribution exists, the state might still be responsible for lack of due diligence to adequately regulate and control PMC conduct.

Language, Semantics, and Methods for Security Protocols

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Crazzolara, Federico

events. Methods like strand spaces and the inductive method of Paulson have been designed to support an intensional, event-based, style of reasoning. These methods have successfully tackled a number of protocols though in an ad hoc fashion. They make an informal spring from a protocol to its......-nets. They have persistent conditions and as we show in this thesis, unfold under reasonable assumptions to a more basic kind of nets. We relate SPL-nets to strand spaces and inductive rules, as well as trace languages and event structures so unifying a range of approaches, as well as providing conditions under...... reveal. The last few years have seen the emergence of successful intensional, event-based, formal approaches to reasoning about security protocols. The methods are concerned with reasoning about the events that a security protocol can perform, and make use of a causal dependency that exists between...

Public Supervision over Private Relationships : Towards European Supervision Private Law?

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Cherednychenko, O.O.

2014-01-01

The rise of public supervision over private relationships in many areas of private law has led to the development of what, in the author’s view, could be called ‘European supervision private law’. This emerging body of law forms part of European regulatory private law and is made up of

Getting Digital Assets from Public–Private Partnership Research Projects through “The Valley of Death,” and Making Them Sustainable

Science.gov (United States)

Aartsen, Wendy; Peeters, Paul; Wagers, Scott; Williams-Jones, Bryn

2018-01-01

Projects in public–private partnerships, such as the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), produce data services and platforms (digital assets) to help support the use of medical research data and IT tools. Maintaining these assets beyond the funding period of a project can be a challenge. The reason for that is the need to develop a business model that integrates the perspectives of all different stakeholders involved in the project, and these digital assets might not necessarily be addressing a problem for which there is an addressable market of paying customers. In this manuscript, we review four IMI projects and the digital assets they produced as a means of illustrating the challenges in making digital assets sustainable and the lessons learned. To progress digital assets beyond proof-of-concept into widely adopted tools, there is a need for continuation of multi-stakeholder support tailored to these assets. This would be best done by implementing a structure similar to the accelerators that are in place to help transform startup businesses into growing and thriving businesses. The aim of this article is to highlight the risk of digital asset loss and to provoke discussion on the concept of developing an “accelerator” for digital assets from public–private partnership research projects to increase the chance that digital assets will be sustained and continue to add value long after a project has ended. PMID:29594123

Evaluation of a Crisis-Preparedness Training Program for the Faculty of a Private Elementary School

Science.gov (United States)

Boyle, Marybeth N.

2010-01-01

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of a training program for the faculty of a private elementary school on executing the protocols, roles, and responsibilities defined in the institution's crisis-management plan. A formal training program for the faculty had not been developed, and administrators had no measure by which…

Private and Non-Private Disc Herniation Patients: Do they Differ?

Science.gov (United States)

Gregebo, Birgitta; Dai, Deliang; Schillberg, Birgitta; Baehr, Martin; Nyström, Bo; Taube, Adam

2014-01-01

In the 2006 yearly report from the Swedish National Register for Lumbar Spine Surgery it was claimed that international studies show obvious differences between private and non-private patients with regard to results from back surgery. Therefore our aim was to reveal such possible differences by comparing the two categories of patients at a private clinic. The material comprises 1184 patients operated on for lumbar disc herniation during the period of 1987 to 2007. Basic pre-operative data were obtained from the medical records and follow-up was performed by a questionnaire around 5 years post-operatively. Small but statistically significant differences between private and non-private patients were seen pre-operatively regarding the proportions of a/ men and women in the samples, b/ those with physically demanding jobs, c/ those on sick leave and d/ those with lumbar pain. Over the years the admitted private patients had a decreasing mean duration of symptoms which was not seen in the non-private patients. No apparent differences (n.s.) were seen between the two categories of patients pre-operatively regarding age, presence and level of leg pain or the proportion who smoked. Post-operative improvement in leg and lumbar pain was very similar in private and non-private patients as was satisfaction with the results and the proportion of patients returning to work. Despite small pre-operative differences concerning some variables and a significant difference in symptom duration between private and non-private disc herniation patients, the final clinical results were very similar.

VANET Routing Protocols: Pros and Cons

OpenAIRE

Paul, Bijan; Ibrahim, Md.; Bikas, Md. Abu Naser

2012-01-01

VANET (Vehicular Ad-hoc Network) is a new technology which has taken enormous attention in the recent years. Due to rapid topology changing and frequent disconnection makes it difficult to design an efficient routing protocol for routing data among vehicles, called V2V or vehicle to vehicle communication and vehicle to road side infrastructure, called V2I. The existing routing protocols for VANET are not efficient to meet every traffic scenarios. Thus design of an efficient routing protocol h...

USING A LOCUM TENENS IN A PRIVATE PRACTICE

African Journals Online (AJOL)

10332324

The focus of this article is only on medical practitioners in a private practice making ..... advisable and in the interest of the locum when signing a contract. .... 11.2 Any single act in the exercise of the calling of a medical practitioner (or dental.

Motivation and Psychological Contract in the Singapore Private Banking Industry

OpenAIRE

Poh, Din Kiat

2008-01-01

This management project seeks to understand the sources of motivation and the types of psychological contracts prevalent amongst employees in Singapore's private banking industry. Singapore's private banking industry had seen tremendous growth in the last few years with the Government's push to make it the Switzerland of Asia. This growth has resulted in high demand for talent and high turnover rates. It is often said that money is not the key reason why people stayed motivated. Part of this ...

Practical quantum private query with better performance in resisting joint-measurement attack

Science.gov (United States)

Wei, Chun-Yan; Wang, Tian-Yin; Gao, Fei

2016-04-01

As a kind of practical protocol, quantum-key-distribution (QKD)-based quantum private queries (QPQs) have drawn lots of attention. However, joint-measurement (JM) attack poses a noticeable threat to the database security in such protocols. That is, by JM attack a malicious user can illegally elicit many more items from the database than the average amount an honest one can obtain. Taking Jacobi et al.'s protocol as an example, by JM attack a malicious user can obtain as many as 500 bits, instead of the expected 2.44 bits, from a 104-bit database in one query. It is a noticeable security flaw in theory, and would also arise in application with the development of quantum memories. To solve this problem, we propose a QPQ protocol based on a two-way QKD scheme, which behaves much better in resisting JM attack. Concretely, the user Alice cannot get more database items by conducting JM attack on the qubits because she has to send them back to Bob (the database holder) before knowing which of them should be jointly measured. Furthermore, JM attack by both Alice and Bob would be detected with certain probability, which is quite different from previous protocols. Moreover, our protocol retains the good characters of QKD-based QPQs, e.g., it is loss tolerant and robust against quantum memory attack.

Approximate and exact hybrid algorithms for private nearest-neighbor queries with database protection

KAUST Repository

Ghinita, Gabriel; Kalnis, Panos; Kantarcioǧlu, Murâ t; Bertino, Elisa

2010-01-01

Mobile devices with global positioning capabilities allow users to retrieve points of interest (POI) in their proximity. To protect user privacy, it is important not to disclose exact user coordinates to un-trusted entities that provide location-based services. Currently, there are two main approaches to protect the location privacy of users: (i) hiding locations inside cloaking regions (CRs) and (ii) encrypting location data using private information retrieval (PIR) protocols. Previous work focused on finding good trade-offs between privacy and performance of user protection techniques, but disregarded the important issue of protecting the POI dataset D. For instance, location cloaking requires large-sized CRs, leading to excessive disclosure of POIs (O({pipe}D{pipe}) in the worst case). PIR, on the other hand, reduces this bound to O(√{pipe}D{pipe}), but at the expense of high processing and communication overhead. We propose hybrid, two-step approaches for private location-based queries which provide protection for both the users and the database. In the first step, user locations are generalized to coarse-grained CRs which provide strong privacy. Next, a PIR protocol is applied with respect to the obtained query CR. To protect against excessive disclosure of POI locations, we devise two cryptographic protocols that privately evaluate whether a point is enclosed inside a rectangular region or a convex polygon. We also introduce algorithms to efficiently support PIR on dynamic POI sub-sets. We provide solutions for both approximate and exact NN queries. In the approximate case, our method discloses O(1) POI, orders of magnitude fewer than CR- or PIR-based techniques. For the exact case, we obtain optimal disclosure of a single POI, although with slightly higher computational overhead. Experimental results show that the hybrid approaches are scalable in practice, and outperform the pure-PIR approach in terms of computational and communication overhead. © 2010

Approximate and exact hybrid algorithms for private nearest-neighbor queries with database protection

KAUST Repository

Ghinita, Gabriel

2010-12-15

Mobile devices with global positioning capabilities allow users to retrieve points of interest (POI) in their proximity. To protect user privacy, it is important not to disclose exact user coordinates to un-trusted entities that provide location-based services. Currently, there are two main approaches to protect the location privacy of users: (i) hiding locations inside cloaking regions (CRs) and (ii) encrypting location data using private information retrieval (PIR) protocols. Previous work focused on finding good trade-offs between privacy and performance of user protection techniques, but disregarded the important issue of protecting the POI dataset D. For instance, location cloaking requires large-sized CRs, leading to excessive disclosure of POIs (O({pipe}D{pipe}) in the worst case). PIR, on the other hand, reduces this bound to O(√{pipe}D{pipe}), but at the expense of high processing and communication overhead. We propose hybrid, two-step approaches for private location-based queries which provide protection for both the users and the database. In the first step, user locations are generalized to coarse-grained CRs which provide strong privacy. Next, a PIR protocol is applied with respect to the obtained query CR. To protect against excessive disclosure of POI locations, we devise two cryptographic protocols that privately evaluate whether a point is enclosed inside a rectangular region or a convex polygon. We also introduce algorithms to efficiently support PIR on dynamic POI sub-sets. We provide solutions for both approximate and exact NN queries. In the approximate case, our method discloses O(1) POI, orders of magnitude fewer than CR- or PIR-based techniques. For the exact case, we obtain optimal disclosure of a single POI, although with slightly higher computational overhead. Experimental results show that the hybrid approaches are scalable in practice, and outperform the pure-PIR approach in terms of computational and communication overhead. © 2010

Private power in China

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Daniel, Martin

1999-10-01

Contains Executive Summary and Chapters on: Introduction; Political and economic background; Energy supply; The Chinese electricity sector; Private power in China; Issues for private investors; Fuel choice in private projects; Private investors in China; Listed Chinese generators; Private power prospects; Implemented private generation projects; Planned private Generation Projects; Plants owned by listed Chinese generators. (Author)

Improvement of pressure ulcer prevention care in private for-profit residential care homes: an action research study.

Science.gov (United States)

Kwong, Enid Wy; Hung, Maria Sy; Woo, Kevin

2016-11-25

A need exits to develop a protocol for preventing pressure ulcers (PUs) in private for-profit nursing homes in Hong Kong, where the incidence of PUs is relatively high and which have high proportion of non-professional care staff. The implementation of such protocol would involve changes in the practice of care, likely evoking feelings of fear and uncertainty that may become a barrier to staff adherence. We thus adopted the Systems Model of Action Research in this study to manage the process of change for improving PU prevention care and to develop a pressure ulcer prevention protocol for private for-profit nursing homes. A total of 474 residents and care staff who were health workers, personal care workers, and/or nurses from four private, for-profit nursing homes in Hong Kong participated in this study. Three cyclic stages and steps, namely, unfreezing (planning), changing (action), and refreezing (results) were carried out. During each cycle, focus group interviews, field observations of the care staff's practices and inspections of the skin of the residents for pressure ulcers were conducted to evaluate the implementation of the protocol. Qualitative content analysis was adopted to analyse the data. The data and methodological triangulation used in this study increased the credibility and validity of the results. The following nine themes emerged from this study: prevention practices after the occurrence of PUs, the improper use of pressure ulcer prevention materials, non-compliance with several prevention practices, improper prevention practices, the perception that the preventive care was being performed correctly, inadequate readiness to use the risk assessment tool, an undesirable environment, the supplying of unfavorable resources, and various management styles in the homes with or without nurses. At the end of the third cycle, the changes that were identified included improved compliance with the revised risk assessment method, the timely and appropriate

Protocols for second-generation business satellites systems

Science.gov (United States)

Evans, B. G.; Coakley, F. P.; El Amin, M. H. M.

The paper discusses the nature and mix of traffic in business satellite systems and describes the limitations on the protocol imposed by the differing impairments of speech, video, and data. A simple TDMA system protocol is presented which meets the requirements of mixed-service operation. The efficiency of the protocol together with implications for allocation, scheduling and synchronisation are discussed. Future-generation satellites will probably use on-board processing. Some initial work on protocols that make use of on-board processing and the implications for satellite and earth-station equipment are presented.

Privatization and Education

Science.gov (United States)

Dash, Neena

2009-01-01

This paper highlights emerging trends, programmes and policies in privatization of education in Western countries. These trends are educational vouchers, choice of private schools, private school liberalization, private contracting of specific services, tuition tax credits and deductions for parents ,subsidies and assistance grants to private…

In-memory interconnect protocol configuration registers

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Cheng, Kevin Y.; Roberts, David A.

2017-09-19

Systems, apparatuses, and methods for moving the interconnect protocol configuration registers into the main memory space of a node. The region of memory used for storing the interconnect protocol configuration registers may also be made cacheable to reduce the latency of accesses to the interconnect protocol configuration registers. Interconnect protocol configuration registers which are used during a startup routine may be prefetched into the host's cache to make the startup routine more efficient. The interconnect protocol configuration registers for various interconnect protocols may include one or more of device capability tables, memory-side statistics (e.g., to support two-level memory data mapping decisions), advanced memory and interconnect features such as repair resources and routing tables, prefetching hints, error correcting code (ECC) bits, lists of device capabilities, set and store base address, capability, device ID, status, configuration, capabilities, and other settings.

In-memory interconnect protocol configuration registers

Science.gov (United States)

Cheng, Kevin Y.; Roberts, David A.

2017-09-19

Systems, apparatuses, and methods for moving the interconnect protocol configuration registers into the main memory space of a node. The region of memory used for storing the interconnect protocol configuration registers may also be made cacheable to reduce the latency of accesses to the interconnect protocol configuration registers. Interconnect protocol configuration registers which are used during a startup routine may be prefetched into the host's cache to make the startup routine more efficient. The interconnect protocol configuration registers for various interconnect protocols may include one or more of device capability tables, memory-side statistics (e.g., to support two-level memory data mapping decisions), advanced memory and interconnect features such as repair resources and routing tables, prefetching hints, error correcting code (ECC) bits, lists of device capabilities, set and store base address, capability, device ID, status, configuration, capabilities, and other settings.

Position-based coding and convex splitting for private communication over quantum channels

Science.gov (United States)

Wilde, Mark M.

2017-10-01

The classical-input quantum-output (cq) wiretap channel is a communication model involving a classical sender X, a legitimate quantum receiver B, and a quantum eavesdropper E. The goal of a private communication protocol that uses such a channel is for the sender X to transmit a message in such a way that the legitimate receiver B can decode it reliably, while the eavesdropper E learns essentially nothing about which message was transmitted. The ɛ -one-shot private capacity of a cq wiretap channel is equal to the maximum number of bits that can be transmitted over the channel, such that the privacy error is no larger than ɛ \\in (0,1). The present paper provides a lower bound on the ɛ -one-shot private classical capacity, by exploiting the recently developed techniques of Anshu, Devabathini, Jain, and Warsi, called position-based coding and convex splitting. The lower bound is equal to a difference of the hypothesis testing mutual information between X and B and the "alternate" smooth max-information between X and E. The one-shot lower bound then leads to a non-trivial lower bound on the second-order coding rate for private classical communication over a memoryless cq wiretap channel.

Management and marketing of private basketball clubs for children and juniors

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Silvia GRĂDINARU

2017-03-01

Full Text Available Basketball is in the top of favourite sports. The appearance of private sport clubs on the sports market is caused by the increasingly precarious conditions in state institutions and, at the same time, by the influence of the European Community. We aim at identifying a pattern of activity meant to attract and educated children in the field of basketball through private basketball clubs by making parents aware of the beneficial effects of basketball and of being a member of a sports team. The survey was carried out in 12 private basketball clubs that carry out activities in a consequent manner (in number and in value. Private basketball club managers responded to the questions in our questionnaire showing willingness to cooperate; results show that all private basketball clubs are non-profit organisations and are involved in the competitions organised by the Romanian Federation of Basketball. Private basketball clubs represent half of the affiliated basketball clubs and dominate the competitions reserved to the different age categories, which denotes the efficiency of their activities.

Make Markets Work for Climate

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

2006-11-01

In developing countries with rapidly growing economies, energy consumption will more than triple by 2030. This will require more than 8 trillion euros in investments in energy in these countries. The way these investments are made will be crucial in determining whether greenhouse gas emissions will rise proportionately. By creating a worldwide, lucrative market for clean technologies, countries can use the money they set aside for fighting climate change to stimulate large-scale private investment in clean energy production and efficient energy consumption. A well-functioning market ensures that money is invested where it will be the most cost-effective and will have the greatest impact in helping to solve a generally recognised problem. This also means making sure that innovations get to the market, so as to take advantage of economies of scale. The conference on 16 and 17 October 2006 in Amsterdam was the official start of the collaboration of governments, business and financial institutions to Make Markets Work for Climate. At the conference it was underlined that coordinated strategies are needed for international financial institutions, private banks, private investors and governments. Business and governments stand shoulder to shoulder in shaping the much needed actions on climate change. The participants agreed that potentially profitable opportunities exist for investment in commercial technologies in developing countries, especially aimed at energy efficiency. An enabling environment is needed in developing countries to attract funds for clean energy. Attention should be paid to less-developed countries. They have difficulty profiting from the current CDM market and are unable to compete on the technology learning curve. In order to make markets work for climate there is a strong need for long-term continuity in the carbon market beyond 2012. Governments need to create stable incentives for business to invest in clean energy technologies. Business is ready

A protocol for the secure two-party quantum scalar product

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

He, Li-Bao, E-mail: helibao@mail.ustc.edu.cn [National High Performance Computing Center, Department of Computer Science and Technology, USTC, Hefei 230027 (China); Suzhou Institute for Advanced Study, USTC, Suzhou 215123 (China); Huang, Liu-Sheng; Yang, Wei; Xu, Rui [National High Performance Computing Center, Department of Computer Science and Technology, USTC, Hefei 230027 (China); Suzhou Institute for Advanced Study, USTC, Suzhou 215123 (China)

2012-03-19

Secure scalar product serves as an important primitive for secure multi-party computation and has a wide application in different areas, such as statistical analysis, data mining, computational geometry, etc. How to collaboratively compute the correct scalar product result without leaking any participants' private information becomes the primary principle of designing secure scalar product schemes. In this Letter, we present a secure two-party quantum scalar product scheme via quantum entanglement and quantum measurement with the help of a non-colluding third party (TP). Furthermore, the scheme is proven to be secure under various kinds of outside attacks and participant attacks. -- Highlights: ► We extend the secure two-party scalar product to the quantum field. ► Our protocol is built upon quantum entanglement and quantum measurement. ► Communication cost is acceptable if the elements of participants' private vectors are not too sparse. ► Participants will leak no private information under the no-collusion model.

A protocol for the secure two-party quantum scalar product

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

He, Li-Bao; Huang, Liu-Sheng; Yang, Wei; Xu, Rui

2012-01-01

Secure scalar product serves as an important primitive for secure multi-party computation and has a wide application in different areas, such as statistical analysis, data mining, computational geometry, etc. How to collaboratively compute the correct scalar product result without leaking any participants' private information becomes the primary principle of designing secure scalar product schemes. In this Letter, we present a secure two-party quantum scalar product scheme via quantum entanglement and quantum measurement with the help of a non-colluding third party (TP). Furthermore, the scheme is proven to be secure under various kinds of outside attacks and participant attacks. -- Highlights: ► We extend the secure two-party scalar product to the quantum field. ► Our protocol is built upon quantum entanglement and quantum measurement. ► Communication cost is acceptable if the elements of participants' private vectors are not too sparse. ► Participants will leak no private information under the no-collusion model.

Privat boligudlejning

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Andersen, Hans Skifter

2008-01-01

for private udlejningsboligers pris, økonomi og kvalitet. Det økonomiske afkast af investering i private udlejningsejendomme har været højt i de sidste 10 år, men fortrinsvist pga. værdistigninger. For tiden er disse gået i stå, hvilket gør den økonomiske fremtid for den private udlejningssektor mindre...

Are tax subsidies for private medical insurance self-financing? Evidence from a microsimulation model.

Science.gov (United States)

López Nicolás, Angel; Vera-Hernández, Marcos

2008-09-01

This paper develops an empirical strategy to estimate whether subsidies to private medical insurance are self-financing in countries where public and private insurance coexist and the latter covers the same treatments as the former. We construct a simulation routine based on a micro-econometric discrete choice model that allows us to evaluate the impact of premium changes on the utilization of outpatient and inpatient health care services. As an application, we estimate the budgetary effects of scrapping a subsidy from the purchase of individual private policies, using micro-data from Catalonia. Our results suggest that the subsidy is not self-financing. This result is driven by the fact that private medical insurance holders make concurrent use of public and private services, and by the price inelasticity of the demand for private policies.

Malaysian Private Education Quality: Application of SERVQUAL Model

Science.gov (United States)

Vaz, Anthony; Mansori, Shaheen

2013-01-01

Intense competition among existing private education providers and the Malaysian government's relaxation of regulations for allowing international universities to open off shore campuses in Malaysia, have forced companies in the education industry to develop strategies which can help them to make their existing students satisfied and keep them…

Comparing Performance of Government and Private Clients in Construction Projects: Contractors’ Perspective

OpenAIRE

Jati Utomo Dwi Hatmoko; Riqi Radian Khasania

2016-01-01

By nature, government and private projects have different characteristics, which influence client performance. This research aims to compare performance of government and private clients in construction projects as perceived by contractors. Six client performance indicators were used, i.e. understanding of project requirements, financial, decision making, management skills, supports for contractor, and client’s attitude. Data were collected through questionnaire surveys filled in by 117 respo...

Private channels in plant-pollinator mutualisms

Science.gov (United States)

Chen, Chun; Hossaert-McKey, Martine

2010-01-01

Volatile compounds often mediate plant-pollinator interactions, and may promote specialization in plant-pollinator relationships, notably through private channels of unusual compounds. Nevertheless, the existence of private channels, i.e., the potential for exclusive communication via unique signals and receptors, is still debated in the literature. Interactions between figs and their pollinating wasps offer opportunities for exploring this concept. Several experiments have demonstrated that chemical mediation is crucial in ensuring the encounter between figs and their species-specific pollinators. Indeed, chemical messages emitted by figs are notably species- and developmental stage-specific, making them reliable cues for the pollinator. In most cases, the species-specificity of wasp attraction is unlikely to result from the presence of a single specific compound. Nevertheless, a recent paper on the role of scents in the interaction between Ficus semicordata and its pollinating wasp Ceratosolen gravelyi showed that a single compound, 4-methylanisole, is the main signal compound in the floral scent, and is sufficient by itself to attract the obligate pollinator. Mainly focusing on these results, we propose here that a floral scent can act as a private channel, attracting only the highly specific pollinator. PMID:20484975

Whole Building Cost and Performance Measurement: Data Collection Protocol Revision 2

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Fowler, Kimberly M.; Spees, Kathleen L.; Kora, Angela R.; Rauch, Emily M.; Hathaway, John E.; Solana, Amy E.

2009-03-27

This protocol was written for the Department of Energy’s Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) to be used by the public as a tool for assessing building cost and performance measurement. The primary audiences are sustainable design professionals, asset owners, building managers, and research professionals within the Federal sector. The protocol was developed based on the need for measured performance and cost data on sustainable design projects. Historically there has not been a significant driver in the public or private sector to quantify whole building performance in comparable terms. The deployment of sustainable design into the building sector has initiated many questions on the performance and operational cost of these buildings.

Private Water Projects

OpenAIRE

Izaguirre, Ada Karina; Hunt, Catherine

2005-01-01

Drawing on the World Bank's Private Participation in Infrastructure Project Database, this Note reviews developments in the water and sewerage sector of developing countries in 2004 and changes in private participation in the sector since 2001. Data for 2004 show that total investment in water and sewerage projects with private participation amounted to nearly US$2 billion. Recent private ...

Private expenditure and the role of private health insurance in Greece: status quo and future trends.

Science.gov (United States)

Siskou, Olga; Kaitelidou, Daphne; Economou, Charalampos; Kostagiolas, Peter; Liaropoulos, Lycourgos

2009-10-01

The health care system in Greece is financed in almost equal proportions by public and private sources. Private expenditure, consists mostly of out-of-pocket and under-the-table payments. Such payments strongly suggest dissatisfaction with the public system, due to under financing during the last 25 years. This gap has been filled rapidly by the private sector. From this point of view, one might suggest that the flourishing development of private provision may lead in turn to a corresponding growth in private health insurance (PHI). This paper aims to examine the role of PHI in Greece, to identify the factors influencing its development, and to make some suggestions about future policies and trends. In the decade of 1985-1995 PHI show increasing activity, reflecting the intention of some citizens to seek health insurance solutions in the form of supplementary cover in order to ensure faster access, better quality of services, and increased consumer choice. The benefits include programs covering hospital expenses, cash benefits, outpatient care expenses, disability income insurance, as well as limited managed care programs. However, despite recent interest, PHI coverage remains low in Greece compared to other EU countries. Economic, social and cultural factors such as low average household income, high unemployment, obligatory and full coverage by social insurance, lead to reluctance to pay for second-tier insurance. Instead, there is a preference to pay a doctor or hospital directly even in the form of under-the-table payments (which are remarkably high in Greece), when the need arises. There are also factors endogenous to the PHI industry, related to market policies, low organisational capacity, cream skimming, and the absence of insurance products meeting consumer requirements, which explain the relatively low state of development of PHI in Greece.

THE EFFICIENCY OF IMPLEMENTING PRIVATE MANAGEMENT IN STATE COMPANIES

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mungiu-Pupăzan Mariana Claudia

2012-09-01

Full Text Available In 2012, nine state-owned companies are expected to have private management giving up the statemanagement. Therefore, a full debate of this issue is required, taking into consideration the fact that, in ouropinion, this process involves more than just the replacement of a manager with another. The implementationof private management in companies of national strategy, currently in state ownership, is desired to be aprofound and also very complex process, aiming to change organizational culture in depth, both verticallyand horizontally, so as to increase efficiency in these companies.Implementation of private management could be a good opportunity for an efficient development ofthese companies, for an increasing level of competitiveness on the international market, but only in terms ofa leadership team chosen on performance criteria, with a coherent set of objectives and a high independencelevel of decision.There are some opinions from people with experience in managing both private and statecompanies. They believe that the idea of establishing a private management in state companies, is, in themain, good, but it is essential to take into consideration the idea of a team trained to lead the company,instead of one person as a general manager.Another element to be taken into account, so that this idea of private management may have thedesired effect, is to precisely determine companies where private management teams should be installed. Notall companies are suitable for the same private management strategy. This type of leadership is better forcompanies with a real international perspective, such as Tarom, while strategic companies should be ratherreformed, including management privatization, and kept as state strategic areas. However, strict criteria ofstate intervention in decision-making process should be established, a striking question concerning thecircumstances under which such a management team could be successful, given that state firms are

Public-private partnerships in practice: collaborating to improve health finance policy in Ghana and Kenya.

Science.gov (United States)

Suchman, Lauren; Hart, Elizabeth; Montagu, Dominic

2018-06-13

Social health insurance (SHI), one mechanism for achieving universal health coverage, has become increasingly important in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) as they work to achieve this goal. Although small private providers supply a significant proportion of healthcare in LMICs, integrating these providers into SHI systems is often challenging. Public-private partnerships in health are one way to address these challenges, but we know little about how these collaborations work, how effectively, and why. Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted with National Health Insurance (NHI) officials in Kenya and Ghana, as well as with staff from several international NGOs (INGOs) representing social franchise networks that are partnering to increase private provider accreditation into the NHIs, this article examines one example of public-private collaboration in practice. We found that interviewees initially had incomplete knowledge about the potential for cross-sector synergy, but both sides were motivated to work together around shared goals and the potential for mutual benefit. The public-private relationship then evolved over time through regular face-to-face interactions, reciprocal feedback, and iterative workplan development. This process led to a collegial relationship that also has given small private providers more voice in the health system. In order to sustain this relationship, we recommend that both public and private sector representatives develop formalized protocols for working together, as well as less formal open channels for communication. Models for aggregating small private providers and delivering them to government programmes as a package have potential to facilitate public-private partnerships as well, but there is little evidence on how these models work in LMICs thus far.

Getting Digital Assets from Public–Private Partnership Research Projects through “The Valley of Death,” and Making Them Sustainable

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Wendy Aartsen

2018-03-01

Full Text Available Projects in public–private partnerships, such as the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI, produce data services and platforms (digital assets to help support the use of medical research data and IT tools. Maintaining these assets beyond the funding period of a project can be a challenge. The reason for that is the need to develop a business model that integrates the perspectives of all different stakeholders involved in the project, and these digital assets might not necessarily be addressing a problem for which there is an addressable market of paying customers. In this manuscript, we review four IMI projects and the digital assets they produced as a means of illustrating the challenges in making digital assets sustainable and the lessons learned. To progress digital assets beyond proof-of-concept into widely adopted tools, there is a need for continuation of multi-stakeholder support tailored to these assets. This would be best done by implementing a structure similar to the accelerators that are in place to help transform startup businesses into growing and thriving businesses. The aim of this article is to highlight the risk of digital asset loss and to provoke discussion on the concept of developing an “accelerator” for digital assets from public–private partnership research projects to increase the chance that digital assets will be sustained and continue to add value long after a project has ended.

Making Better Re/Insurance Underwriting and Capital Management Decisions with Public-Private-Academic Partnerships

Science.gov (United States)

Michel, G.; Gunasekera, R.; Werner, A.; Galy, H.

2012-04-01

Similar to 2001, 2004, and 2005, 2011 was another year of unexpected international catastrophe events, in which insured losses were more than twice the expected long-term annual average catastrophe losses of USD 30 to 40bn. Key catastrophe events that significantly contributed these losses included the Mw 9.0 Great Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, the Jan. 2011 floods in Queensland, the October 2011 floods in Thailand, the Mw 6.1 Christchurch earthquake and Convective system (Tornado) in United States. However, despite considerable progress in catastrophe modelling, the advent of global catastrophe models, increasing risk model coverage and skill in the detailed modelling, the above mentioned events were not satisfactorily modelled by the current mainstream Re/Insurance catastrophe models. This presentation therefore address problems in models and incomplete understanding identified from recent catastrophic events by considering: i) the current modelling environment, and ii) how the current processes could be improved via: a) the understanding of risk within science networks such as the Willis Research Network, and b) the integration of risk model results from available insurance catastrophe models and tools. This presentation aims to highlight the needed improvements in decision making and market practices, thereby advancing the current management of risk in the Re/Insurance industry. This also increases the need for better integration of Public-Private-Academic partnerships and tools to provide better estimates of not only financial loss but also humanitarian and infrastructural losses as well.

Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt versus three-party pseudo-telepathy: on the optimal number of samples in device-independent quantum private query

Science.gov (United States)

Basak, Jyotirmoy; Maitra, Subhamoy

2018-04-01

In device-independent (DI) paradigm, the trustful assumptions over the devices are removed and CHSH test is performed to check the functionality of the devices toward certifying the security of the protocol. The existing DI protocols consider infinite number of samples from theoretical point of view, though this is not practically implementable. For finite sample analysis of the existing DI protocols, we may also consider strategies for checking device independence other than the CHSH test. In this direction, here we present a comparative analysis between CHSH and three-party Pseudo-telepathy game for the quantum private query protocol in DI paradigm that appeared in Maitra et al. (Phys Rev A 95:042344, 2017) very recently.

Removing Ambiguities of IP Telephony Traffic Using Protocol Scrubbers

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Bazara I. A. Barry

2012-10-01

Full Text Available Network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs face the serious challenge of attacks such as insertion and evasion attacks that are caused by ambiguous network traffic. Such ambiguity comes as a result of the nature of network traffic which includes protocol implementation variations and errors alongside legitimate network traffic. Moreover, attackers can intentionally introduce further ambiguities in the traffic. Consequently, NIDSs need to be aware of these ambiguities when detection is performed and make sure to differentiate between true attacks and protocol implementation variations or errors; otherwise, detection accuracy can be affected negatively. In this paper we present the design and implementation of tools that are called protocol scrubbers whose main functionality is to remove ambiguities from network traffic before it is presented to the NIDS. The proposed protocol scrubbers are designed for session initiation and data transfer protocols in IP telephony systems. They guarantee that the traffic presented to NIDSs is unambiguous by eliminating ambiguous behaviors of protocols using well-designed protocol state machines, and walking through packet headers of protocols to make sure packets will be interpreted in the desired way by the NIDS. The experimental results shown in this paper demonstrate the good quality and applicability of the introduced scrubbers.

Making Cities Green.

Science.gov (United States)

Goldstein, Neil B.; Engel, Jane

1981-01-01

Describes several examples of urban parks and the renewal of city open spaces. Community groups interested in getting funding from government or private sources must cope with budget restrictions by making effective, innovative use of available money. Government agencies with funds allocated for urban improvements are mentioned. (AM)

A Proposal for Public and Private Partnership in Extension.

Science.gov (United States)

Krell, Rayda K; Fisher, Marc L; Steffey, Kevin L

2016-01-01

Public funding for Extension in the United States has been decreasing for many years, but farmers' need for robust information on which to make management decisions has not diminished. The current Extension funding challenges provide motivation to explore a different model for developing and delivering extension. The private sector has partnered with the public sector to fund and conduct agricultural research, but partnering on extension delivery has occurred far less frequently. The fundamental academic strength and established Extension network of the public sector combined with the ability of the private sector to encourage and deliver practical, implementable solutions has the potential to provide measurable benefits to farmers. This paper describes the current Extension climate, presents data from a survey about Extension and industry relationships, presents case studies of successful public- and private-sector extension partnerships, and proposes a framework for evaluating the state of effective partnerships. Synergistic public-private extension efforts could ensure that farmers receive the most current and balanced information available to help with their management decisions.

An Investigation of the Dayton Regional STEM School Public-Private Partnerships

Science.gov (United States)

Poole, Kimberly S.

This dissertation study documents in-depth the exploration of the Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) between the Dayton Regional STEM School (DRSS) and their industry partners as well as the establishment of a framework for evaluating and assessing PPPs. The public-private partnership agreements were studied in order to answer the over-arching research question: How is an effective public-private partnership established, assessed, and evaluated in education? A descriptive case study methodology was used to study DRSS' public-private partnership agreements to determine if goals and objectives were established and whether or not the partnerships met those goals and objectives. This case study also included the development and testing of a proposed evaluation framework that will allow for consistent, systematic inquiry that can produce defensible assertions regarding the assessment and evaluation of public-private partnerships in education. Results of the case study support the findings that utilization of an evaluation framework can serve to make public-private partnerships more successful. Results also indicated that establishment of goals and objectives enable effective evaluation for informal partnerships but could not be definitively stated for formal partnerships due to the lack of data points. The data from this case study revealed many emergent themes that should be considered in the development of future public-private partnerships. Overall this study contributes to the growing body of knowledge for public-private partnerships in education.

Bounds on the sample complexity for private learning and private data release

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Kasiviswanathan, Shiva [Los Alamos National Laboratory; Beime, Amos [BEN-GURION UNIV.; Nissim, Kobbi [BEN-GURION UNIV.

2009-01-01

Learning is a task that generalizes many of the analyses that are applied to collections of data, and in particular, collections of sensitive individual information. Hence, it is natural to ask what can be learned while preserving individual privacy. [Kasiviswanathan, Lee, Nissim, Raskhodnikova, and Smith; FOCS 2008] initiated such a discussion. They formalized the notion of private learning, as a combination of PAC learning and differential privacy, and investigated what concept classes can be learned privately. Somewhat surprisingly, they showed that, ignoring time complexity, every PAC learning task could be performed privately with polynomially many samples, and in many natural cases this could even be done in polynomial time. While these results seem to equate non-private and private learning, there is still a significant gap: the sample complexity of (non-private) PAC learning is crisply characterized in terms of the VC-dimension of the concept class, whereas this relationship is lost in the constructions of private learners, which exhibit, generally, a higher sample complexity. Looking into this gap, we examine several private learning tasks and give tight bounds on their sample complexity. In particular, we show strong separations between sample complexities of proper and improper private learners (such separation does not exist for non-private learners), and between sample complexities of efficient and inefficient proper private learners. Our results show that VC-dimension is not the right measure for characterizing the sample complexity of proper private learning. We also examine the task of private data release (as initiated by [Blum, Ligett, and Roth; STOC 2008]), and give new lower bounds on the sample complexity. Our results show that the logarithmic dependence on size of the instance space is essential for private data release.

Private Labels

OpenAIRE

Kolmačková, Zuzana

2013-01-01

This Bachelor Thesis titled Private labels deals with distribution strategy based on the introduction of private labels especially in retail chains. At the beginning it is focused on the general concept of private label offered by retailers, where is mentioned basic characteristics, history and structuring of distribution brands. Subsequently this thesis informs readers about the introduction of new special distribution brands, which focus primarily on the new consumption habits of customers....

Short Review on Quantum Key Distribution Protocols.

Science.gov (United States)

Giampouris, Dimitris

2017-01-01

Cryptographic protocols and mechanisms are widely investigated under the notion of quantum computing. Quantum cryptography offers particular advantages over classical ones, whereas in some cases established protocols have to be revisited in order to maintain their functionality. The purpose of this paper is to provide the basic definitions and review the most important theoretical advancements concerning the BB84 and E91 protocols. It also aims to offer a summary on some key developments on the field of quantum key distribution, closely related with the two aforementioned protocols. The main goal of this study is to provide the necessary background information along with a thorough review on the theoretical aspects of QKD, concentrating on specific protocols. The BB84 and E91 protocols have been chosen because most other protocols are similar to these, a fact that makes them important for the general understanding of how the QKD mechanism functions.

Utilization of skilled birth attendants in public and private sectors in Vietnam.

Science.gov (United States)

Do, Mai

2009-05-01

The private sector in health care in Vietnam has been increasingly competing with the government in primary health care services. However, little is known about the use of skilled birth attendance or about choice of public and private sectors among those who opt for skilled attendants. Using data from the Vietnam 2002 Demographic and Health Survey, this study examines factors related to women's decision-making of whether to have a skilled birth attendant at a recent childbirth, and if they did, whether it was a public or private sector provider. The study indicates that the use of the private sector for delivery services was significant. Women's household wealth, education, antenatal care and community's wealth were positively related to skilled birth attendance, while ethnicity and order of childbirth were negatively related. Order of childbirth was positively associated with skilled birth attendance in the private sector. Among service environment factors, increased access to public sector health centres was associated with an increased likelihood of skilled birth attendance in general, but a lowered chance of that in the private sector. Further studies are needed to assess the current situation in the private sector, the demand for delivery services in the private sector, and its readiness to provide quality services.

ECONOMIC THOUGHT ABOUT PRIVATE SECTOR EDUCATION: POLICY IMPLICATIONS FOR MANAGEMENT OF UNIVERSITIES IN AFRICA

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

A. O. AYENI

2006-04-01

Full Text Available This study provides relevant economic ideas that can assist Nigeria and other Africancountries in making innovative policies at privatizing university education. A review of the education market scene on the continent provides an imperfect market with adverse consequences occasioned by inadequate information and unbridled competition.Advocating a joint role for sharing the costs and benefits of university education between government and private sectors, the study suggests a four-policy option for adoption by Nigeria and other African countries. These are, in ascending order of importance: regulated private, subsidized private, competitive private, and complementary private systems of iversity educationUsing the Backcock University in Nigeria as an example, this paper demonstrates thepositive managerial influence of a competitive and complementary system of private university. Nevertheless, to forestall market failure, this study rounds off by pointing out the reformatory, regulatory and redemptive roles of government in the management ofprivate universities in Nigeria and other African countries.

Transport Emissions and Energy Consumption Impacts of Private Capital Investment in Public Transport

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yunqiang Xue

2017-10-01

Full Text Available Introducing private capital into the public transport system for its sustainable development has been increasing around the world. However, previous research ignores emissions and energy consumption impacts, which are important for private capital investment policy-making. To address this problem, the system dynamic (SD approach was used to quantitatively analyze the cumulative effects of different private capital investment models in public transport from the environmental perspective. The SD model validity was verified in the case study of Jinan public traffic. Simulation results show that the fuel consumption and emission reductions are obvious when the private capital considering passenger value invests in public transport compared with the no private capital investment and traditional investment models. There are obvious cumulative reductions for fuel consumption, CO2, CO, SO2, and PM10 emissions for 100 months compared with no private capital investment. This research verifies the superiority of the passenger value investment model in public transport from the environmental point of view, and supplies a theoretical tool for administrators to evaluate the private capital investment effects systematically.

Making public-private partnerships work in Nigeria | Erumebor ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

This Policy Brief delves into special cases and experiences of PPPs while reviewing critical challenges and proffering solutions to making PPPs work in Nigeria. Overall, the Brief recommends the review of the National Integrated Infrastructure Master Plan (NIIMP), enactment of PPP legislation and implementation support ...

ADMINISTRATIVE CIRCULAR NO. 20 USE OF PRIVATE VEHICLES FOR OFFICIAL DUTY - INSURANCE

CERN Multimedia

Human Resources Division - Tel. 73634

2002-01-01

Administrative Circular No. 20 on the use of private vehicles for official duty is shortly to be revised with a view to making certain procedures more flexible. CERN no longer requires members of the personnel to take out optional private insurances (insurance for official journeys, legal assistance insurance) in the case of duty travel for the Organization, since the associated risks are covered by CERN's own insurance. Pending the above mentioned revision, members of the personnel may continue to use their private vehicles for official duty in accordance with the others provisions laid down in the Circular Reminder: Owners of private vehicles must of course be insured by the normal compulsory car insurance required by the laws of the Host States when driving on and off the CERN sites.

76 FR 71329 - Request for Information Regarding Private Education Loans and Private Educational Lenders

Science.gov (United States)

2011-11-17

... Regarding Private Education Loans and Private Educational Lenders AGENCY: Bureau of Consumer Financial... Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, to prepare a Report on Private Education Loans and Private... Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, to prepare a Report on Private Education Loans and Private...

Serving Satellite Remote Sensing Data to User Community through the OGC Interoperability Protocols

Science.gov (United States)

di, L.; Yang, W.; Bai, Y.

2005-12-01

Remote sensing is one of the major methods for collecting geospatial data. Hugh amount of remote sensing data has been collected by space agencies and private companies around the world. For example, NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) is generating more than 3 Tb of remote sensing data per day. The data collected by EOS are processed, distributed, archived, and managed by the EOS Data and Information System (EOSDIS). Currently, EOSDIS is managing several petabytes of data. All of those data are not only valuable for global change research, but also useful for local and regional application and decision makings. How to make the data easily accessible to and usable by the user community is one of key issues for realizing the full potential of these valuable datasets. In the past several years, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has developed several interoperability protocols aiming at making geospatial data easily accessible to and usable by the user community through Internet. The protocols particularly relevant to the discovery, access, and integration of multi-source satellite remote sensing data are the Catalog Service for Web (CS/W) and Web Coverage Services (WCS) Specifications. The OGC CS/W specifies the interfaces, HTTP protocol bindings, and a framework for defining application profiles required to publish and access digital catalogues of metadata for geographic data, services, and related resource information. The OGC WCS specification defines the interfaces between web-based clients and servers for accessing on-line multi-dimensional, multi-temporal geospatial coverage in an interoperable way. Based on definitions by OGC and ISO 19123, coverage data include all remote sensing images as well as gridded model outputs. The Laboratory for Advanced Information Technology and Standards (LAITS), George Mason University, has been working on developing and implementing OGC specifications for better serving NASA Earth science data to the user community for many

[On the role of the state-private partnership in public health].

Science.gov (United States)

Nechaev, V S; Nisan, B A

2012-01-01

The article deals with the issues of study of state-private partnership in the framework of development of strategic measures of regulation of this area in public health. It is demonstrated that the regulation of state-private partnership has to combine the dynamism inherent in entrepreneurship and the public stability needed for normal public health functioning. The control functions of state authorities in the area of public health policy developed into concept of "supervision" which obligates the state to manage the health system guided by norms of ethics and financial expediency. The regulation as a main tool of "supervision" in the state-private partnership has to meet the same two requirements. The activation of entrepreneur activity in public health by no means is caused by increase of privatization in this sector. Under these conditions, the implementation of market mechanisms in public health system make is more effective and efficient.

The Groningen protocol: another perspective

OpenAIRE

Jotkowitz, A B; Glick, S

2006-01-01

The Groningen protocol allows for the euthanasia of severely ill newborns with a hopeless prognosis and unbearable suffering. We understand the impetus for such a protocol but have moral and ethical concerns with it. Advocates for euthanasia in adults have relied on the concept of human autonomy, which is lacking in the case of infants. In addition, biases can potentially influence the decision making of both parents and physicians. It is also very difficult to weigh the element of quality of...

Design, Development and Implementation of Decision Support Systems for Private Equity Investment

OpenAIRE

Vroomen, Paul

2017-01-01

The objective of this research is to design, develop and implement an intelligent decision support system (IDSS) for making rational private equity investment decisions. (Private equity investments are capital investments in enterprises that are not traded on public equity markets; they include Equity Buy-Out, Venture Capital, and the new Equity Crowd Funding (ECF) asset classes). The design and development of the IDSS requires the integration of investment science (valuation theory, portfoli...

Examining Effects of Virtual Machine Settings on Voice over Internet Protocol in a Private Cloud Environment

Science.gov (United States)

Liao, Yuan

2011-01-01

The virtualization of computing resources, as represented by the sustained growth of cloud computing, continues to thrive. Information Technology departments are building their private clouds due to the perception of significant cost savings by managing all physical computing resources from a single point and assigning them to applications or…

Symmetric cryptographic protocols

CERN Document Server

Ramkumar, Mahalingam

2014-01-01

This book focuses on protocols and constructions that make good use of symmetric pseudo random functions (PRF) like block ciphers and hash functions - the building blocks for symmetric cryptography. Readers will benefit from detailed discussion of several strategies for utilizing symmetric PRFs. Coverage includes various key distribution strategies for unicast, broadcast and multicast security, and strategies for constructing efficient digests of dynamic databases using binary hash trees.   •        Provides detailed coverage of symmetric key protocols •        Describes various applications of symmetric building blocks •        Includes strategies for constructing compact and efficient digests of dynamic databases

A PROPOSED MAPPING ARCHITECTURE BETWEEN IAX AND JINGLE PROTOCOLS

OpenAIRE

Hadeel Saleh Haj Aliwi; Putra Sumari

2016-01-01

Nowadays, multimedia communication has improved rapidly to allow people to communicate via the Internet. However, Internet users cannot communicate with each other unless they use the same chatting applications since each chatting application uses a certain signaling protocol to make the media call. The mapping architecture is a very critical issue since it solves the communication problems between any two protocols, as well as it enables people around the world to make a voice/video call eve...

Improvement of pressure ulcer prevention care in private for-profit residential care homes: an action research study

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Enid WY Kwong

2016-11-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background A need exits to develop a protocol for preventing pressure ulcers (PUs in private for-profit nursing homes in Hong Kong, where the incidence of PUs is relatively high and which have high proportion of non-professional care staff. The implementation of such protocol would involve changes in the practice of care, likely evoking feelings of fear and uncertainty that may become a barrier to staff adherence. We thus adopted the Systems Model of Action Research in this study to manage the process of change for improving PU prevention care and to develop a pressure ulcer prevention protocol for private for-profit nursing homes. Methods A total of 474 residents and care staff who were health workers, personal care workers, and/or nurses from four private, for-profit nursing homes in Hong Kong participated in this study. Three cyclic stages and steps, namely, unfreezing (planning, changing (action, and refreezing (results were carried out. During each cycle, focus group interviews, field observations of the care staff’s practices and inspections of the skin of the residents for pressure ulcers were conducted to evaluate the implementation of the protocol. Qualitative content analysis was adopted to analyse the data. The data and methodological triangulation used in this study increased the credibility and validity of the results. Results The following nine themes emerged from this study: prevention practices after the occurrence of PUs, the improper use of pressure ulcer prevention materials, non-compliance with several prevention practices, improper prevention practices, the perception that the preventive care was being performed correctly, inadequate readiness to use the risk assessment tool, an undesirable environment, the supplying of unfavorable resources, and various management styles in the homes with or without nurses. At the end of the third cycle, the changes that were identified included improved compliance with the

Private Equity Waves

NARCIS (Netherlands)

J.T.J. Smit (Han); W.A. van den Berg (Ward)

2006-01-01

textabstractThis study presents a dynamic model for the private equity market in which information revelation and uncertainty rationally explain the cyclical pattern of investment flows into private equity. The net benefit of private equity over public equity is i) uncertain and ii) agents have

Comparative Study of Internal Efficiency in Private and Public ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The education sector has been undergoing regular reviews so that to improve efficiency and cost effectiveness in resource utilization. This study was designed to make a comparative study of internal efficiency in both private and public primary schools of Manga Division, Nyamira District, Kenya. Specifically, the study not ...

Semi-quantum communication: protocols for key agreement, controlled secure direct communication and dialogue

Science.gov (United States)

Shukla, Chitra; Thapliyal, Kishore; Pathak, Anirban

2017-12-01

Semi-quantum protocols that allow some of the users to remain classical are proposed for a large class of problems associated with secure communication and secure multiparty computation. Specifically, first-time semi-quantum protocols are proposed for key agreement, controlled deterministic secure communication and dialogue, and it is shown that the semi-quantum protocols for controlled deterministic secure communication and dialogue can be reduced to semi-quantum protocols for e-commerce and private comparison (socialist millionaire problem), respectively. Complementing with the earlier proposed semi-quantum schemes for key distribution, secret sharing and deterministic secure communication, set of schemes proposed here and subsequent discussions have established that almost every secure communication and computation tasks that can be performed using fully quantum protocols can also be performed in semi-quantum manner. Some of the proposed schemes are completely orthogonal-state-based, and thus, fundamentally different from the existing semi-quantum schemes that are conjugate coding-based. Security, efficiency and applicability of the proposed schemes have been discussed with appropriate importance.

A Logical Analysis of Quantum Voting Protocols

Science.gov (United States)

Rad, Soroush Rafiee; Shirinkalam, Elahe; Smets, Sonja

2017-12-01

In this paper we provide a logical analysis of the Quantum Voting Protocol for Anonymous Surveying as developed by Horoshko and Kilin in (Phys. Lett. A 375, 1172-1175 2011). In particular we make use of the probabilistic logic of quantum programs as developed in (Int. J. Theor. Phys. 53, 3628-3647 2014) to provide a formal specification of the protocol and to derive its correctness. Our analysis is part of a wider program on the application of quantum logics to the formal verification of protocols in quantum communication and quantum computation.

When America Makes, America Works A Successful Public Private 3D Printing (Additive Manufacturing) Partnership

Science.gov (United States)

2016-10-01

community within a public-private partnership model to drive an innovation economy forward for the nation. Ad- ditive manufacturing is a game-changer...also is an incredibly powerful teaching tool to reinvigorate Science, Technology, Engineering and Math - ematics—or STEM—education in the United States

Public Private Partnerships in Water and Electricity in Africa

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Auriol, Emmanuelle; Blanc, Aymeric

2007-01-01

The paper analyzes the costs and benefits of private participation in the electricity and water industries in Sub- Saharan Africa. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the participation of private unregulated firms in the supply of services for the middle class and poor is fairly common in the region. This private involvement reflects the extreme weakness of African governments. By contrast, service to the rich is provided by public utilities. Theory then suggests that prices should be high, so that the public firms make a profit. Yet piped water, and to a lesser extent electricity, are heavily subsidized. This signals a problem of capture by the ruling elite. It is a matter of justice and efficiency to increase public utilities revenues to subsidize investment and fiscal relief. This is especially relevant in electricity, where the economies of scale are much larger than in water. Electrification is the biggest challenge to the African economy because it requires huge investment. Local and regional private investors can play a non-negligible role in reducing penury. However, their involvement is conditional on the financial health of the sector and on strong government commitment. (authors)

Privatization in economic theory

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Drakić Maja

2007-01-01

Full Text Available In reality privatization has never occurred according to the handbook rules of ordinary market transactions. Not even in advanced market economies can privatization transactions be described by the Walrasian or Arrowian, or Leontiefian equilibrium models, or by the equilibrium models of the game theory. In these economies transactions of privatization take place in a fairly organic way – which means that those are driven by the dominance of private property rights and in a market economy. But despite this fact Western privatization also some peculiar features as compared to ordinary company takeovers, since the state as the seller may pursue non – economic goals. Changes in the dominant form of property change positions and status of many individuals and groups in the society. That’s why privatization can even less be explained by ordinary market mechanisms in transition countries where privatizing state-owned property have happened in a mass scale and where markets and private property rights weren't established at the time process of privatization began. In this paper I’ll discuss and analyze the phenomenon of privatization in context of different economic theories arguing that empirical results go in favor of the public choice theory (Buchanan, 1978, theory of "economic constitution" (Brennan and Buchanan 1985, (Buchanan and Tullock, 1989, and theory of "collective action" (Olson, 1982. These theories argues that transition from one economic system into another, for example transition from collectivistic, socialistic system into capitalism and free market economy with dominant private property, will not happen through isolated changes of only few economic institutions, no matter how deep that changes would be. In other words privatization can not give results if it's not followed by comprehensive change of economic system because privatized companied wouldn't be able to operate in old environment.

Private investments in nuclear medicine: an audit on the economic aspects

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bal, C.S.; Bandopadhyaya, G.P.

1997-01-01

The objective of this article is to critically analyse from the macroeconomics point of view the true picture of private investment in nuclear medicine i.e. whether it is a profit making or loss incurring investment

THE ESSENCE OF THE EFFECTIVE MERCHANDISING WHEN PROMOTING A PRIVATE LABEL PRODUCT

OpenAIRE

Майковська, Вікторія Ігорівна; Солониченко, Тетяна Сергіївна

2014-01-01

The need for own goods mark is disclosed in the article in conditions of competitive retail market. The competitive benefits are grounded which the own brand affords. Characteristic features and peculiarities of the own goods mark are defined. The experience of Private Label applying in the world, Europe and Ukraine is analyzed. The lack of problem development of merchandising effectiveness study in the promoting process of Private Label products is specified. The tasks to make the analysis o...

Estimation of the Thurstonian model for the 2-AC protocol

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Christensen, Rune Haubo Bojesen; Lee, Hye-Seong; Brockhoff, Per B.

2012-01-01

. This relationship makes it possible to extract estimates and standard errors of δ and τ from general statistical software, and furthermore, it makes it possible to combine standard regression modelling with the Thurstonian model for the 2-AC protocol. A model for replicated 2-AC data is proposed using cumulative......The 2-AC protocol is a 2-AFC protocol with a “no-difference” option and is technically identical to the paired preference test with a “no-preference” option. The Thurstonian model for the 2-AC protocol is parameterized by δ and a decision parameter τ, the estimates of which can be obtained...... by fairly simple well-known methods. In this paper we describe how standard errors of the parameters can be obtained and how exact power computations can be performed. We also show how the Thurstonian model for the 2-AC protocol is closely related to a statistical model known as a cumulative probit model...

Breaking Megrelishvili protocol using matrix diagonalization

Science.gov (United States)

Arzaki, Muhammad; Triantoro Murdiansyah, Danang; Adi Prabowo, Satrio

2018-03-01

In this article we conduct a theoretical security analysis of Megrelishvili protocol—a linear algebra-based key agreement between two participants. We study the computational complexity of Megrelishvili vector-matrix problem (MVMP) as a mathematical problem that strongly relates to the security of Megrelishvili protocol. In particular, we investigate the asymptotic upper bounds for the running time and memory requirement of the MVMP that involves diagonalizable public matrix. Specifically, we devise a diagonalization method for solving the MVMP that is asymptotically faster than all of the previously existing algorithms. We also found an important counterintuitive result: the utilization of primitive matrix in Megrelishvili protocol makes the protocol more vulnerable to attacks.

The Privatization of College Counseling Services: A Preliminary Investigation.

Science.gov (United States)

Phillips, Larry; And Others

1996-01-01

Investigates 31 colleges and 1 state system of 21 colleges that addressed privatizing counseling services. A small number of colleges were found to have adopted different models of outsourcing, and some had considered outsourcing but not pursued it. Discusses advantages, disadvantages, factors affecting decision making, and levels of success. (JPS)

13 CFR 107.1550 - Distributions by Licensee-permitted “tax Distributions” to private investors and SBA.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

...-permitted âtax Distributionsâ to private investors and SBA. 107.1550 Section 107.1550 Business Credit and... Distributions” to private investors and SBA. If you have outstanding Participating Securities or Earmarked... purposes, you may make “tax Distributions” to your investors in accordance with this § 107.1550, whether or...

Privatization Framework: Political Economy Perspective

OpenAIRE

Bastian, Indra

2009-01-01

Privatization has been recognized as a worldwide phenomenon. In this pa-per, a political economy approach is developed to analyze privatization. The ap-proach assumes that political economy and privatization overlap in people’s need. So, the framework of political economy in privatization is based on the ‘need’ phi-losophy. Government and private sectors are contrasted in this respect, leading to a conclusion on privatization as a method to manage the economy. Keywords: privatization, politic...

Private Roads

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Verhoef, Erik T.

2007-01-01

This paper studies the efficiency impacts of private toll roads in initially untolled networks. The analysis allows for capacity and toll choice by private operators, and endogenizes entry and therewith the degree of competition, distinguishing and allowing for both parallel and serial competition.

Referral of children seeking care at private health facilities in Uganda.

Science.gov (United States)

Mbonye, Anthony K; Buregyeya, Esther; Rutebemberwa, Elizeus; Clarke, Siân E; Lal, Sham; Hansen, Kristian S; Magnussen, Pascal; LaRussa, Philip

2017-02-14

In Uganda, referral of sick children seeking care at public health facilities is poor and widely reported. However, studies focusing on the private health sector are scanty. The main objective of this study was to assess referral practices for sick children seeking care at private health facilities in order to explore ways of improving treatment and referral of sick children in this sector. A survey was conducted from August to October 2014 in Mukono district, central Uganda. Data was collected using a structured questionnaire supplemented by Focus Group Discussions and Key Informant interviews with private providers and community members. A total of 241 private health facilities were surveyed; 170 (70.5%) were registered drug shops, 59 (24.5%) private clinics and 12 (5.0%) pharmacies. Overall, 104/241 (43.2%) of the private health facilities reported that they had referred sick children to higher levels of care in the two weeks prior to the survey. The main constraints to follow referral advice as perceived by caretakers were: not appreciating the importance of referral, gender-related decision-making and negotiations at household level, poor quality of care at referral facilities, inadequate finances at household level; while the perception that referral leads to loss of prestige and profit was a major constraint to private providers. In conclusion, the results show that referral of sick children at private health facilities faces many challenges at provider, caretaker, household and community levels. Thus, interventions to address constraints to referral of sick children are urgently needed.

Using semantics for representing experimental protocols.

Science.gov (United States)

Giraldo, Olga; García, Alexander; López, Federico; Corcho, Oscar

2017-11-13

An experimental protocol is a sequence of tasks and operations executed to perform experimental research in biological and biomedical areas, e.g. biology, genetics, immunology, neurosciences, virology. Protocols often include references to equipment, reagents, descriptions of critical steps, troubleshooting and tips, as well as any other information that researchers deem important for facilitating the reusability of the protocol. Although experimental protocols are central to reproducibility, the descriptions are often cursory. There is the need for a unified framework with respect to the syntactic structure and the semantics for representing experimental protocols. In this paper we present "SMART Protocols ontology", an ontology for representing experimental protocols. Our ontology represents the protocol as a workflow with domain specific knowledge embedded within a document. We also present the S ample I nstrument R eagent O bjective (SIRO) model, which represents the minimal common information shared across experimental protocols. SIRO was conceived in the same realm as the Patient Intervention Comparison Outcome (PICO) model that supports search, retrieval and classification purposes in evidence based medicine. We evaluate our approach against a set of competency questions modeled as SPARQL queries and processed against a set of published and unpublished protocols modeled with the SP Ontology and the SIRO model. Our approach makes it possible to answer queries such as Which protocols use tumor tissue as a sample. Improving reporting structures for experimental protocols requires collective efforts from authors, peer reviewers, editors and funding bodies. The SP Ontology is a contribution towards this goal. We build upon previous experiences and bringing together the view of researchers managing protocols in their laboratory work. Website: https://smartprotocols.github.io/ .

Security of a single-state semi-quantum key distribution protocol

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Wei; Qiu, Daowen; Mateus, Paulo

2018-06-01

Semi-quantum key distribution protocols are allowed to set up a secure secret key between two users. Compared with their full quantum counterparts, one of the two users is restricted to perform some "classical" or "semi-quantum" operations, which potentially makes them easily realizable by using less quantum resource. However, the semi-quantum key distribution protocols mainly rely on a two-way quantum channel. The eavesdropper has two opportunities to intercept the quantum states transmitted in the quantum communication stage. It may allow the eavesdropper to get more information and make the security analysis more complicated. In the past ten years, many semi-quantum key distribution protocols have been proposed and proved to be robust. However, there are few works concerning their unconditional security. It is doubted that how secure the semi-quantum ones are and how much noise they can tolerate to establish a secure secret key. In this paper, we prove the unconditional security of a single-state semi-quantum key distribution protocol proposed by Zou et al. (Phys Rev A 79:052312, 2009). We present a complete proof from information theory aspect by deriving a lower bound of the protocol's key rate in the asymptotic scenario. Using this bound, we figure out an error threshold value such that for all error rates that are less than this threshold value, the secure secret key can be established between the legitimate users definitely. Otherwise, the users should abort the protocol. We make an illustration of the protocol under the circumstance that the reverse quantum channel is a depolarizing one with parameter q. Additionally, we compare the error threshold value with some full quantum protocols and several existing semi-quantum ones whose unconditional security proofs have been provided recently.

Strengthening referral of sick children from the private health sector and its impact on referral uptake in Uganda: a cluster randomized controlled trial protocol

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Esther Buregyeya

2016-11-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Uganda’s under-five mortality is high, currently estimated at 66/1000 live births. Poor referral of sick children that seek care from the private sector is one of the contributory factors. The proposed intervention aims to improve referral and uptake of referral advice for children that seek care from private facilities (registered drug shops/private clinics. Methods/Design A cluster randomized design will be applied to test the intervention in Mukono District, central Uganda. A sample of study clusters will implement the intervention. The intervention will consist of three components: i raising awareness in the community: village health teams will discuss the importance of referral and encourage households to save money, ii training and supervision of providers in the private sector to diagnose, treat and refer sick children, iii regular meetings between the public and private providers (convened by the district health team to discuss the referral system. Twenty clusters will be included in the study, randomized in the ratio of 1:1. A minimum of 319 sick children per cluster and the total number of sick children to be recruited from all clusters will be 8910; adjusting for a 10 % loss to follow up and possible withdrawal of private outlets. Discussion The immediate sustainable impact will be appropriate treatment of sick children. The intervention is likely to impact on private sector practices since the scope of the services they provide will have expanded. The proposed study is also likely to have an impact on families as; i they may appreciate the importance of timely referral on child illness management, ii the cost savings related to reduced morbidity will be used by household to access other social services. The linkage between the private and public sectors will create a potential avenue for delivery of other public health interventions and improved working relations in the two sectors. Further, improved quality of

'Going private': a qualitative comparison of medical specialists' job satisfaction in the public and private sectors of South Africa.

Science.gov (United States)

Ashmore, John

2013-01-03

There is a highly inequitable distribution of health workers between public and private sectors in South Africa, partly due to within-country migration trends. This article elaborates what South African medical specialists find satisfying about working in the public and private sectors, at present, and how to better incentivize retention in the public sector. Seventy-four qualitative interviews were conducted - among specialists and key informants - based in one public and one private urban hospital in South Africa. Interviews were coded to determine common job satisfaction factors, both financial and non-financial in nature. This served as background to a broader study on the impacts of specialist 'dual practice', that is, moonlighting. All qualitative specialist respondents were engaged in dual practice, generally working in both public and private sectors. Respondents were thus able to compare what was satisfying about these sectors, having experience of both. Results demonstrate that although there are strong financial incentives for specialists to migrate from the public to the private sector, public work can be attractive in some ways. For example, the public hospital sector generally provides more of a team environment, more academic opportunities, and greater opportunities to feel 'needed' and 'relevant'. However, public specialists suffer under poor resource availability, lack of trust for the Department of Health, and poor perceived career opportunities. These non-financial issues of public sector dissatisfaction appeared just as important, if not more important, than wage disparities. The results are useful for understanding both what brings specialists to migrate to the private sector, and what keeps some working in the public sector. Policy recommendations center around boosting public sector resources and building trust of the public sector through including health workers more in decision-making, inter alia. These interventions may be more cost

[Computerized protocol for functional exploration of the stomatognathic system].

Science.gov (United States)

Salsench, J; Torrent, J; Ferrer, J

1988-11-01

In making a protocol it is necessary that all members of the team who are going to collect information have the same unity of criterion about the different variables that compose it. The drawing up of this document is as much or more necessary than the protocol itself.

Security Protocols: Specification, Verification, Implementation, and Composition

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Almousa, Omar

An important aspect of Internet security is the security of cryptographic protocols that it deploys. We need to make sure that such protocols achieve their goals, whether in isolation or in composition, i.e., security protocols must not suffer from any aw that enables hostile intruders to break...... results. The most important generalization is the support for all security properties of the geometric fragment proposed by [Gut14]....... their security. Among others, tools like OFMC [MV09b] and Proverif [Bla01] are quite efficient for the automatic formal verification of a large class of protocols. These tools use different approaches such as symbolic model checking or static analysis. Either approach has its own pros and cons, and therefore, we...

Petroleum privatization and institutional environment: the Russian example

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Locarelli, C.; Finon, D.

2003-09-01

This paper treats of the reform of the Russian hydrocarbons industry using an institutionalistic approach. The theoretical objective of the privatization is the installation of a growth scheme based on important productivity gains, through large scale re-structuration, investments for the reproduction of oil and gas reserves, and big infrastructures development. The choice of this sector is justified because it represents an extreme case of inadequateness of the measures preconized by the Washington consensus with respect to the institutional environment. Stress has been put on the modification of the property rights of companies. The introduction of market institutions in a transition economy has led to an opportunistic adaptation of the behaviour of private and government actors. There is a clear correlation between the insecurity of property rights in general and the abundance of exploitable and exportable natural resources. Then, the privatization and the limited performance of the hydrocarbons sector in Russia is analyzed in terms of efficiency and long-term strategy, essential for a resources industry to make reserves. The unexpected results of this privatization are explained using an analysis of the market institutions applied to the very specific institutional environment of the Russian economy. Finally, the inadequateness of these institutions with the initial informal institutions has led to adaptations fully dependent of the institutional path with the necessity of preserving a minimum inter-industrial consistency. (J.S.)

Interests and Advantages of the Private Sector in the State-Private Partnership

OpenAIRE

Brailovskiy Ilya A.

2013-01-01

The article is devoted to analysis of interests that stimulate a private partner to joint activity with the state and advantages they obtain from realisation of projects of the state-private partnership (SPP). It marks out main features and fields of application of the state-private partnership. It underlines that an important prerequisite for motivation of the private sector to enter into partnership relations with the state is observance of clear law competent formal rules in the institutio...

[Private health insurance in Brazil: approaches to public/private patterns in healthcare].

Science.gov (United States)

Sestelo, José Antonio de Freitas; Souza, Luis Eugenio Portela Fernandes de; Bahia, Lígia

2013-05-01

This article draws on a previous review of 270 articles on private health plans published from 2000 to 2010 and selects 17 that specifically address the issue of the relationship between the public and private healthcare sectors. Content analysis considered the studies' concepts and terms, related theoretical elements, and predominant lines of argument. A reading of the argumentative strategies detected the existence of a critical view of the modus operandi in the public/private relationship based on Social Medicine and the theoretical tenets of the Brazilian Health Reform Movement. The study also identified contributions based on neoliberal business approaches that focus strictly on economic issues to discuss private health insurance. Understanding the public/private link in healthcare obviously requires the development of a solid empirical base, analyzed with adequate theoretical assumptions due to the inherent degree of complexity in the public/private healthcare interface.

How private housholds can use environment - higher energy consumption despite efficiency increasement; Wie private Haushalte die Umwelt nutzen - hoeherer Energieverbrauch trotz Effizienzsteigerung. Hintergrundpapier

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

NONE

2006-11-15

Energy saving potentials are not being used satisfactorily to date, especially as regards the use of electricity. No-load losses caused by electrical devices such as television sets and computers amount to some 17 billion kilowatt hours per year for private households alone. This makes 3.3. billion euros in electricity costs. Having an easily accessible mains switch that disconnects electrical devices from the mains can already help to avoid no-load losses. White goods such as fridge-freezers, washing machines or dish washers also offer considerable saving potentials. Efficient technologies could contribute annual savings from this product sector in the order of seven billion kilowatt hours, equivalent to 5.8% of the total electricity consumption of private households.

A Key Establishment Protocol for RFID User in IPTV Environment

Science.gov (United States)

Jeong, Yoon-Su; Kim, Yong-Tae; Sohn, Jae-Min; Park, Gil-Cheol; Lee, Sang-Ho

In recent years, the usage of IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) has been increased. The reason is a technological convergence of broadcasting and telecommunication delivering interactive applications and multimedia content through high speed Internet connections. The main critical point of IPTV security requirements is subscriber authentication. That is, IPTV service should have the capability to identify the subscribers to prohibit illegal access. Currently, IPTV service does not provide a sound authentication mechanism to verify the identity of its wireless users (or devices). This paper focuses on a lightweight authentication and key establishment protocol based on the use of hash functions. The proposed approach provides effective authentication for a mobile user with a RFID tag whose authentication information is communicated back and forth with the IPTV authentication server via IPTV set-top box (STB). That is, the proposed protocol generates user's authentication information that is a bundle of two public keys derived from hashing user's private keys and RFID tag's session identifier, and adds 1bit to this bundled information for subscriber's information confidentiality before passing it to the authentication server.

Overview of the Global Trend in Private Medical Practice | Afolabi ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

More over, many governments face various constraints that force them to prioritize and restrict government spending. This make it impossible for any government to provide free health care for her ever increasing population. Private medical practice is an alternative to complement government efforts in providing health care ...

Women Using Physics: Alternate Career Paths, The Private Sector

Science.gov (United States)

Tams, Jessica

2006-12-01

For those who have spent their careers inside the safe walls of academia, the word is a little scary. Can I compete? Will I fit in? What do I need to know? Am I prepared? Will I succeed? While many would say: Yes! You are ready to excel! This isn’t actually the case. The private sector comes with many unanticipated shocks to many of us, especially women. This isn’t a group project. This session will discuss entering a quickly growing and competitive technical field and what one can do to prepare for continued success. Preparing and Entering the Private Sector * Women with technical skills are a desired part of the private workforcein general women posses stronger people skills, are more reliable and often more well rounded than their male counterparts. Key factors we will discuss to landing that first job: · Expand your knowledge base with current applications of technology · Preparing a solid employment pitch to highlight strengths: Overcoming stereotypes · Don’t show them your bad side: Why some student projects may hurt you · The private sector attitude toward performance and entry level expectations Excelling in the Private Sector * Now that we have landed a job * for better or worse we are now all about making money and exerting control. What to keep in mind while working in the private sector: · The formative first years: focus on your weaknesses and practice, practice, practice · Men & Women in the workplace: what women subconsciously do to hurt their careers · Politics: Working in a team environment · Polish & Detail & Reliabilit

Income and expenditure in private dental clinics in Japan

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Midori Tsuneishi

2013-08-01

Full Text Available Although national dental care expenditure has not changed, the number of dental clinics has increased. Mass media has been reporting on the financial difficulties of dental clinics. To address this issue, we reviewed articles that showed the distribution and changes in net income, that is, total expenses subtracted from total income, of private dental clinics in Japan using data from a survey conducted by the Japan Dental Association. We also reviewed articles analyzing the factors relating to the net income. The results of the articles showed that distribution of net income has become positively skewed, with the mean dragged to the right by a few high scores. This means that the median is more appropriate than the mean as a measure of central tendency of net income. Factors relating to net income of private dental clinics have changed: private dental clinics that were opened after 1989 (new and had dental hygienists, who may conduct dental maintenance, had high net income, suggesting that they are well-managed or having a different type of patient mix in recent years. These analyses provide important and useful information for not only better management of private dental clinics but also policy-making in dental health care.

THE USE OF EXCHANGEABLE BONDS DURING THE PRIVATIZATION PROCESS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Damian Kaźmierczak

2014-04-01

Full Text Available In our article we present the use of hybrid securities in the privatization process. We show that exchangeable bonds may be successfully applied during privatization of state companies throughout the world. It may be profitable for many reasons. Firstly, the exchangeables offer a much lower coupon in comparison with the ordinary government bonds which may be crucial for highly indebted countries. Secondly, throughout the entire maturity period the state remains the owner of the privatized firm which means that the government can be a beneficiary of high dividends paid by the public enterprises and can actively manage them. Thirdly, in the case of unfavorable market conditions the authorities get an opportunity to wait for the end of economic turmoil in order to avoid selling the equity participations under their true value. Finally, the issue of certain types of exchangeables (e.g. callable exchangeables or mandatory exchangeables and adding several provisions (e.g. greenshoe option or clean-up call makes the instrument more flexible for the issuer. We also present a few examples of the privatization processes by means of exchangeable bonds i.a. in Germany and in Austria. Most of such operations, e.g. German Deutsche Post, Austrian Telekom Austria or Portuguese Galp Energia SGPS S.A. were completed with success.

A Caribbean evaluation of public versus private drinking water provision: the case of St. Maarten, Netherlands Antilles

NARCIS (Netherlands)

M.A.C. Schouten (Marco); D. Brdjanovic (Damir); M.P. van Dijk (Meine Pieter)

2008-01-01

textabstractThis article assesses how a small island state can choose the best option in the process of private sector involvement. It reviews the decision process to involve or not the private sector in water and sanitation supply and in which way. Nine criteria are used to make the choice. A

Factors influencing nurses' job satisfaction in selected private hospitals in England.

Science.gov (United States)

Lephalala, R P; Ehlers, V J; Oosthuizen, M J

2008-09-01

The quantitative descriptive survey used self-completion questionnaires to study factors influencing nurses' job satisfaction in selected private hospitals in England. Herzberg's Theory of Motivation was used to contextualise the results obtained from 85 completed questionnaires. In terms of Herzberg's Theory of Motivation, the most important extrinsic (hygiene) factor was no satisfaction with their salaries compared to nurses' salaries in other private hospitals in England, in the NHS and even at their own hospitals. However, most nurses were satisfied with the other extrinsic factors (organisation and administration policies, supervision and interpersonal relations). The most important intrinsic factors (motivators), influencing nurses' job satisfaction was their lack of satisfaction with promotions (including the fact that their qualifications were reportedly not considered for promotions), lack of advancement opportunities and being in dead-end jobs, and lack of involvement in decision- and policy-making activities. Nurses' levels of job satisfaction might be enhanced if promotion policies could be consistent, advancement opportunities implemented, qualifications considered for promotions, salary issues clarified, and if nurses could be involved in decision- and policy-making. Enhanced levels of job satisfaction could help to reduce turnover rates among registered nurses at the private hospitals in England that participated in this study.

Secure Multi-Player Protocols

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Fehr, Serge

While classically cryptography is concerned with the problem of private communication among two entities, say players, in modern cryptography multi-player protocols play an important role. And among these, it is probably fair to say that secret sharing, and its stronger version verifiable secret...... sharing (VSS), as well as multi-party computation (MPC) belong to the most appealing and/or useful ones. The former two are basic tools to achieve better robustness of cryptographic schemes against malfunction or misuse by “decentralizing” the security from one single to a whole group of individuals...... (captured by the term threshold cryptography). The latter allows—at least in principle—to execute any collaboration among a group of players in a secure way that guarantees the correctness of the outcome but simultaneously respects the privacy of the participants. In this work, we study three aspects...

Pay and Perks Creep Up for Private-College Presidents

Science.gov (United States)

Stripling, Jack

2012-01-01

Private-college presidents often draw scrutiny for their hefty compensation packages, but most of them have a ready comeback: I could make a lot more money in the corporate world. While this statement is surely sometimes true, it is also true that some of the nation's top-paid presidents continue to receive perks that their corporate counterparts…

The UMTS-AKA Protocols for Intelligent Transportation Systems

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hwang Min-Shiang

2009-01-01

Full Text Available The integration of communication protocols into transport systems is a much adored research area today. Much of seminal work has been reported on the topic of intelligent transportation systems (ITS in the recent years. Many advanced techniques have been garnered to improve online communication and to promote the security, comfort, and efficiency of ITS. Of primary importance to the effective application of ITS is the communication protocol used. A fascinating development is that the yesterday's Global System for Mobile Communication protocol is being replaced by the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System protocol, which is the third-generation mobile technology. This article attempts to identify a suitable communication system for ITS applications. It is impracticable to substantially modify the original UMTS-IMS-AKA protocol which is in practice because it can disturb the operation of the current system, and thus we explore other possibilities through this research. We investigate a novel protocol to make the original UMTS-IMS-AKA protocol compliant with ITS as well as adaptable into the current UMTS protocol.

How to create a public-private partnership: a replicable project associated with business continuity.

Science.gov (United States)

Hahn, Daniel

2010-07-01

In an age of political turmoil and mistrust of governments, having an outlet for creative problem solving that involves all aspects of communities during disasters is critical. Additionally, there is a need for outlets that save taxpayer money for particular projects, such as road construction or infrastructure protection. Public-private partnerships are one way to accomplish these goals. Utilised correctly, a public-private partnership is a win-win situation for all participants. This paper will make the case for the continued support from all sectors for public-private partnerships. A description of public-private partnerships will be given to show the broad spectrum of opportunities for such a partnership. In addition, a case study of a public-private partnership called SAFER Santa Rosa is explored as the programme is oriented towards disasters, but keeps the community engaged all year round. Finally, an example is presented of an initiative that not only exemplifies the spirit of public-private partnerships, but has attracted international recognition because it is simple, replicable, cost-effective and valuable to both the private sector and the public sector. The Business Emergency Response Toolkit bag is a true public-private success story. It is hoped that the reader will be able to replicate the ideas discussed herein in their own community.

Comparing Performance of Government and Private Clients in Construction Projects: Contractors’ Perspective

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jati Utomo Dwi Hatmoko

2016-09-01

Full Text Available By nature, government and private projects have different characteristics, which influence client performance. This research aims to compare performance of government and private clients in construction projects as perceived by contractors. Six client performance indicators were used, i.e. understanding of project requirements, financial, decision making, management skills, supports for contractor, and client’s attitude. Data were collected through questionnaire surveys filled in by 117 respondents. The results show that there is a significant difference between both types of client performance. Three variables related to financial indicators, i.e. timely payment, owner value estimate, and payment approval, rank in the bottom three of the government client performance, but in contrast rank in the top three of the private ones. These results suggest that the government clients’ performance is perceived inferior to the private ones. Establishing a clients’ forum for sharing knowledge and best practices would be a strategic solution to enhance clients’ capacities.

Determination of Priorities in Apparel Purchasing from Private Sale Websites

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Saricam Canan

2017-12-01

Full Text Available In the fast-changing internet era, private sale websites attracted an enormous interest from the consumers in especially online marketing of apparel goods. The retailers may garner more benefit if the prior issues for the consumers when they are purchasing apparel products online is known. Reviewing the literature, this study presents the factors in three groups in a hierarchical manner considering the multidimensional aspect of online purchasing of apparel products from private sale websites and then determines the prior issues for the consumers by making pairwise comparisons among these factors using analytical hierarchy process on a sample group of 100 Turkish respondents. The findings revealed that “privacy/security” in terms of online shopping criteria, “product information” in terms of apparel products criteria, and “discount ratio” in terms of private shopping criteria took highest scores of importance when the aspects were analyzed individually. Nonetheless, the parameters regarding the online shopping criteria were found to be more important than the criteria regarding the apparel products and private shopping criteria. In the end, it was also observed that these items that were found to have highest importance were actually corresponding to the risks of the situation.

Implementation of prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV programme through private hospitals of Delhi--policy implications.

Science.gov (United States)

Gupta, A K; Garg, C R; Joshi, B C; Rawat, N; Dabla, V; Gupta, A

2015-01-01

In India, programme for prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) of HIV is primarily implemented through public health system. State AIDS Control Societies (SACSs) encourage private hospitals to set up integrated counselling and testing centres (ICTCs). However, private hospitals of Delhi did not set up ICTCs. Consequently, there is no information on PMTCT interventions in private hospitals of Delhi. This study was undertaken by Delhi SACS during March 2013 through September 2013 to assess status of implementation of PMTCT programme in various private hospitals of Delhi to assist programme managers in framing national policy to facilitate uniform implementation of National PMTCT guidelines. Out of total 575 private hospitals registered with Government of Delhi, 336 (58.4%) catering to pregnant women were identified. About 100 private hospitals with facility of antenatal care, vaginal/caesarean delivery and postnatal care and minimum 10 indoor beds were selected for study. Study sample comprised of large corporate hospitals (≥100 beds; n = 29), medium-sized hospitals (25 to women tested, 52 (0.14%) were detected HIV-positive. However, against National Policy, HIV testing was done without pre/post-test counselling/or consent of women, no PMTCT protocol existed, delivery of HIV-positive women was not undertaken and no efforts were made to link HIV-positive women to antiretroviral treatment. Major intervention observed was medical termination of pregnancy, which indicates lack of awareness in private hospitals about available interventions under national programme. The role of private hospitals in management of HIV in pregnant women must be recognized and mainstreamed in HIV control efforts. There is an urgent need for capacity building of private health care providers to improve standards of practice. National AIDS Control Organization may consider establishing linkages or adopting model developed by some countries with generalized epidemic for delivering

Conditional use of social and private information guides house-hunting ants.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Adam L Cronin

Full Text Available Social animals can use both social and private information to guide decision making. While social information can be relatively economical to acquire, it can lead to maladaptive information cascades if attention to environmental cues is supplanted by unconditional copying. Ants frequently employ pheromone trails, a form of social information, to guide collective processes, and this can include consensus decisions made when choosing a place to live. In this study, I examine how house-hunting ants balance social and private information when these information sources conflict to different degrees. Social information, in the form of pre-established pheromone trails, strongly influenced the decision process in choices between equivalent nests, and lead to a reduced relocation time. When trails lead to non-preferred types of nest, however, social information had less influence when this preference was weak and no influence when the preference was strong. These results suggest that social information is vetted against private information during the house-hunting process in this species. Private information is favoured in cases of conflict and this may help insure colonies against costly wrong decisions.

Conditional use of social and private information guides house-hunting ants.

Science.gov (United States)

Cronin, Adam L

2013-01-01

Social animals can use both social and private information to guide decision making. While social information can be relatively economical to acquire, it can lead to maladaptive information cascades if attention to environmental cues is supplanted by unconditional copying. Ants frequently employ pheromone trails, a form of social information, to guide collective processes, and this can include consensus decisions made when choosing a place to live. In this study, I examine how house-hunting ants balance social and private information when these information sources conflict to different degrees. Social information, in the form of pre-established pheromone trails, strongly influenced the decision process in choices between equivalent nests, and lead to a reduced relocation time. When trails lead to non-preferred types of nest, however, social information had less influence when this preference was weak and no influence when the preference was strong. These results suggest that social information is vetted against private information during the house-hunting process in this species. Private information is favoured in cases of conflict and this may help insure colonies against costly wrong decisions.

Infection control practice in private dental laboratories in Riyadh

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

AlKheraif, Abdulaziz A; Mobarak, Fahmy A

2008-01-01

In view of the risk of infection of dental health care workers and patients, interruption of possible chains of infection is to be demanded. The objective of this study was to assess infection control practice in private dental laboratories in Riyadh City, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The study was conducted on thirty-two private dental laboratories in Riyadh City regarding infection control practiced by these laboratories. The instrument of the study consisted of ten open-ended questions that were asked from the laboratories directors. A large percentage of the surveyed laboratories (87.5 %) did not implement any infection control protocol during their practice. The mean number of impressions received per week was 16. Most of the surveyed laboratories (90.6 %) had no way of communication with the clinics regarding the disinfection procedures. The results indicated that 62.5 % of the laboratories reported that they were aware that they may get infection from non-disinfected items. Only a small percentage (6.2%) of the laboratories added disinfecting agent to pumice slurry. Wearing laboratory coats was reported by 75% of the laboratory workers. The use of gloves during work was reported by 59.3% of the laboratories while 56.2% reported the use protective eyewear. Only 21.8% of the laboratories use face masks during work. Construction of infection control manuals that contain updated and recommended guidelines to ensure aseptic practice in private dental laboratories is highly recommended. Also, a way of communication between dentists and dental technicians regarding disinfection of laboratory items should be strongly encouraged. (author)

76 FR 68047 - Making It Easier for America's Small Businesses and America's Exporters to Access Government...

Science.gov (United States)

2011-11-02

... Government should be individualized and efficient. If the private sector can allow consumers to customize... local government services as well as those of private sector partners. (3) Agencies shall make... competitiveness, innovation, and job growth. If we are to thrive in the global economy, and make America the best...

Private information alone can trigger trapping of ant colonies in local feeding optima.

Science.gov (United States)

Czaczkes, Tomer J; Salmane, Anete K; Klampfleuthner, Felicia A M; Heinze, Jürgen

2016-03-01

Ant colonies are famous for using trail pheromones to make collective decisions. Trail pheromone systems are characterised by positive feedback, which results in rapid collective decision making. However, in an iconic experiment, ants were shown to become 'trapped' in exploiting a poor food source, if it was discovered earlier. This has conventionally been explained by the established pheromone trail becoming too strong for new trails to compete. However, many social insects have a well-developed memory, and private information often overrules conflicting social information. Thus, route memory could also explain this collective 'trapping' effect. Here, we disentangled the effects of social and private information in two 'trapping' experiments: one in which ants were presented with a good and a poor food source, and one in which ants were presented with a long and a short path to the same food source. We found that private information is sufficient to trigger trapping in selecting the poorer of two food sources, and may be sufficient to cause it altogether. Memories did not trigger trapping in the shortest path experiment, probably because sufficiently detailed memories did not form. The fact that collective decisions can be triggered by private information alone may require other collective patterns previously attributed solely to social information use to be reconsidered. © 2016. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd.

Private Water Districts

Data.gov (United States)

California Natural Resource Agency — Private Water District boundaries are areas where private contracts provide water to the district in California. This database is designed as a regions polygon...

IVOA Credential Delegation Protocol Version 1.0

Science.gov (United States)

Plante, Raymond; Graham, Matthew; Rixon, Guy; Taffoni, Giuliano; Plante, Raymond; Graham, Matthew

2010-02-01

The credential delegation protocol allows a client program to delegate a user's credentials to a service such that that service may make requests of other services in the name of that user. The protocol defines a REST service that works alongside other IVO services to enable such a delegation in a secure manner. In addition to defining the specifics of the service protocol, this document describes how a delegation service is registered in an IVOA registry along with the services it supports. The specification also explains how one can determine from a service registration that it requires the use of a supporting delegation service.

Private quantum decoupling and secure disposal of information

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Buscemi, Francesco

2009-01-01

Given a bipartite system, correlations between its subsystems can be understood as the information that each one carries about the other. In order to give a model-independent description of secure information disposal, we propose the paradigm of private quantum decoupling, corresponding to locally reducing correlations in a given bipartite quantum state without transferring them to the environment. In this framework, the concept of private local randomness naturally arises as a resource, and total correlations are divided into eliminable and ineliminable ones. We prove upper and lower bounds on the quantity of ineliminable correlations present in an arbitrary bipartite state, and show that, in tripartite pure states, ineliminable correlations satisfy a monogamy constraint, making apparent their quantum nature. A relation with entanglement theory is provided by showing that ineliminable correlations constitute an entanglement parameter. In the limit of infinitely many copies of the initial state provided, we compute the regularized ineliminable correlations to be measured by the coherent information, which is thus equipped with a new operational interpretation. In particular, our results imply that two subsystems can be privately decoupled if their joint state is separable.

PRIVATE SECTOR IN HEALTH CARE DELIVERY: A REALITY AND A CHALLENGE IN PAKISTAN.

Science.gov (United States)

Shaikh, Babar Tasneem

2015-01-01

Under performance of the public sector health care system in Pakistan has created a room for private sector to grow and become popular in health service delivery, despite its questionable quality, high cost and dubious ethics of medical practice. Private sector is no doubt a reality; and is functioning to plug many weaknesses and gaps in health care delivery to the poor people of Pakistan. Yet, it is largely unregulated and unchecked due to the absence of writ of the state. In spite of its inherent trait of profit making, the private sector has played a significant and innovative role both in preventive and curative service provision. Private sector has demonstrated great deal of responsiveness, hence creating a relation of trust with the consumers of health in Pakistan, majority of who spend out of their pocket to buy 'health'. There is definitely a potential to engage and involve private and non-state entities in the health care system building their capacities and instituting regulatory frameworks, to protect the poor's access to health care system.

Value solidity in government and business: Results of an empirical study on public and private sector organizational values

NARCIS (Netherlands)

van der Wal, Z.; Huberts, L.W.J.C.

2008-01-01

This article reports on a survey study of 382 managers from a variety of public and private sector organizations, on the values that guide sectoral decision making. Just as some important classical differences emerge, a number of similarities between the public and private sector appear to result in

Making a Historical Survey of a State's Nuclear Ambitions. Impact of Historical Developments of a State's National Nuclear Non-Proliferation Policy on Additional Protocol Implementation

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Jonter, Thomas

2003-03-01

In 1998, SKI initiated a project to conduct a historical survey of the Swedish nuclear weapons research for the period 1945-1972. IAEA became interested and accepted it in 2000 as a support program task to increase transparency and to support the implementation of the Additional Protocol in Sweden. The main purpose of the Additional Protocol is to make the IAEA control system more efficient with regard to nuclear material, facilities and research. Other countries have now shown interest to follow the Swedish example and to make their own reviews of their past nuclear energy and nuclear weapons research. The most important aim is to produce basic information for IAEA on the nuclear activities of the past and to refine and strengthen the instruments of the Safeguard System within the Additional Protocol. The first objective of this report is to present a short summary of the Swedish historical survey, as well as similar projects in other countries dealing with nuclear-related and nuclear weapons research reviews. These tasks are dealt with in chapter 2. Secondly, the objective is to present a general model of how a national base survey can be designed. The model is based on the Swedish experiences and it has been designed to also serve as a guideline for other countries to strengthen their safeguards systems within the framework of the Additional Protocol. Since other States declared that they would make similar historical surveys, the SKI decided to work out a model that could be used by other countries intending to conduct such studies. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are participating in a co-operation project to carry out such nationally base surveys under the auspices of the Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate. Finland is also conducting such a survey, but it is done independently, albeit in close exchange of views between SKI and its Finnish counterpart, STUK. This is described in chapter 3. The third objective is to develop a pedagogic methodology for teaching

Prevalence of potentially serious drug-drug interactions among South African elderly private health sector patients using the Mimica Matanović/Vlahović-Palčevski protocol.

Science.gov (United States)

van Heerden, Julandi A; Burger, Johanita R; Gerber, Jan J; Vlahović-Palčevski, Vera

2018-04-01

To determine the prevalence of potentially serious drug-drug interactions (DDIs) and their relationship with gender and age, among elderly in South Africa. A cross-sectional study was conducted using pharmaceutical claims data for 2013, for a total of 103 420 medical scheme beneficiaries' ≥65 years. All medications dispensed within one calendar month where the days' supply of medication dispensed overlapped, were grouped as one prescription. DDIs per prescription were then identified using the Mimica Matanović/Vlahović-Palčevski DDI protocol. Results were interpreted using effect sizes, that is Cramér's V, Cohen's d and Cohen's ƒ 2 . A total of 331 659 DDIs were identified on 235 870 (25.8%, N = 912 713) prescriptions (mean 0.36 (SD 0.7) (95% CI, 0.36 to 0.37)). Women encountered 63.5% of all DDIs. Effect sizes for the association between DDIs and age group (Cramér's V = 0.06), and gender (Cramér's V = 0.05) was negligible. There was no difference between men and women regarding the mean number of DDIs identified per prescription (Cohen's d = 0.10). The number of medicine per prescription (ƒ 2 = 0.51) was the biggest predictor of the DDIs. The most frequent interacting drug combinations were between central nervous system medicines (30.6%). Our study is the first to report the prevalence of potentially serious DDIs among an elderly population in the South African private health sector utilising the Mimica Matanović/Vlahović-Palčevski DDI protocol. Overall, we identified DDIs in approximately 26% of the prescriptions in our study. Age and gender were not found to be predictors of potentially serious DDIs. © 2017 Royal Pharmaceutical Society.

Understanding protocol performance: impact of test performance.

Science.gov (United States)

Turner, Robert G

2013-01-01

This is the second of two articles that examine the factors that determine protocol performance. The objective of these articles is to provide a general understanding of protocol performance that can be used to estimate performance, establish limits on performance, decide if a protocol is justified, and ultimately select a protocol. The first article was concerned with protocol criterion and test correlation. It demonstrated the advantages and disadvantages of different criterion when all tests had the same performance. It also examined the impact of increasing test correlation on protocol performance and the characteristics of the different criteria. To examine the impact on protocol performance when individual tests in a protocol have different performance. This is evaluated for different criteria and test correlations. The results of the two articles are combined and summarized. A mathematical model is used to calculate protocol performance for different protocol criteria and test correlations when there are small to large variations in the performance of individual tests in the protocol. The performance of the individual tests that make up a protocol has a significant impact on the performance of the protocol. As expected, the better the performance of the individual tests, the better the performance of the protocol. Many of the characteristics of the different criteria are relatively independent of the variation in the performance of the individual tests. However, increasing test variation degrades some criteria advantages and causes a new disadvantage to appear. This negative impact increases as test variation increases and as more tests are added to the protocol. Best protocol performance is obtained when individual tests are uncorrelated and have the same performance. In general, the greater the variation in the performance of tests in the protocol, the more detrimental this variation is to protocol performance. Since this negative impact is increased as

Employ a Mobile Agent for Making a Payment

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yan Wang

2008-01-01

Full Text Available The mobile agent paradigm offers flexibility and autonomy to e-commerce applications. But it is challenging to employ a mobile agent to make a payment due to the security consideration. In this paper, we propose a new agent-assisted secure payment protocol, which is based on SET payment protocol and aims at enabling the dispatched consumer-agent to autonomously sign contracts and make the payment on behalf of the cardholder after having found the best merchant, without the possibility of disclosing any secret to any participant. This is realized by adopting the Signature-Share scheme, and employing a Trusted Third Party (TTP. In the proposed protocol, the principle that each participant knows what is strictly necessary for his/her role is followed as in SET. In addition, mechanisms have been devised for preventing and detecting double payment, overspending and overpayment attacks. Finally the security properties of the proposed protocol are studied analytically. In comparison with other existing models, the proposed protocol is more efficient and can detect more attacks.

Privatization an a national business

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Andrzej Tokarski

2009-12-01

Full Text Available Privatization is a very complicated process that builds a market economy. It entails numerous problems, the overcoming of which depends on the pace and scale of privatization in a particular country. The privatization process of the Polish economy is assessed differently, and still raises a lot of controversy and debate, not only for the economy, but also politics. This is particularly the privatization of state assets. Privatization was one of the foundations for political transformation in Poland and other Central- and Eastern European countries. Some say that was a great success, while for others it was a field for plunder and affairs. Who is right? Is privatization a success or a failure? This paper aims to present the arguments posed by both supporters and opponents of the privatization in Poland.

Private Tutoring: Evidence from India

OpenAIRE

Azam, Mehtabul

2015-01-01

Drawing on the nationally representative "Participation and Expenditure in Education" surveys, we document the incidence and cost of private tutoring at different stages of schooling over the last two decades in India. As private tutoring involve two decisions: a) whether to take private tuition or not, and b) how much to spend on private tutoring conditional on positive decision in (a), we analyze the determinants of the two decisions separately using a Hurdle model. We find that private tut...

Reservation Application System Of Private Lesson At Easyspeak Denpasar Based On Web And Android

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ferry yudhitama putra

2016-06-01

Full Text Available Abstract— English Private lessons institutes are now widely facilitates a person to develop English skills in speaking and writing. Currently the service users private lessons English book private lessons manually, that is by coming directly to the place as well as through the telephone service, but with the operator even then still have difficulties in user validation that requires a long time. To facilitate the user in terms of the reservation, then the system will be built based on web and Android. Development of private lessons reservation application built with PHP and Java programming language using CodeIgniter framework on the web side , while on the Android using Eclipse tools , and MySQL as database storage media . Applications reservation private lessons has several functions to make a reservation time and tutor can be done by the student of Easyspeak and on the side of the tutor application can provide information about the student will be taught , as well as on the side of the operator to provide ease in setting booking private lessons because it computerized not manually as before. Applications reservation private lessons are also equipped with a reminder or reminders are made on the side of Android apps , using alarmmanager system.

The design of maternal centered life-style modification program for weight gain management during pregnancy - a study protocol.

Science.gov (United States)

Farajzadegan, Ziba; Pozveh, Zahra Amini

2013-08-01

Abnormal weight gain during pregnancy increases the adverse health outcomes during the pregnancy, delivery, and the postpartum period. Most of the pregnant women develop weight gain more than the recommended limits; therefore, interventions to manage such disproportionate weight gain are needed. In this paper, the design of the maternal centered life-style intervention study is described, which focuses on controlling weight gaining during pregnancy for all body mass index (BMI) groups. In our randomized field trial, 160 pregnant women with 6-10 weeks of gestational age who visit one of the participating Isfahan four urban public-health centers and 4 private obstetric offices are included. The maternal centered life-style intervention carried out by trained midwives is standardized in a protocol. All the participants are visited at 6-10, 11-15, 16-20, 21-25, 26-30, 31-34, 35-37, 38, 39, and 40 weeks of pregnancy. The women who are randomized in the intervention group receive maternal centered educational package of prenatal care for the pregnant woman and a log book in the first visit. Counselors accompany the pregnant women to maintain or develop a healthy life-style. Data collection will perform monthly measuring body weight, BMI. Because, we don't have structured protocol for weight management during pregnancy especially, in private sectors if the maternal centered life-style intervention proves to be effective, it will be suggested to merge this package to routine care. Therewith by empowering women to manage their weight the public-health burden can be reduced. Beside that private obstetricians also have structured protocol for their client management.

The micro-step motor controller protocol and driver

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Hong, Kwang Pyo; Lee, Chang Hee; Moon, Myung Kook; Choi, Bung Hun; Choi, Young Hyun; Cheon, Jong Gu

2004-11-01

We developed the communication protocol which is a main kernel of motor control firmware program that is used at HANARO neutron spectrometer now. This protocol driver divide into as a 4 group(Serial protocol, DLL, Active-X, Labview driver), so end-user can control the motor control as easily by PC RS232/422 port and have a merits as follows: Support a Low Level/High level driver, Support a Network Connectivity function by using High level Driver, One Server can services many client request. By using this protocol, The End-user can be easily makes a application motor control program and developed another application system program by using several kinds of programming tools under Widows and Linux based operation systems

SWOT analysis & privatization in Croatia

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Družić Ivo

2006-01-01

Full Text Available Legal framework for privatization in Croatia was based on two key laws: the Transformation Act of 1991, and the Privatization Act of 1993, amended in 1996. Early start of privatization process in 1990s in Croatia was marked by the transformation of socially-owned companies into stock holding companies or limited liability companies. The first step (1991-1993 of this process of almost 2700 companies which entered privatization was their evaluation and transformation into private ownership entities. The second step (1994- 1997 consisted of privatization of CPF portfolio. The portfolios change constantly, not only as a result of privatization but also because companies themselves change, as does their position in the market. The third step (1998 in the privatization process was voucher privatization. Privatization of large infrastructure and utility companies designated as public enterprises began in 1999 (Croatian Telecom and INA in 2002 (public enterprises are privatized on the basis of separate laws. Attempts to discuss privatization in Croatia in terms of SWOT analysis have been motivated by the stark difference among Croatian professional economists in an appraisal of Croatia's performance during the transition process in general and of the privatization process in particular. Therefore we considered the elements of SWOT analysis to be an acceptable way to delve into the confusing world of bickering arguments on the state and perspective of the Croatia's privatization process. In this paper we have tried to provide an impartial approach by employing two criteria i.e. strength and weaknesses in judging the events and results of the privatization process in Croatia. Strength of the overall privatization process can be mostly ascribed to the institutional swiftness on micro as well as on macro level. On the micro level 80% of the companies were formally privatized in the first two years despite unfavorable external conditions comprising the

A Geographical Heuristic Routing Protocol for VANETs

Science.gov (United States)

Urquiza-Aguiar, Luis; Tripp-Barba, Carolina; Aguilar Igartua, Mónica

2016-01-01

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) leverage the communication system of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Recently, Delay-Tolerant Network (DTN) routing protocols have increased their popularity among the research community for being used in non-safety VANET applications and services like traffic reporting. Vehicular DTN protocols use geographical and local information to make forwarding decisions. However, current proposals only consider the selection of the best candidate based on a local-search. In this paper, we propose a generic Geographical Heuristic Routing (GHR) protocol that can be applied to any DTN geographical routing protocol that makes forwarding decisions hop by hop. GHR includes in its operation adaptations simulated annealing and Tabu-search meta-heuristics, which have largely been used to improve local-search results in discrete optimization. We include a complete performance evaluation of GHR in a multi-hop VANET simulation scenario for a reporting service. Our study analyzes all of the meaningful configurations of GHR and offers a statistical analysis of our findings by means of MANOVA tests. Our results indicate that the use of a Tabu list contributes to improving the packet delivery ratio by around 5% to 10%. Moreover, if Tabu is used, then the simulated annealing routing strategy gets a better performance than the selection of the best node used with carry and forwarding (default operation). PMID:27669254

Responsibility of international organizations under international law for the acts of global health public-private partnerships

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Clarke, L.C.

2011-01-01

Public-private partnerships governing global health are making progress in relation to the prevention and treatment of diseases such as AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. This progress should not be underestimated as these partnerships are making strides above and beyond efforts of either the public

Fee-for-service, Capitation and Health Provider Choice with Private Contracts

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Boone, J.

2014-01-01

Contracts between health insurers and providers are private; i.e. not public. By modelling this explicitly, we find the following. Insurers with bigger provider networks,pay higher fee-for-service rates to providers. This makes it more likely that a patient is treated and hence health care costs

FDI and Telecommunications Privatization: Case Studies of Latin America, United Kingdom, and Hungary

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mi-Kyung Yun

1998-12-01

Full Text Available This thesis observed the recent trend of privatization and the effect of foreign investment, and the example of the overseas experience of sale of the state-own enterprises. To study the enlightenment of the strategy which attracted foreign investment by way of privatization or the issue the Korean government needs to be paid attention to when foreigners invest in public sections. The most important enlightenment getting from the foreign instances is that although it takes a long time before privatization, the foreign investment could be effectively attracted and the price could be risen maximum only when the stable and transparent restriction system is established. In order to get a price as high as possible, the sell of stocks should be done in many times. Promote the competition of demand between investment institutions and private investors. Control and make use of the financial institutions properly by way of various attractive economic policies. And so on.

How PEPFAR's public-private partnerships achieved ambitious goals, from improving labs to strengthening supply chains.

Science.gov (United States)

Sturchio, Jeffrey L; Cohen, Gary M

2012-07-01

The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), established in 2003, is widely recognized as one of the most ambitious and successful bilateral programs ever implemented to address a single disease. Part of the program's success is attributable to the participation of the private sector, working in partnership with the US and local governments and implementing organizations to maximize the reach and effectiveness of every dollar spent. We examined key public-private partnerships that grew out of PEPFAR to identify features that have made them effective. For example, PEPFAR's Supply Chain Management System took advantage of private industry's best practices in logistics, and a partnership with the medical technology company BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company) improved laboratory systems throughout sub-Saharan Africa. We found that setting ambitious goals, enlisting both global and local partners, cultivating a culture of collaboration, careful planning, continuous monitoring and evaluation, and measuring outcomes systematically led to the most effective programs. The Office of the US Global AIDS Coordinator and PEPFAR should continue to strengthen their capacity for private-sector partnerships, learning from a decade of experience and identifying new ways to make smart investments that will make the most efficient use of taxpayer resources, expand proven interventions more rapidly, and help ensure the sustainability of key programs.

SPECT/CT workflow and imaging protocols

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Beckers, Catherine [University Hospital of Liege, Division of Nuclear Medicine and Oncological Imaging, Department of Medical Physics, Liege (Belgium); Hustinx, Roland [University Hospital of Liege, Division of Nuclear Medicine and Oncological Imaging, Department of Medical Physics, Liege (Belgium); Domaine Universitaire du Sart Tilman, Service de Medecine Nucleaire et Imagerie Oncologique, CHU de Liege, Liege (Belgium)

2014-05-15

Introducing a hybrid imaging method such as single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT)/CT greatly alters the routine in the nuclear medicine department. It requires designing new workflow processes and the revision of original scheduling process and imaging protocols. In addition, the imaging protocol should be adapted for each individual patient, so that performing CT is fully justified and the CT procedure is fully tailored to address the clinical issue. Such refinements often occur before the procedure is started but may be required at some intermediate stage of the procedure. Furthermore, SPECT/CT leads in many instances to a new partnership with the radiology department. This article presents practical advice and highlights the key clinical elements which need to be considered to help understand the workflow process of SPECT/CT and optimise imaging protocols. The workflow process using SPECT/CT is complex in particular because of its bimodal character, the large spectrum of stakeholders, the multiplicity of their activities at various time points and the need for real-time decision-making. With help from analytical tools developed for quality assessment, the workflow process using SPECT/CT may be separated into related, but independent steps, each with its specific human and material resources to use as inputs or outputs. This helps identify factors that could contribute to failure in routine clinical practice. At each step of the process, practical aspects to optimise imaging procedure and protocols are developed. A decision-making algorithm for justifying each CT indication as well as the appropriateness of each CT protocol is the cornerstone of routine clinical practice using SPECT/CT. In conclusion, implementing hybrid SPECT/CT imaging requires new ways of working. It is highly rewarding from a clinical perspective, but it also proves to be a daily challenge in terms of management. (orig.)

SPECT/CT workflow and imaging protocols

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Beckers, Catherine; Hustinx, Roland

2014-01-01

Introducing a hybrid imaging method such as single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT)/CT greatly alters the routine in the nuclear medicine department. It requires designing new workflow processes and the revision of original scheduling process and imaging protocols. In addition, the imaging protocol should be adapted for each individual patient, so that performing CT is fully justified and the CT procedure is fully tailored to address the clinical issue. Such refinements often occur before the procedure is started but may be required at some intermediate stage of the procedure. Furthermore, SPECT/CT leads in many instances to a new partnership with the radiology department. This article presents practical advice and highlights the key clinical elements which need to be considered to help understand the workflow process of SPECT/CT and optimise imaging protocols. The workflow process using SPECT/CT is complex in particular because of its bimodal character, the large spectrum of stakeholders, the multiplicity of their activities at various time points and the need for real-time decision-making. With help from analytical tools developed for quality assessment, the workflow process using SPECT/CT may be separated into related, but independent steps, each with its specific human and material resources to use as inputs or outputs. This helps identify factors that could contribute to failure in routine clinical practice. At each step of the process, practical aspects to optimise imaging procedure and protocols are developed. A decision-making algorithm for justifying each CT indication as well as the appropriateness of each CT protocol is the cornerstone of routine clinical practice using SPECT/CT. In conclusion, implementing hybrid SPECT/CT imaging requires new ways of working. It is highly rewarding from a clinical perspective, but it also proves to be a daily challenge in terms of management. (orig.)

A PROPOSED MAPPING ARCHITECTURE BETWEEN IAX AND JINGLE PROTOCOLS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hadeel Saleh Haj Aliwi

2016-03-01

Full Text Available Nowadays, multimedia communication has improved rapidly to allow people to communicate via the Internet. However, Internet users cannot communicate with each other unless they use the same chatting applications since each chatting application uses a certain signaling protocol to make the media call. The mapping architecture is a very critical issue since it solves the communication problems between any two protocols, as well as it enables people around the world to make a voice/video call even if they use different chatting applications. Providing the interoperability between different signaling protocols and multimedia applications takes the advantages of more than one protocol. Many mapping architectures have been proposed to ease exchanging the media between at least two users without facing any difficulties such as SIP-Jingle, IAX-RSW, H.323-MGCP, etc. However, the design of any of the existing mapping architectures has some weaknesses related to larger delay, time consuming, and security matters. The only way to overcome these problems is to propose an efficient mapping architecture. This paper proposed a new mapping architecture between Inter-Asterisk eXchange Protocol and Jingle Protocol. The proposed mapping architecture consists of IAX domain (IAX client, IAX server, IAX-to-Jingle gateway, and Jingle domain (Jingle client, Jingle server, Jingle-to-IAX gateway. The tasks of the translation gateways are represented by the URI conversion, media capability exchange, translator of call setup and teardown signals, and real time media transmission.

Struggle against privatization: a case history in the use of comparative performance evaluation of public hospitals.

Science.gov (United States)

Oh, Juhwan; Lee, Jin-Seok; Choi, Yong-Jun; Park, Hyeung-Keun; Do, Young Kyung; Eun, Sang-Jun

2011-01-01

After the 1997 economic crisis, the South Korean government implemented neoliberal policies in many sectors. In health care, the government attempted to privatize nine public hospitals, framing the initiative as "better management." In this discourse, public hospital workers were stereotyped as lazy and incompetent, while public hospitals were portrayed as poorly managed and of low quality. However, the government did not present any relevant evidence of improvement in already privatized hospitals, even though three hospitals had been semi-privatized at that time. In this study, the authors evaluated the effects of the semi-privatization, comparing the performance of the semi-privatized hospitals with that of the nine other hospitals targeted for privatization. The study found adverse effects on performance, unlike the claims made by the government. Semi-privatization intensified the workloads of hospital workers and the instability of employment, froze or decreased real wages, and drastically increased hospital revenue per patient stay. The changes may have resulted from redefining profit as the goal of the hospitals, as opposed to the previous focus on decision-making on public health. These research findings played a decisive role in the struggle to keep the targeted public hospitals free of privatization, especially in two of the nine hospitals targeted for privatization in 2001.

THE USE OF ICT IN QUALITY EDUCATION MANAGEMENT IN PRIVATE GYMNASIUMS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

I.V. Plish

2012-07-01

Full Text Available The article deals with the peculiarities of the use of information and communication technologies (ICT in the process of the quality education management in private gynasiums. The social importance and the novelty of private education as well as the role of the education quality management and in the same time the lack of practical realization of the effective mechanisms caused the search of the effective technologies of the quality management. The structure of information education environment was proposed into the article. The main goal is to give opportunity to be effective and operative in the process of decision making. The positive influence on the education process was underlined.

Demarcation of Security in Authentication Protocols

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Ahmed, Naveed; Jensen, Christian D.

2011-01-01

Security analysis of communication protocols is a slippery business; many “secure” protocols later turn out to be insecure. Among many, two complains are more frequent: inadequate definition of security and unstated assumptions in the security model. In our experience, one principal cause...... for such state of affairs is an apparent overlap of security and correctness, which may lead to many sloppy security definitions and security models. Although there is no inherent need to separate security and correctness requirements, practically, such separation is significant. It makes security analysis...... easier, and enables us to define security goals with a fine granularity. We present one such separation, by introducing the notion of binding sequence as a security primitive. A binding sequence, roughly speaking, is the only required security property of an authentication protocol. All other...

MR efficiency using automated MRI-desktop eProtocol

Science.gov (United States)

Gao, Fei; Xu, Yanzhe; Panda, Anshuman; Zhang, Min; Hanson, James; Su, Congzhe; Wu, Teresa; Pavlicek, William; James, Judy R.

2017-03-01

MRI protocols are instruction sheets that radiology technologists use in routine clinical practice for guidance (e.g., slice position, acquisition parameters etc.). In Mayo Clinic Arizona (MCA), there are over 900 MR protocols (ranging across neuro, body, cardiac, breast etc.) which makes maintaining and updating the protocol instructions a labor intensive effort. The task is even more challenging given different vendors (Siemens, GE etc.). This is a universal problem faced by all the hospitals and/or medical research institutions. To increase the efficiency of the MR practice, we designed and implemented a web-based platform (eProtocol) to automate the management of MRI protocols. It is built upon a database that automatically extracts protocol information from DICOM compliant images and provides a user-friendly interface to the technologists to create, edit and update the protocols. Advanced operations such as protocol migrations from scanner to scanner and capability to upload Multimedia content were also implemented. To the best of our knowledge, eProtocol is the first MR protocol automated management tool used clinically. It is expected that this platform will significantly improve the radiology operations efficiency including better image quality and exam consistency, fewer repeat examinations and less acquisition errors. These protocols instructions will be readily available to the technologists during scans. In addition, this web-based platform can be extended to other imaging modalities such as CT, Mammography, and Interventional Radiology and different vendors for imaging protocol management.

The Effect of Government Expenditures, Private Investment and Labor on Economic Growth in Pidie District

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Munzir AG

2018-02-01

Full Text Available This study aims to determine the effect of government spending, private investment, and labor on economic growth in Pidie District, Data analyzed from 2000-2016, using multiple linear regression model. The results of research on government spending, private investment and labor both simultaneously and partially have a positive and significant impact on economic growth in Pidie District. Variations of government expenditure variables, private investment and labor are able to explain the variation of economic growth in Pidie District by 48,7 percent and the rest of 51,3 percent influenced by other variables. Labor is the most dominant variable of influence on economic growth in Pidie District. Private investment is the least influence variable to economic growth in Pidie District. The need for a policy that could make private government investment spending, and labor increases simultaneously so it is likely to have a positive impact on improving economic growth in Pidie District.

A More Efficient Contextuality Distillation Protocol

Science.gov (United States)

Meng, Hui-xian; Cao, Huai-xin; Wang, Wen-hua; Fan, Ya-jing; Chen, Liang

2018-03-01

Based on the fact that both nonlocality and contextuality are resource theories, it is natural to ask how to amplify them more efficiently. In this paper, we present a contextuality distillation protocol which produces an n-cycle box B ∗ B ' from two given n-cycle boxes B and B '. It works efficiently for a class of contextual n-cycle ( n ≥ 4) boxes which we termed as "the generalized correlated contextual n-cycle boxes". For any two generalized correlated contextual n-cycle boxes B and B ', B ∗ B ' is more contextual than both B and B '. Moreover, they can be distilled toward to the maximally contextual box C H n as the times of iteration goes to infinity. Among the known protocols, our protocol has the strongest approximate ability and is optimal in terms of its distillation rate. What is worth noting is that our protocol can witness a larger set of nonlocal boxes that make communication complexity trivial than the protocol in Brunner and Skrzypczyk (Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 160403 2009), this might be helpful for exploring the problem that why quantum nonlocality is limited.

Who is More Free? A Comparison of the Decision-Making of Private and Public School Principals

Science.gov (United States)

Shakeel, M. Danish; DeAngelis, Corey A.

2017-01-01

While substantial school choice research focuses on student achievement outcomes, little has explored the mechanisms involved in producing such outcomes. We present a comparative analysis of private and public school principals using data from the School and Staffing Survey (SASS) 2011-2012. We add to the literature by examining the differences in…

Evidence on Private Sector Training. Background Paper No. 7c.

Science.gov (United States)

Ouweneel, William M.

Private sector training is a primary force in education in the United States for a number of reasons: (1) the sheer amount of such training makes it a major factor; (2) this training has a significant impact on the nation's productivity and competitiveness; (3) it plays a major role in creating innovative and cost-effective solutions to training…

RANCANG BANGUN FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL (FTP DENGAN PENGAMANAN OPEN SSL PADA JARINGAN VPN MIKROTIK DI SMK DWIWARNA

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Devi Ruwaida

2018-01-01

Full Text Available File Transfer Protocol (FTP server merupakan jenis sistem yang menghubungkan hak pengakses (client dan penyedia (server dalam melakukan pertukaran data yang melewati port 21, yang semula ftp server berjalan pada protocol yang tidak terlindungi di dalam port 21, kemudian dengan OpenSSL ini di amankan agar data dapat sampai ke tujuan. Pada penelitian ini akan dibangun Rancang Bangun File Transfer Protocol (Ftp Dengan Pengamanan Open Ssl Pada Jaringan Vpn Mikrotik Di Smk Dwiwarna  yang akan di konfigurasi pada debian 9.1 dengan  di tambahnya pengaman sertifikat ssl , dengan harapan  melindungi proses dalam pengiriman data dapat dengan aman dan ditambahkannya sistem VPN PPTP pada mikrotik akan lebih memberikan keamanan yang lebih baik lagi, dimana pemanfaatan Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP suatu protokol jaringan yang bisa memungkinkan client dalam pengiriman data secara aman melalui remote client kepada server sekolah dibangunnya suatu virtual private network (VPN.

The Limits of Multistakeholder Governance: The Case of the Global Partnership for Education and Private Schooling

Science.gov (United States)

Menashy, Francine

2017-01-01

This study investigates collective decision making within a multistakeholder partnership through a case study of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE). Analyzed through the theoretical framework of sociological institutionalism, this study applies the issue of private schooling as a lens to understand policy-related decision making between…

Public private partnerships

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Miranda Sarmento, J.J.

2014-01-01

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are increasing in number worldwide and are used to build and manage large public infrastructure projects. In PPPs, the private sector plays a role in developing and maintaining public infrastructure and services, which is usually a public sector responsibility.

Financial Private Regulation and Enforcement

OpenAIRE

MILLER, Geoffrey

2011-01-01

This paper has been delivered within the context of the research project "Transnational Private Regulatory Regimes: Constitutional foundations and governance design". This paper considers the topic of private regulation and enforcement for internationally active financial services firms. The paper documents the following types of regulation and enforcement that involve significant private input: house rules, contracts, internal compliance, management-based regulation, private standard-sett...

Public and private in the post-soviet area: the problem of demarcation

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

M. I. Zaidel

2014-01-01

Full Text Available The article focuses on the problem of determination of public and private in the post­soviet area. Formation of these spheres should be a logical conclusion of successful transformation and modernization process in ex­soviet republics and getting all spheres of civil life out of the state control. Historical specific is underlined; it is given the determination and main characteristics of public and private. It is given two main approaches’ ways of interpretation the phenomena and formation of public sphere according to H. Arendt and Ju. Hubermas. The specific of formation and demarcation of public and private spheres in the post­soviet area is analyzed. The boundaries between public and private spheres were deformed by the soviet state and communist society. As a result it was built hierarchical relations among the state, society and ruler; it is typical for power centralized societies. The determining factor of institutional heritage in the processes of state­making is underlined. The deformation of division of state, public and private spheres is caused by combining of traditional and modern institutes and practices; as a result social practices that are against of logic of modern society slow down the development of market­oriented economy and modernization of institutions.

Governance of private label as a strategic asset: developing a brand valuation model

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Renato Giovannini

2017-12-01

Full Text Available This paper aims at identifying which factors should be considered in the building of an economic evaluation model for the private label brand. In fact, some specific characteristics of private label, with respect to industrial brand, make unusable the consolidated models available. The results of the paper are the definition of some specific factors of private label, the assumptions about how these features impact on the traditional economic evaluation models and how these could be included in a model. Because of the complexity of the topic, the hypothesis is to build a model of synthesis, made of two parts: one part for a Financial-Based evaluation of Brand Equity, with the addition of some specific factors and indicators to the traditional formulas, while the other part is for a Consumer-based evaluation of Brand Equity, thanks to an index that summarizes the strength of private label brands from the consumer perspective. The private label economic evaluation has some relevant managerial implications on the retail system, on the vertical supply chain relationships and on the understanding of the strategic nature of this asset.

Full employment maintenance in the private sector

Science.gov (United States)

Young, G. A.

1976-01-01

Operationally, full employment can be accomplished by applying modern computer capabilities, game and decision concepts, and communication feedback possibilities, rather than accepted economic tools, to the problem of assuring invariant full employment. The government must provide positive direction to individual firms concerning the net number of employees that each firm must hire or refrain from hiring to assure national full employment. To preserve free enterprise and the decision making power of the individual manager, this direction must be based on each private firm's own numerical employment projections.

The Hungarian environmental private law under the influence of jus publicum

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Julesz Máté

2016-01-01

Full Text Available The relationship between environmental public law and environmental private law is of a growing significance. Not only environmental criminal law has an effect on environmental private law, but, since the beginning of the new legal, economic and political era in 1989, private law elements are also to be found in the environmental administrative law. The reciprocity between environmental private and administrative law is clear-cut. Private law institutions, like injunction or deposit, are upheld in environmental administrative contracts. The effect of an administrative ruling has legal consequences in the relationship between, e.g., neighbors: there are cases in which a noisy neighbor can be brought before the public administration. The objective liability in the field of environmental private law is accepted by the courts and by the citizens. The level of objectivity may, though, vary from country to country. In the practice of the Hungarian environmental private law, after 3 years, the objective liability is subrogated by a subjective liability, this latter one making exculpation easier. The res ipsa loquitur liability in space law is not an absolute liability, though it establishes a praesumptio juris that the environmental damage caused by a space object (e.g. a satellite is to be covered by the state which has sent the satellite into space. The presumption is, though not easily, rebuttable. In the Hungarian case law, objective environmental liability has been applied sub judice since the novella of the Civil Code in 1977. This novella made environmental private law a part of environmental law. The novella of the Civil Code was preceded by the Act on Environmental Protection of1976. The importance of economics in environmental private law has only recently been accepted by the Hungarian legal science. The role of the Coase theory is indisputable. The environmental private law is quite a new phenomenon in the Hungarian legal science, however

Marker-assisted selection in maize: current status, potential, limitations and perspectives from the private and public sectors

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Ragot, M.; Lee, M.

2007-01-01

More than twenty-five years after the advent of DNA markers, marker-assisted selection (MAS) has become a routine component of some private maize breeding programmes. Line conversion has been one of the most productive applications of MAS in maize breeding, reducing time to market and resulting in countless numbers of commercial products. Recently, applications of MAS for forward breeding have been shown to increase significantly the rate of genetic gain when compared with conventional breeding. Costs associated with MAS are still very high. Further improvements in marker technologies, data handling and analysis, phenotyping and nursery operations are needed to realize the full benefits of MAS for private maize breeding programmes and to allow the transfer of proven approaches and protocols to public breeding programmes in developing countries. (author)

Global property rights. The Kyoto protocol and the knowledge revolution

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Chichilnisky, G.

2006-01-01

This paper is about the origin of today's global environmental problems, and how to resolve them. At stake are catastrophic risks from global warming and damage to the world's biodiversity that ranks as the planet' sixth great extinction. The origin of today's global environmental problems is a historic difference in property rights regimes between industrial and developing countries, the North and the South. The solutions we suggest involve redefining property rights in the use of the global environment as well as in knowledge. We discuss the Kyoto Protocol's new systems of property rights on the use of the planet's atmosphere, and propose a parallel system of property rights on knowledge. Resources such as forests and oil and other mineral deposits are owned as private property in industrial countries but they are treated as common or government property in developing countries. Ill-defined protected property rights lead to the over-extraction of resources in the South, such as timber and oil. They are exported at low prices to the North that over-consumes them. The international market amplifies the tragedy of the commons, leading to inferior solutions for the world economy as a whole (Chichilnisky 1994). Updating property rights on resources in developing countries would face formidable opposition. The lack of property rights in inputs to production, such as timber and oil, could be compensated by assigning property rights on by-products of outputs. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol provides an example as it limits the countries' rights to emit carbon, a by-product of burning fossil fuels. Our suggestions for trading emissions rights (Chichilnisky 1995, 96) was adopted in the Kyoto Protocol, yet the atmosphere's carbon concentration is a global public good, which makes trading tricky. Trading rights to forests' carbon sequestration services or to genetic blueprints would also be trading global public goods. Markets that trade public goods have been shown to require a

Families of quantum fingerprinting protocols

Science.gov (United States)

Lovitz, Benjamin; Lütkenhaus, Norbert

2018-03-01

We introduce several families of quantum fingerprinting protocols to evaluate the equality function on two n -bit strings in the simultaneous message passing model. The original quantum fingerprinting protocol uses a tensor product of a small number of O (logn ) -qubit high-dimensional signals [H. Buhrman et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 167902 (2001), 10.1103/PhysRevLett.87.167902], whereas a recently proposed optical protocol uses a tensor product of O (n ) single-qubit signals, while maintaining the O (logn ) information leakage of the original protocol [J. M. Arazola and N. Lütkenhaus, Phys. Rev. A 89, 062305 (2014), 10.1103/PhysRevA.89.062305]. We find a family of protocols which interpolate between the original and optical protocols while maintaining the O (logn ) information leakage, thus demonstrating a tradeoff between the number of signals sent and the dimension of each signal. There has been interest in experimental realization of the recently proposed optical protocol using coherent states [F. Xu et al., Nat. Commun. 6, 8735 (2015), 10.1038/ncomms9735; J.-Y. Guan et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 240502 (2016), 10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.240502], but as the required number of laser pulses grows linearly with the input size n , eventual challenges for the long-time stability of experimental setups arise. We find a coherent state protocol which reduces the number of signals by a factor 1/2 while also reducing the information leakage. Our reduction makes use of a simple modulation scheme in optical phase space, and we find that more complex modulation schemes are not advantageous. Using a similar technique, we improve a recently proposed coherent state protocol for evaluating the Euclidean distance between two real unit vectors [N. Kumar et al., Phys. Rev. A 95, 032337 (2017), 10.1103/PhysRevA.95.032337] by reducing the number of signals by a factor 1/2 and also reducing the information leakage.

RadNet: Open network protocol for radiation data

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Rees, B.; Olson, K.; Beckes-Talcott, J.; Kadner, S.; Wenderlich, T.; Hoy, M.; Doyle, W.; Koskelo, M.

1998-01-01

Safeguards instrumentation is increasingly being incorporated into remote monitoring applications. In the past, vendors of radiation monitoring instruments typically provided the tools for uploading the monitoring data to a host. However, the proprietary nature of communication protocols lends itself to increased computer support needs and increased installation expenses. As a result, a working group of suppliers and customers of radiation monitoring instruments defined an open network protocol for transferring packets on a local area network from radiation monitoring equipment to network hosts. The protocol was termed RadNet. While it is now primarily used for health physics instruments, RadNet's flexibility and strength make it ideal for remote monitoring of nuclear materials. The incorporation of standard, open protocols ensures that future work will not render present work obsolete; because RadNet utilizes standard Internet protocols, and is itself a non-proprietary standard. The use of industry standards also simplifies the development and implementation of ancillary services, e.g. E-main generation or even pager systems

From the Private to the Public to the Private?

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Kjær, Poul F.

2018-01-01

A central assumption in much contemporary scholarship is that a central shift has taken place over the course of the last four decades: a shift from a world largely centered on public authority to a world that is increasingly dominated by private authority. The central expression of this shift...... is seen to be a concurring move from public to private law and thus from legislation to contract as the central legal instrument structuring economic as well as other social processes. While developments in this direction can certainly be observed, this article provides a more nuanced perspective....... Outlining a long-term historical perspective, this article reconstructs the manifold and volatile dynamic between institutionalized forms of public and private authority. It does soon the basis of the argument that, in the course of this evolutionary process, the very function and meaning of both public...

Information-theoretic security proof for quantum-key-distribution protocols

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Renner, Renato; Gisin, Nicolas; Kraus, Barbara

2005-01-01

We present a technique for proving the security of quantum-key-distribution (QKD) protocols. It is based on direct information-theoretic arguments and thus also applies if no equivalent entanglement purification scheme can be found. Using this technique, we investigate a general class of QKD protocols with one-way classical post-processing. We show that, in order to analyze the full security of these protocols, it suffices to consider collective attacks. Indeed, we give new lower and upper bounds on the secret-key rate which only involve entropies of two-qubit density operators and which are thus easy to compute. As an illustration of our results, we analyze the Bennett-Brassard 1984, the six-state, and the Bennett 1992 protocols with one-way error correction and privacy amplification. Surprisingly, the performance of these protocols is increased if one of the parties adds noise to the measurement data before the error correction. In particular, this additional noise makes the protocols more robust against noise in the quantum channel

Information-theoretic security proof for quantum-key-distribution protocols

Science.gov (United States)

Renner, Renato; Gisin, Nicolas; Kraus, Barbara

2005-07-01

We present a technique for proving the security of quantum-key-distribution (QKD) protocols. It is based on direct information-theoretic arguments and thus also applies if no equivalent entanglement purification scheme can be found. Using this technique, we investigate a general class of QKD protocols with one-way classical post-processing. We show that, in order to analyze the full security of these protocols, it suffices to consider collective attacks. Indeed, we give new lower and upper bounds on the secret-key rate which only involve entropies of two-qubit density operators and which are thus easy to compute. As an illustration of our results, we analyze the Bennett-Brassard 1984, the six-state, and the Bennett 1992 protocols with one-way error correction and privacy amplification. Surprisingly, the performance of these protocols is increased if one of the parties adds noise to the measurement data before the error correction. In particular, this additional noise makes the protocols more robust against noise in the quantum channel.

Serial private infrastructures

NARCIS (Netherlands)

van den Berg, V.A.C.

2013-01-01

This paper investigates private supply of two congestible infrastructures that are serial, where the consumer has to use both in order to consume. Four market structures are analysed: a monopoly and 3 duopolies that differ in how firms interact. It is well known that private supply leads too high

The private partners of public health: public-private alliances for public good.

Science.gov (United States)

McDonnell, Sharon; Bryant, Carol; Harris, Jeff; Campbell, Marci Kramish; Lobb, Ano; Hannon, Peggy A; Cross, Jeffrey L; Gray, Barbara

2009-04-01

We sought to convey lessons learned by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) Prevention Research Centers (PRCs) about the value and challenges of private-sector alliances resulting in innovative health promotion strategies. Several PRCs based in a variety of workplace and community settings contributed. We conducted interviews with principal investigators, a literature review, and a review of case studies of private-sector alliances in a microbusiness model, a macrobusiness model, and as multiparty partnerships supporting public health research, implementation, and human resource services. Private-sector alliances provide many advantages, particularly access to specialized skills generally beyond the expertise of public health entities. These skills include manufacturing, distribution, marketing, business planning, and development. Alliances also allow ready access to employee populations. Public health entities can offer private-sector partners funding opportunities through special grants, data gathering and analysis skills, and enhanced project credibility and trust. Challenges to successful partnerships include time and resource availability and negotiating the cultural divide between public health and the private sector. Critical to success are knowledge of organizational culture, values, mission, currency, and methods of operation; an understanding of and ability to articulate the benefits of the alliance for each partner; and the ability and time to respond to unexpected changes and opportunities. Private-public health alliances are challenging, and developing them takes time and resources, but aspects of these alliances can capitalize on partners' strengths, counteract weaknesses, and build collaborations that produce better outcomes than otherwise possible. Private partners may be necessary for program initiation or success. CDC guidelines and support materials may help nurture these alliances.

Policy changes that encourage private business investment in Colombia

OpenAIRE

Dailami, Mansoor

1989-01-01

Private business investment has expanded remarkably in Colombia's recent economic recovery. Sustained expansion of this investment is considered crucial to continued economic growth and increases in production. Having analyzed demand, the cost of capital, and the availability and allocation of investable funds, the paper makes the following conclusions. First, motivating firms to expand capacity is a key requirement for continued expansion. Secondly, frequent forecasting of such variables as ...

The Efficacy of Private Sector Providers in Improving Public Educational Outcomes

Science.gov (United States)

Heinrich, Carolyn J.; Nisar, Hiren

2013-01-01

School districts required under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to provide supplemental educational services (SES) to students in schools that are not making adequate yearly progress rely heavily on the private sector to offer choice in services. If the market does not drive out ineffective providers, students may not gain through SES participation.…

The Face of Private Tutoring in Russia: Evidence from Online Marketing by Private Tutors

Science.gov (United States)

Kozar, Olga

2013-01-01

Private tutoring is a common and worldwide phenomenon. However, there is a dearth of up-to-date research on private tutoring compared with that on institutional one-to-one teaching, which could be explained by challenges associated with data collection. This article proposes using publicly available online advertisements of private tutors as a…

From Social to Private Ownership

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Gregoric, Aleksandra; Masten, Arjana Brezigar; Zajc, Katarina

2011-01-01

of the multiple blockholder structures that these firms were assigned at privatization. We observe significant path dependence: patterns of ownership and control are in part determined by the persistence of the initial privatization owners (state funds, privatization investment funds, employees, and managers...

UNFINISHED BUSINESS: The Economics of The Kyoto Protocol

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

JA Edmonds; CN MacCracken; RD Sands; SH Kim

2000-07-06

The Kyoto Protocol to the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) was completed on the morning of December 11, 1997, following over two years of negotiations. The product of these deliberations is a complex and incomplete document knitting together the diversity of interests and perspectives represented by the more than 150 delegations. Because the document is complex, its implications are not immediately obvious. If it enters into force, the Kyoto Protocol will have far-reaching implications for all nations--both nations with obligations under the Protocol and those without obligations. National energy systems, and the world's energy system, could be forever changed. In this paper the authors develop an assessment of the energy and economic implications of achieving the goals of the Kyoto Protocol. They find that many of the details of the Protocol that remain to be worked out introduce critical uncertainties affecting the cost of compliance. There are also a variety of uncertainties that further complicate the analysis. These include future non-CO{sub 2} greenhouse gas emissions and the cost of their mitigation. Other uncertainties include the resolution of negotiations to establish rules for determining and allocating land-use emissions rights, mechanisms for Annex 1 trading, and participation by non-Annex 1 members in the Clean Development Mechanism. In addition, there are economic uncertainties, such as the behavior of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in supplying emissions credits under Annex 1 trading. These uncertainties in turn could affect private sector investments in anticipation of the Protocol's entrance into force. The longer the nature of future obligations remains unclear, the less able decision makers will be to incorporate these rules into their investment decisions. They find that the cost of implementing the Protocol in the US can vary by more than an order of magnitude. The marginal cost could be as low as $26 per

Communication protocol in chassis detecting wireless transmission system based on WiFi

Science.gov (United States)

In chassis detecting wireless transmission system, the wireless network communication protocol plays a key role in the information exchange and synchronization between the host and chassis PDA. This paper presents a wireless network transmission protocol based on TCP/IP which makes the rules of info...

Public and Private Institutions: Educating Civil Society about European Security Concerns

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rafael Bardají

1997-12-01

Full Text Available As an specialist in strategic studies and political adviser, the author developes three basic ideas in his speech: 1 the objective necessity of strategic thinking to increase defense awareness, with the goal of ameliorating the relations between civil society and the Armed Forces, and to create a strategic culture to help to make more permeable the Administration decision-making process; 2 public and private institutions have to understand each other, despite the fact that tradition and time pressures do negatively weigh on Administration decision-making; 3 both parts –Administration and specialists in security– have to make the effort of becoming more flexible, on the one hand, and more capable of producing relevant studies in political terms, on the other.

Factors Influencing the Private Involvement in Urban Rail Public-Private Partnership Projects in China

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yongjian Ke

2017-03-01

Full Text Available Private investors have been encouraged to participate in the development and operation of urban rail projects in China through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs, given the fact that subnational governments are suffering from urgent development demands and severe fiscal pressure. However, there is no formal assessment to determine the private involvement in a PPP project. This problem is particularly critical in the sector of urban rail, in which the huge investment cannot rely on the private sector alone. This study hence aimed to uncover and identify the influencing factors. Multiple research methods, including content analysis, case study and focus group discussion were adopted to achieve the research purpose. Seven types of influencing factors were identified, including project financial model, government fiscal commitment, risk allocation, public accountability, efficiency considerations, policy and regulations, and organisational marketing strategies. The findings add to the current knowledge base by uncovering the drivers behind private involvement in a PPP project. They are also beneficial for industry practitioners as a basis/checklist to determine the private involvement.

Does Society Win or Lose as a Result of Privatization? The Case of Water Sector Privatization in Colombia

OpenAIRE

Mauricio Olivera; Felipe Barrera

2007-01-01

This paper studies the effects of water sector privatization on consumers’ welfare in 46 municipalities in Colombia. First, the privatization process is described. Second, the paper evaluates the impact of privatization on access, price, and quality of water as well as health outcomes using differences-in-differences methodology with variation across time (before and after privatization) and between treatment and control groups (privatized and non-privatized municipalities) and controlling fo...

Decision making process: a comparison between the public and private sector

OpenAIRE

Igreja, Arthur Schuler da

2014-01-01

The problem of decision making, its mechanisms and consequences is the very core of management, it is virtually impossible to separate the act of manage from this knowledge area. As defined by Herbert Simon – "decision making" as though it were synonymous with "managing". A decision is a selection made by an individual regarding a choice of a conclusion about a situation. This represents a course of behavior pertaining to what must be done or what must not be done. A decision is the point at ...

Utilization and expenditure at public and private facilities in 39 low-income countries.

Science.gov (United States)

Saksena, Priyanka; Xu, Ke; Elovainio, Riku; Perrot, Jean

2012-01-01

To document the patterns of health service utilization and health payments at public and private facilities across countries. We used data from the World Health Surveys from 39 low- and low-middle income countries to examine differences between public and private sectors. Utilization of outpatient and inpatient services, out-of-pocket payments (OOP) at public and private facilities, and transportation costs were compared. Utilization and payments to public and private sectors differ widely. Public facilities dominated in most countries for both outpatient and inpatient services. But, whereas use of private facilities is more common among the rich, poor people also use them, to a considerable extent and in almost all the countries in the study. The majority of OOP were incurred at public providers for inpatient services. On average, this was not the case for outpatient services. Medicines accounted for the largest share of OOP for all services except inpatient services at private facilities, where consultation fees did. Transportation costs were considerable. Price competition is certainly not the only factor that guides choice of provider. The results support continued efforts by the governments to engage strategically with the private sector. However, they also highlight the importance of not generalizing conditions across countries. Governments may need to reconsider simplistic user-fee abolition strategies at public providers if they simply focus on consultation fees. Policies to make health services more accessible need to consider a comprehensive benefit package that includes a wider scope of costs related to care such as expenditures on medicines and transportation. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Privatization and the globalization of energy markets

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

NONE

1996-10-01

This report reviews recent global efforts to privatize energy resources and outlines the opportunities and challenges privatization has presented to U.S. and foreign multinational energy companies. The group of energy companies studied in this report includes the major U.S. petroleum companies and many foreign companies. The foreign companies reviewed include state-run energy enterprises, recently privatized energy enterprises, and foreign multinationals that have been privately held. The privatization of non-petroleum energy industries, such as electricity generation and transmission, natural gas transmission, and coal mining, are also discussed. Overseas investments made by electric companies, natural gas companies, and coal companies are included. The report is organized into six chapters: (1) economics of privatization; (2) petroleum privatization efforts among non-U.S. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations; (3) petroleum privatization efforts in Latin America; (4) privatization in socialist and former socialist regimes; (5) privatization efforts in global electric power generation, transmission, and distribution industries; and (6) privatization and globalization of world coal.

Private Sector in Indian Healthcare Delivery: Consumer Perspective and Government Policies to promote private Sector

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Utkarsh Shah, Ragini Mohanty

2011-01-01

Full Text Available This research paper attempts to collate literature from various sources, in an attempt to answer three pertinent questions related to healthcare in India. Firstly, what is it meant by ‘private sector’ in healthcare delivery system of India, secondly how has the private sector evolved over the decades and what has been the role of the government in propelling the growth. Finally, the paper tries to highlight some of the factors that have promoted the growth of private sector in India with specific reference to quality of medical care. The paper explicitly indicates that the deficiencies in the public health delivery system of India, was the key to growth of private infrastructure in healthcare.The shift of hospital industry for ‘welfare orientation’ to ‘business orientation’ was marked by the advent of corporate hospitals, supported by various policy level initiatives made by the government. Today, there are over 20 international healthcare brands in India with several corporate hospitals.However, a large section of the ‘private healthcare delivery segment’ is scattered and quality of medical care continues to remain a matter of concern. This paper tracks the various government initiatives to promote private investment in healthcare and attempts to explore the reasons for preference of the private sector. Surprisingly, in contrast to contemporary belief, quality of medical care doesn’t seem to be the leading cause for preference of the private sector. Except for a few select corporate and trust hospitals, quality of medical care in private sector seems to be poor and at times compromised.

Bayesian adaptive survey protocols for resource management

Science.gov (United States)

Halstead, Brian J.; Wylie, Glenn D.; Coates, Peter S.; Casazza, Michael L.

2011-01-01

Transparency in resource management decisions requires a proper accounting of uncertainty at multiple stages of the decision-making process. As information becomes available, periodic review and updating of resource management protocols reduces uncertainty and improves management decisions. One of the most basic steps to mitigating anthropogenic effects on populations is determining if a population of a species occurs in an area that will be affected by human activity. Species are rarely detected with certainty, however, and falsely declaring a species absent can cause improper conservation decisions or even extirpation of populations. We propose a method to design survey protocols for imperfectly detected species that accounts for multiple sources of uncertainty in the detection process, is capable of quantitatively incorporating expert opinion into the decision-making process, allows periodic updates to the protocol, and permits resource managers to weigh the severity of consequences if the species is falsely declared absent. We developed our method using the giant gartersnake (Thamnophis gigas), a threatened species precinctive to the Central Valley of California, as a case study. Survey date was negatively related to the probability of detecting the giant gartersnake, and water temperature was positively related to the probability of detecting the giant gartersnake at a sampled location. Reporting sampling effort, timing and duration of surveys, and water temperatures would allow resource managers to evaluate the probability that the giant gartersnake occurs at sampled sites where it is not detected. This information would also allow periodic updates and quantitative evaluation of changes to the giant gartersnake survey protocol. Because it naturally allows multiple sources of information and is predicated upon the idea of updating information, Bayesian analysis is well-suited to solving the problem of developing efficient sampling protocols for species of

Managing Debt and Capital Investments: A Toolbox for Private Colleges and Universities

Science.gov (United States)

Townsley, Michael K.

2008-01-01

All private colleges and universities make strategic capital investments and consider the use of debt to fund those investments. From the commonplace purchase of photocopiers to the construction of new academic buildings or dormitories, investment decisions that yield long-term financial benefits must follow on the heels of careful analysis. To…

IMPLEMENTATION RASPBERRY PI USING PRIVATE CLOUD FOR ACCESSING PERSONAL DATA

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sitti Aisa

2016-12-01

Full Text Available The continued development and widespread use of current technology so that accessing and managing data from a personal computer to make private users become inflexible due to the personal computer requires a power source directly and storage areas are static, therefore, the author plans to implement a service private cloud that uses raspberry pi as a server and will be tested by the test Blackbox. Our research by collecting data that we did put a literature study, experiments, and observations. The design method using UML use case diagrams, class diagrams, activity diagrams and sequence diagrams. This application is built using Django, Python, Raspberry Pi, MySQL. Hopefully the benefit of this implementation can help a person in terms of managing data from a wide variety of resources (resource quickly and anywhere.

Schizophrenia research participants' responses to protocol safeguards: recruitment, consent, and debriefing.

Science.gov (United States)

Roberts, Laura Weiss; Warner, Teddy D; Anderson, Charles T; Smithpeter, Megan V; Rogers, Melinda K

2004-04-01

To examine the perspectives and preferences regarding ethically important aspects of recruitment, consent, and debriefing of people with schizophrenia who volunteered for research protocols. A structured interview to assess research-related views of people with schizophrenia was developed and piloted. Data collection occurred at three sites. For this analysis, we examined the subset of responses from schizophrenia patients currently enrolled in a protocol. Data from 28 schizophrenia research volunteers were analyzed. Of these, 22 were men and 11 were voluntary inpatients. Most (n=23) recalled speaking with someone before enrolling in the protocol, and most (n=26) reported trusting the person who told them about it. Participants reported a moderate understanding of their protocols. All but one person (n=27) remembered signing a consent form. Twenty-one volunteers indicated that consent forms are meant to help both the patient and the researcher. Most (n=23) reported making the enrollment decision alone, with 22 making this decision prior to reviewing the consent form. The decision was described as relatively easy. Respondents felt some pressure to enroll, with women experiencing more pressure. Debriefing practices were strongly endorsed by participants. All 28 of the volunteers wished to be informed if a health problem (i.e., "something wrong") was discovered during the protocol. The persons living with schizophrenia who were interviewed for this project expressed interesting perspectives and preferences regarding ethically important aspects of recruitment, consent, and debriefing in clinical research that may help guide efforts to make research processes more attuned to participants and merit further inquiry.

Engaging the private sector in malaria surveillance: a review of strategies and recommendations for elimination settings.

Science.gov (United States)

Bennett, Adam; Avanceña, Anton L V; Wegbreit, Jennifer; Cotter, Chris; Roberts, Kathryn; Gosling, Roly

2017-06-14

In malaria elimination settings, all malaria cases must be identified, documented and investigated. To facilitate complete and timely reporting of all malaria cases and effective case management and follow-up, engagement with private providers is essential, particularly in settings where the private sector is a major source of healthcare. However, research on the role and performance of the private sector in malaria diagnosis, case management and reporting in malaria elimination settings is limited. Moreover, the most effective strategies for private sector engagement in malaria elimination settings remain unclear. Twenty-five experts in malaria elimination, disease surveillance and private sector engagement were purposively sampled and interviewed. An extensive review of grey and peer-reviewed literature on private sector testing, treatment, and reporting for malaria was performed. Additional in-depth literature review was conducted for six case studies on eliminating and neighbouring countries in Southeast Asia and Southern Africa. The private health sector can be categorized based on their commercial orientation or business model (for-profit versus nonprofit) and their regulation status within a country (formal vs informal). A number of potentially effective strategies exist for engaging the private sector. Conducting a baseline assessment of the private sector is critical to understanding its composition, size, geographical distribution and quality of services provided. Facilitating reporting, referral and training linkages between the public and private sectors and making malaria a notifiable disease are important strategies to improve private sector involvement in malaria surveillance. Financial incentives for uptake of rapid diagnostic tests and artemisinin-based combination therapy should be combined with training and community awareness campaigns for improving uptake. Private sector providers can also be organized and better engaged through social

Controlled Delegation Protocol in Mobile RFID Networks

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yang MingHour

2010-01-01

Full Text Available To achieve off-line delegation for mobile readers, we propose a delegation protocol for mobile RFID allowing its readers access to specific tags through back-end server. That is to say, reader-tag mutual authentication can be performed without readers being connected to back-end server. Readers are also allowed off-line access to tags' data. Compared with other delegation protocols, our scheme uniquely enables back-end server to limit each reader's reading times during delegation. Even in a multireader situation, our protocol can limit reading times and reading time periods for each of them and therefore makes back-end server's delegation more flexible. Besides, our protocol can prevent authorized readers from transferring their authority to the unauthorized, declining invalid access to tags. Our scheme is proved viable and secure with GNY logic; it is against certain security threats, such as replay attacks, denial of service (DoS attacks, Man-in-the-Middle attacks, counterfeit tags, and breaches of location and data privacy. Also, the performance analysis of our protocol proves that current tags can afford the computation load required in this scheme.

Responsibility for private sector adaptation to climate change

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Tina Schneider

2014-06-01

Full Text Available The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007 indicates that vulnerable industries should adapt to the increasing likelihood of extreme weather events along with slowly shifting mean annual temperatures and precipitation patterns, to prevent major damages or periods of inoperability in the future. Most articles in the literature on business management frame organizational adaptation to climate change as a private action. This makes adaptation the sole responsibility of a company, for its sole benefit, and overlooks the fact that some companies provide critical goods and services such a food, water, electricity, and medical care, that are so vital to society that even a short-term setback in operations could put public security at risk. This raises the following questions: (1 Who is responsible for climate change adaptation by private-sector suppliers of critical infrastructure? (2 How can those who are identified to be responsible, actually be held to assume their responsibility for adapting to climate change? These questions will be addressed through a comprehensive review of the literature on business management, complemented by a review of specialized literature on public management. This review leads to several conclusions. Even though tasks that formerly belonged to the state have been taken over by private companies, the state still holds ultimate responsibility in the event of failure of private-sector owned utilities, insofar as they are "critical infrastructure." Therefore, it remains the state's responsibility to foster adaptation to climate change with appropriate action. In theory, effective ways of assuming this responsibility, while enabling critical infrastructure providers the flexibility adapt to climate change, would be to delegate adaptation to an agency, or to conduct negotiations with stakeholders. In view of this theory, Germany will be used as a case study to demonstrate how private-sector critical infrastructure

More Eyes, (No Guns,) Less Crime: Estimating the Effects of Unarmed Private Patrols on Crime Using a Bayesian Structural Time-Series Model

NARCIS (Netherlands)

P.P. Liu (Paul); M. Fabbri (Marco)

2016-01-01

textabstractThis work studies the effect of unarmed private security patrols on crime. We make use of a initiative, triggered by an arguably exogenous events, consisting in hiring unarmed private security agents to patrol, observe and report to ordinary police criminal activities within a

Motivations for recreating on farmlands, private forests, and state or national parks.

Science.gov (United States)

Sotomayor, Sandra; Barbieri, Carla; Wilhelm Stanis, Sonja; Aguilar, Francisco X; Smith, Jordan W

2014-07-01

This study explores the importance of different motivations to visit three types of recreational settings--farms, private forests, and state or national parks. Data were collected via a mail-back questionnaire administered to a stratified random sample of households in Missouri (USA). Descriptive and inferential statistics reveal both similarities and discontinuities in motivations for visiting farms, private forests, and state or national parks for recreation. Being with family, viewing natural scenery, and enjoying the smells and sounds of nature were all highly important motivations for visiting the three types of settings. However, all 15 motivations examined were perceived to be significantly more important for visits to state or national parks than to farms or private forests. Findings suggest that individuals are more strongly motivated to recreate at state and national parks relative to farmlands or forests. Post hoc paired t tests comparing motivations between both agricultural settings (farms and private forests) revealed significant differences in eight different recreational motivations. Individuals tended to place more importance on the ability to use equipment and test their skills when considering recreating on private forests. Conversely, social motivations (e.g., doing something with the family) were more important when individuals were considering recreating on farmland. Collectively, the findings suggest individuals expect distinctly different outcomes from their visits to farmlands, private forests, or state or national parks. Consequently, all three types of recreational settings have competitive advantages that their managers could capitalize on when making decisions about how to attract new visitors or produce the most desirable experiences for current recreationists.

The Willingness of Non-Industrial Private Forest Owners to Enter California's Carbon Offset Market.

Science.gov (United States)

Kelly, Erin Clover; Gold, Gregg J; Di Tommaso, Joanna

2017-11-01

While non-industrial private forest landowners have a significant amount of forest landholdings in the US, they are underrepresented in the California cap-and-trade market forest offset program. Additional participation could benefit both the market and non-industrial private forest landowners. We developed a mail questionnaire which served as both a survey instrument and outreach tool about the market. Questions covered forest ownership objectives, landowners' future plans for forests, views of climate change, and attitudes and intentions regarding forest carbon offset project development. We sampled from five Northern California counties for a total of 143 usable surveys. Three different groups of landowners were identified based on their management objectives: amenity (including protecting nature and recreation); legacy (passing land to children and/or maintaining a farm or ranch); and income. Landowner objective groups differed on several key variables, particularly related to potential motivations for joining the market, while all landowners expressed concerns about protocol requirements. Regardless of ownership objectives, over half expressed that receiving revenue from their forests would be an important motivator to join, though most were unwilling to satisfy protocol requirements, even after learning of the potential benefits of program participation. Thus, participation appears to be limited by the costly and complex project development process, as well as a lack of landowner awareness. Extending these lessons, we assert that different landowners may approach payment for ecosystem services programs with different needs, awareness, and motivations, which provide important lessons for those who conduct landowner outreach and for PES program designers.

The Willingness of Non-Industrial Private Forest Owners to Enter California's Carbon Offset Market

Science.gov (United States)

Kelly, Erin Clover; Gold, Gregg J.; Di Tommaso, Joanna

2017-11-01

While non-industrial private forest landowners have a significant amount of forest landholdings in the US, they are underrepresented in the California cap-and-trade market forest offset program. Additional participation could benefit both the market and non-industrial private forest landowners. We developed a mail questionnaire which served as both a survey instrument and outreach tool about the market. Questions covered forest ownership objectives, landowners' future plans for forests, views of climate change, and attitudes and intentions regarding forest carbon offset project development. We sampled from five Northern California counties for a total of 143 usable surveys. Three different groups of landowners were identified based on their management objectives: amenity (including protecting nature and recreation); legacy (passing land to children and/or maintaining a farm or ranch); and income. Landowner objective groups differed on several key variables, particularly related to potential motivations for joining the market, while all landowners expressed concerns about protocol requirements. Regardless of ownership objectives, over half expressed that receiving revenue from their forests would be an important motivator to join, though most were unwilling to satisfy protocol requirements, even after learning of the potential benefits of program participation. Thus, participation appears to be limited by the costly and complex project development process, as well as a lack of landowner awareness. Extending these lessons, we assert that different landowners may approach payment for ecosystem services programs with different needs, awareness, and motivations, which provide important lessons for those who conduct landowner outreach and for PES program designers.

A multi-protocol framework for ad-hoc service discovery

OpenAIRE

Flores-Cortes, C.; Blair, Gordon S.; Grace, P.

2006-01-01

Discovering the appropriate services in ad-hoc computing environments where a great number of devices and software components collaborate discreetly and provide numerous services is an important challenge. Service discovery protocols make it possible for participating nodes in a network to locate and advertise services with minimum user intervention. However, because it is not possible to predict at design time which protocols will be used to advertise services in a given context/environment,...

State Government, Its Relationship to Private Schools.

Science.gov (United States)

Cronin, Joseph M.; Kenyon, Regan

1982-01-01

In examining the state's role in private education, this article discusses court cases bearing on state services to private schools, state regulation of different types of private schools, collaborative efforts between public and private schools, and emerging state attitudes toward private education. (Author/WD)

Data transmission protocol for Pi-of-the-Sky cameras

Science.gov (United States)

Uzycki, J.; Kasprowicz, G.; Mankiewicz, M.; Nawrocki, K.; Sitek, P.; Sokolowski, M.; Sulej, R.; Tlaczala, W.

2006-10-01

The large amount of data collected by the automatic astronomical cameras has to be transferred to the fast computers in a reliable way. The method chosen should ensure data streaming in both directions but in nonsymmetrical way. The Ethernet interface is very good choice because of its popularity and proven performance. However it requires TCP/IP stack implementation in devices like cameras for full compliance with existing network and operating systems. This paper describes NUDP protocol, which was made as supplement to standard UDP protocol and can be used as a simple-network protocol. The NUDP does not need TCP protocol implementation and makes it possible to run the Ethernet network with simple devices based on microcontroller and/or FPGA chips. The data transmission idea was created especially for the "Pi of the Sky" project.

Globalizing animal care and use: making the dream a reality

Science.gov (United States)

Bielitzki, J. T.

1999-01-01

What will drive the globalization of animal care in the 21st century? Will targeted concerns from privately funded groups be the motivating factors? Will the threat of disease, and the concomitant hue and cry from a threatened public, be responsible for bringing nations together to collaborate on rules and regulations? The author, who is responsible for the animal use protocols on NASA's space station, explains why globalization on Planet Earth may be guided by what happens in outer space.

The compatibility of flexible instruments under the Kyoto Protocol

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Jepma, C.J.; Van der Gaast, W.P.; Woerdman, E.

1998-01-01

The compatibility of the Kyoto Protocol flexible instruments and the lessons that can be learned form the AIJ-phase (AIJ stands for Activities Implemented Jointly) are discussed. The key point to be made is that there may be various applications of flexible instruments which can create situations where the various instruments would crowd out each other. On the other hand, applying flexible instruments may create a leverage for Parties in terms of achieving domestic environmental objectives. In addition, several issues related to the implementation of Joint Implementation (JI) , Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and international emissions trading are discussed. The issues concern mainly those that have been included in the working programme on flexible instruments for CoP4 and CoP5 (CoP stands for Convention of Parties). As such the report discusses the consequences of possible negotiations outcomes at CoP for the effectiveness of flexible instruments, Parties' capabilities to achieve their Kyoto Protocol commitments cost-effectively, and the role of the private sector on the national and international credits markets(s). 106 refs

Ensuring living condition for ageing population by public–private partnership (PPP

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Konjar Miha

2018-01-01

Full Text Available Lack of financial resources has become one of the main issues in fulfilling social and physical needs in urban development. The declining levels of public resources make the collaboration between public and private investors necessary. When facing the challenges of ageing population, shared investment may contribute to the appropriate development of sheltered housing to meet the goals of spatial planning as well as certain standards at the level of urban design. By ensuring appropriate living conditions for all generations such urban PPP projects may contribute to the fulfilment of the public interest. The paper presents practice of PPP implementation in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where local authority with the collaboration of private partners ensured more than 400 sheltered apartments in the last years. Examples show the extension of the idea from the 70s onwards in finding new models of housing for the aging population. The development of new models can be a good example of strengthening the cooperation between public and private partners in the field of urban development practice.

Ensuring living condition for ageing population by public-private partnership (PPP)

Science.gov (United States)

Konjar, Miha; Nikšič, Matej; Grom, Janez Peter; Mujkić, Sabina; Fikfak, Alenka

2018-03-01

Lack of financial resources has become one of the main issues in fulfilling social and physical needs in urban development. The declining levels of public resources make the collaboration between public and private investors necessary. When facing the challenges of ageing population, shared investment may contribute to the appropriate development of sheltered housing to meet the goals of spatial planning as well as certain standards at the level of urban design. By ensuring appropriate living conditions for all generations such urban PPP projects may contribute to the fulfilment of the public interest. The paper presents practice of PPP implementation in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where local authority with the collaboration of private partners ensured more than 400 sheltered apartments in the last years. Examples show the extension of the idea from the 70s onwards in finding new models of housing for the aging population. The development of new models can be a good example of strengthening the cooperation between public and private partners in the field of urban development practice.

34 CFR 200.10 - Applicability of a State's academic assessments to private schools and private school students.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... assessments to private schools and private school students. (a) Nothing in § 200.1 or § 200.2 requires a... 34 Education 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Applicability of a State's academic assessments to private schools and private school students. 200.10 Section 200.10 Education Regulations of the Offices of...

Effects of Reading Skills on Students’ Performance in Science and Mathematics in Public and Private Secondary Schools

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ombra A. Imam

2016-05-01

Full Text Available In the Philippine education system, reading, mathematics, and science formed part of the core areas of basic education curriculum. For the last decade, the quality of Philippine education was put into a big question due to poor performance of students in mathematics and science tests both local and abroad. The initial result of current efforts of the government by adopting K-12 curriculum didn’t do much to change the status quo. The purpose of this study is to determine the reading predictors of students’ performance in Mathematics and Science and identify its effects to such performance. A total of 660 freshmen students from public and private high schools in Cotabato City, Philippines were taken as sample. A validated and reliable 150-item test in reading comprehension skills, mathematics and science was used to get primary data to perform correlation and regression analysis. Findings showed that only making inference and getting main idea were predictors of mathematics performance of students in public school and private schools, respectively.  Data analysis also revealed that two reading skills such as noting details and making inference had an influence on science performance of students in public school while skills in getting main idea and drawing conclusion influenced science performance of students in private schools.  However, there was only one skill such as vocabulary in context which was predictor of overall science performance of all students. Moreover, separate effects of making inference, identifying main idea explained only 1.8 percent and 1.3 percent of students’ math performance while their combined effects provided only .1 percent or nearly zero percent. Furthermore, the study found out that separate effects of noting details contributed 3.3 percent and its combined effects with making inference explained 4.2 percent of science performance of students in public schools. In terms of effects of reading to science

Research of private label development in Croatia

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sandra Horvat

2009-07-01

Full Text Available Private labels have been present on the market since 19th century but their intensive market growth began in the last thirty years after retailers realized what their potential could be in the fight against ever-growing competition. Their market growth has not been distributed equally thought the world so Europe became the region with the highest private label market share, which exceeds 40% on some markets. Although the private label market share in Croatia is considerably smaller, it has also increased steadily over the last decade since private labels were introduced on the market. This paper presents the findings of a research conducted for the purpose of identifying trends in private label development on the Croatian market. The research was conducted through in-depth interviews with private label managers in retail companies in Croatia, and with the managers responsible for private label production in manufacturing companies. The research identified three expected trends of private label development in Croatia and these are: an increase in private label quality, the maintenance of a price gap between private labels and manufacturers’ brands and a further increase in the private label market share.

Supporting Adaptation of Wireless Communication Protocols

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Dhomeja, L.D.; Soomro, I.A.; Malkani, Y.A.

2016-01-01

Pervasive devices such as mobile phones and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) come with different wireless communication capabilities, for example, WiFi (Wireless Fidelity), Bluetooth, IrDA (Infrared), etc. In order for pervasive devices to interact with each other, they need to have matching (alike) communication capabilities, otherwise such heterogeneous devices would not be able to interact with each other. In this paper we address this issue and propose a system that makes devices with heterogeneous wireless communication capabilities communicate with each other. The proposed system supports adaptation of wireless communication protocols through a proxy, which sits between a client and a server, and supports adaptation of wireless communication protocols. Its functionality involves intercepting a request made by a client with a different wireless communication capability (e.g. Bluetooth) from what the server has (e.g. WiFi), connecting to the server and then sending results back to the client. We have tested the system by implementing a messaging service application and running it on the system. The proxy supports all Bluetooth protocols, i.e. OBEX (Object Exchange), L2CAP (Logical Link Control and Adaptation Protocol), RFCOM (Radio Frequency Communication) and WiFi protocol and can run on (J2MW (Java 2 Micro Edition) enabled mobile phones which support both Bluetooth and WiFi capabilities. (author)

Two Cheers for the Trafficking Protocol

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Anne T Gallagher

2015-04-01

Full Text Available The Trafficking Protocol makes an easy target for attack. Its origins lie in an attempt to control a particularly exploitative form of migration that was challenging the ability of States to control their own borders. Its parent instrument is a framework agreement to address transnational organised crime. While paying fleeting attention to the rights of victims, the Protocol, with its emphasis on criminalisation and border protection is nowhere near being a human rights treaty. On top of all that it does not even have a credible enforcement mechanism, allowing states parties wide latitude in interpreting and applying their obligations. Strangely, these seemingly insurmountable flaws have not stopped the Protocol’s emergence as perhaps the single most important development in the fight against human trafficking. Without the Protocol, arguments around definitions would have continued to block the evolution of principles and rules. Without the Protocol it is likely that the human rights system would have continued its shameful tradition of sidelining issues such as forced labour, forced sex, forced marriage and the ritual exploitation of migrant workers through debt. Most critically, the Protocol provided the impetus and template for a series of legal and political developments that, over time, have served to ameliorate some of its greatest weaknesses, including the lack of human rights protections and of a credible oversight mechanism.

A Review of 'Law's Impunity: Responsibility and the Modern Private Military Company'

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Marcos Alan S. V. Ferreira

2016-02-01

Full Text Available The mercenaries and mercenarism are two points of concern for scholars studying the rules of war throughout history. Both in jus ad bellum (JAB and jus in bellum (JIB we can find a framework of international law crafted to impede the participation of individuals motivated to take part in hostilities to get private gain. Nevertheless, paradoxically, the problem is when corporations are supported by domestic law to perform serviced in ground combats abroad. In the latter case, Human Rights Law (HRL, International Humanitarian Law (IHL and International Criminal Law (ICL present numerous gaps that make it difficult to incriminate corporations, which perpetuate the impunity among private organizations involved in human rights violations in conflict zones.

Skill and Luck in Private Equity Performance

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Korteweg, Arthur; Sørensen, Morten

2017-01-01

Private equity (PE) performance is persistent, with PE firms consistently producing high (or low) net-of-fees returns. We use a new variance decomposition model to isolate three components of persistence. We find high long-term persistence: the spread in expected net-of-fee future returns between...... top and bottom quartile PE firms is 7–8 percentage points annually. This spread is estimated controlling for spurious persistence, which arises mechanically from the overlap of contemporaneous funds. Performance is noisy, however, making it difficult for investors to identify the PE funds with top...... quartile expected future performance and leaving little investable persistence....

More Haste, Less Speed: Could Public-Private Partnerships Advance Cellular Immunotherapies?

Science.gov (United States)

Bubela, Tania; Bonter, Katherine; Lachance, Silvy; Delisle, Jean-Sébastien; Gold, E Richard

2017-01-01

Cellular immunotherapies promise to transform cancer care. However, they must overcome serious challenges, including: (1) the need to identify and characterize novel cancer antigens to expand the range of therapeutic targets; (2) the need to develop strategies to minimize serious adverse events, such as cytokine release syndrome and treatment-related toxicities; and (3) the need to develop efficient production/manufacturing processes to reduce costs. Here, we discuss whether these challenges might better be addressed through forms of public-private research collaborations, including public-private partnerships (PPPs), or whether these challenges are best addressed by way of standard market transactions. We reviewed 14 public-private relationships and 25 underlying agreements for the clinical development of cancer cellular immunotherapies in the US. Most were based on bilateral research agreements and pure market transactions in the form of service contracts and technology licenses, which is representative of the commercialization focus of the field. We make the strategic case that multiparty PPPs may better advance cancer antigen discovery and characterization and improved cell processing/manufacturing and related activities. In the rush toward the competitive end of the translational continuum for cancer cellular immunotherapy and the attendant focus on commercialization, many gaps have appeared in our understanding of cellular biology, immunology, and bioengineering. We conclude that the model of bilateral agreements between leading research institutions and the private sector may be inadequate to efficiently harness the interdisciplinary skills and knowledge of the public and private sectors to bring these promising therapies to the clinic for the benefit of cancer patients.

Public Sector Unions and Privatization

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Foged, Søren Kjær; Aaskoven, Lasse

2016-01-01

Privatization varies considerably among local governments. One of the oft-listed explanations is the ability of public employees to block privatization. However, many studies on the influence of public employees on privatization do not use very precise measures of the influence of public employees...... Danish municipalities in 2012, we are able to measure the strength of the public eldercare union as well as the number of the public eldercare workers relative to the number of local voters. We find that the increased union strength measured in terms of union density at the municipal level leads...... to substantially and significantly less privatization through the voucher market. By comparison, the estimated relationship between the relative number of public workers and privatization does not reach statistical significance. Features of the voucher market and qualitative evidence suggest that the union...

Student Perceptions of Textbook Layout and Learnability in Private Schools

OpenAIRE

Alefiyah Hoshangabadwala

2015-01-01

This research is an exploratory study that investigates students’ perceptions pertinent to textbook layout and organization and their evaluation of the textbook ease of learning. The objective is to find out whether the layout dynamics of school textbooks make any difference in students’ interest in studying or subject understanding. 73 students from various private schools of Pakistan’s cosmopolitan city Karachi responded to a quantitative survey that gauged their percep...

Private pensions for Europe

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Bovenberg, L.; van Ewijk, C.

2011-01-01

Private pensions can enhance international and intergenerational risk-sharing and create a deeper European capital market, which allows for better diversification of country-specific risks and facilitates economic growth. Private funding of pensions creates a more integrated European capital market

Privacy-Enhancing Security Protocol in LTE Initial Attack

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Uijin Jang

2014-12-01

Full Text Available Long-Term Evolution (LTE is a fourth-generation mobile communication technology implemented throughout the world. It is the communication means of smartphones that send and receive all of the private date of individuals. M2M, IOT, etc., are the base technologies of mobile communication that will be used in the future cyber world. However, identification parameters, such as International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI, Radio Network Temporary Identities (RNTI, etc., in the initial attach section for accessing the LTE network are presented with the vulnerability of being exposed as clear text. Such vulnerability does not end in a mere identification parameter, but can lead to a secondary attack using the identification parameter, such as replication of the smartphone, illegal use of the mobile communication network, etc. This paper proposes a security protocol to safely transmit identification parameters in different cases of the initial attach. The proposed security protocol solves the exposed vulnerability by encrypting the parameters in transmission. Using an OPNET simulator, it is shown that the average rate of delay and processing ratio are efficient in comparison to the existing process.

Digital direction device model to reduce private reading difference in analog survey meter

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kwon, Oh Il; Song, Goan Suk; Jang, Dong Chul

2005-01-01

Because dosimeter used in radiation measurement is shown different response for same dose rate according to kind and energy of measurement sample radiation, must know kind and energy of radiation of each device to get exact measurement. Therefore in using of detector at work, it's very important to make an estimate of the reaction according to radiation. This is adequate by the correction. But as important thing of authoritativeness about d that is used dosimeter and gets may be impact by measurer private interpretation difference as proof reading. The reliability to the results according to the detector associated with the correction and the private reading difference

Privatization: The Use of Risk, Economic and Finance Models to Ensure Its Success

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Jaksch, John A.; Weimar, Mark R.; Young, Joan K.; Taylor, William J.; Furlong, Peter T.; Feldman, Roger D.; Diprinzio, Ray

2001-01-01

The article describes the use of risk, economic and financial models as they were used to help DOE in their decision-making processes on TWRS Privatization. The article describes how the models were used to allocate risk between the contractor and DOE, evaluate whether DOE should accept certain risk allocations, how the economic and financial models were used to evaluate whether the government was receiving the best bid price and whether any money was being saved by using privatization, and evaluated alternative financing schemes. The paper also describes how the financial model was used to evaluate and negotiate the pricing structure which became a part of the contract.

Private sector in public health care systems

OpenAIRE

Matějusová, Lenka

2008-01-01

This master thesis is trying to describe the situation of private sector in public health care systems. As a private sector we understand patients, private health insurance companies and private health care providers. The focus is placed on private health care providers, especially in ambulatory treatment. At first there is a definition of health as a main determinant of a health care systems, definition of public and private sectors in health care systems and the difficulties at the market o...

A Secure Three-Factor User Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for TMIS With User Anonymity.

Science.gov (United States)

Amin, Ruhul; Biswas, G P

2015-08-01

Telecare medical information system (TMIS) makes an efficient and convenient connection between patient(s)/user(s) and doctor(s) over the insecure internet. Therefore, data security, privacy and user authentication are enormously important for accessing important medical data over insecure communication. Recently, many user authentication protocols for TMIS have been proposed in the literature and it has been observed that most of the protocols cannot achieve complete security requirements. In this paper, we have scrutinized two (Mishra et al., Xu et al.) remote user authentication protocols using smart card and explained that both the protocols are suffering against several security weaknesses. We have then presented three-factor user authentication and key agreement protocol usable for TMIS, which fix the security pitfalls of the above mentioned schemes. The informal cryptanalysis makes certain that the proposed protocol provides well security protection on the relevant security attacks. Furthermore, the simulator AVISPA tool confirms that the protocol is secure against active and passive attacks including replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. The security functionalities and performance comparison analysis confirm that our protocol not only provide strong protection on security attacks, but it also achieves better complexities along with efficient login and password change phase as well as session key verification property.

[Public-private partnerships (PPPs) in the health sector: global processes and national dynamics].

Science.gov (United States)

Almeida, Celia

2017-10-02

This essay addresses several dimensions that promote and consolidate the growing participation by private stakeholders in the decision-making process in health, emphasizing international and domestic factors that have facilitated and sustained the persistence of the neoliberal political and ideological perspective over the course of nearly thirty years (since the 1990s). The article emphasizes the role of intergovernmental organizations in this process, highlighting public-private interactions at the global and domestic levels, with a specific focus on so-called public-private partnerships (PPPs). The working premise is that such linkages alter the power relations in policy formulation and implementation, with a predominance of private stakeholders. The article presents an overview of the development of PPPs in Europe, Latin America, and Brazil, identifying their specific origins and the simultaneity of triggering events. The text reiterates the importance of not overlooking the power of these actors in dislodging them from this political position, whether in multilateral organizations or national health systems. The aim is to emphasize the importance of more in-depth reflection on the subject, backing debates within the sector. This entire dynamic requires rethinking strategies of resistance to preserve the rights won through centuries of struggle.

Areva's privatization uncertainties

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Jemain, A.

2004-01-01

The French nuclear public group Areva (the fusion of CEA-Industrie, Framatome and Cogema companies) will actively prepare its privatization and stock exchange introduction before the end of the first half of 2005, in order to re-launch its acquisitions and associations policy. However, the advantages of this privatization with a preponderant public share-holding will depend on the intentions of the French government. Short paper. (J.S.)

Public and private hospital services reform using data envelopment analysis to measure technical, scale, allocative, and cost efficiencies.

Science.gov (United States)

Sheikhzadeh, Yaghoub; Roudsari, Abdul V; Vahidi, Reza Gholi; Emrouznejad, Ali; Dastgiri, Saeed

2012-01-01

The aim of this study was to suggest a suitable context to develop efficient hospital systems while maintaining the quality of care at minimum expenditures. This research aimed to present a model of efficiency for selected public and private hospitals of East Azerbaijani Province of Iran by making use of Data Envelopment Analysis approach in order to recognize and suggest the best practice standards. Among the six inefficient hospitals, 2 (33%) had a technical efficiency score of less than 50% (both private), 2 (33%) between 51 and 74% (one private and one public) and the rest (2, 33%) between 75 and 99% (one private and one public). In general, the public hospitals are relatively more efficient than private ones; it is recommended for inefficient hospitals to make use of the followings: transferring, selling, or renting idle/unused beds; transferring excess doctors and nurses to the efficient hospitals or other health centers; pensioning off, early retirement clinic officers, technicians/technologists, and other technical staff. The saving obtained from the above approaches could be used to improve remuneration for remaining staff and quality of health care services of hospitals, rural and urban health centers, support communities to start or sustain systematic risk and resource pooling and cost sharing mechanisms for protecting beneficiaries against unexpected health care costs, compensate the capital depreciation, increasing investments, and improve diseases prevention services and facilities in the provincial level.

Improving an Anonymous and Provably Secure Authentication Protocol for a Mobile User

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jongho Moon

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Recently many authentication protocols using an extended chaotic map were suggested for a mobile user. Many researchers demonstrated that authentication protocol needs to provide key agreement, mutual authentication, and user anonymity between mobile user and server and resilience to many possible attacks. In this paper, we cautiously analyzed chaotic-map-based authentication scheme and proved that it is still insecure to off-line identity guessing, user and server impersonation, and on-line identity guessing attacks. To address these vulnerabilities, we proposed an improved protocol based on an extended chaotic map and a fuzzy extractor. We proved the security of the proposed protocol using a random oracle and AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool. Furthermore, we present an informal security analysis to make sure that the improved protocol is invulnerable to possible attacks. The proposed protocol is also computationally efficient when compared to other previous protocols.

Comparison of public and private school teachers and school principals’ opinions in Abuja, Nigeria

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Deniz Ozcan

2015-01-01

Full Text Available This study aims to examine public and private school teachers’ opinions on different aspects of their professional associations and provisions and also asks principals about teachers’ conduct and their views on the Nigerian curriculum. To conduct this study, qualitative and quantitative research models were used to investigate differences between the two organizations. Quantitative data was collected by distributing questionnaires to 118 teachers in the Abuja Municipal Area Council (AMAC, Nigeria. To conduct the qualitative analysis, 15 teachers from two schools were selected (a total of 30 teachers to answer 5 discussion questions concerning their views on the Nigerian educational system. The findings revealed that private school teachers are at an advantage when it comes to provision of resources and technology, professional development and to some degree salaries. Both public and private school teachers felt being a teacher did not bring them respect in their community. Government policy makers need to study private schools and how they operate to see how they can make changes to produce the revolutionary reform needed in education. 30 principals’ interviews revealed that public school teachers are not easily held accountable for misconduct due to the structure of leadership, while private school teachers are held accountable and any form of unprofessionalism easily leads to termination of employment.

Bringing indigenous ownership back to the private sector

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Kragelund, Peter

. This time disguised in terms like empowerment and unequal opportunities but just as politicised as in the 1970s. In light of the current anti-Chinese sentiments in Zambia, this paper seeks to further our understanding of private sector policy making in Zambia. It argues that populist politics, referring...... been particularly present in all sectors of the Zambian economy. Foreign ownership, however, is not new to African societies and several African countries pursued indigenisation policies in the wake of independence to bring ownership back to their own citizens. Now indigenisation policies thrive again...

Detecting privatization factors on promoting exports of steel companies

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Seyed Mohsen SeyedAliAkbar

2016-05-01

Full Text Available Privatization is considered as the transfer of business from the government to the private sector. This process is often accomplished in an attempt to reduce the size of government, increase the productivity and export activities. There is no doubt that in an export oriented economy, government tries to promote expert based activities by making necessary changes on rules and regulations. This paper presents an empirical investigation to determine important factors on promoting export in Iran. The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among some experts active in steel industry. Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy is equal to 0.839 and Bartlett's Test of Sphericity yields an approximation Chi-Square value of 2485.02 (Sig. = 0.000, df = 276. Using principle component analysis with Varimax rotation, the study has detected five important factors including human resources development, productivity management, marketing management, creating competitive environment and building necessary infrastructures, which influence the most on export activities.

The entrepreneurial state debunking public vs. private sector myths

CERN Document Server

Mazzucato, Mariana

2015-01-01

This new bestseller from leading economist Mariana Mazzucato – named by the ‘New Republic’ as one of the ‘most important innovation thinkers’ today – is stirring up much-needed debates worldwide about the role of the State in innovation. Debunking the myth of a laggard State at odds with a dynamic private sector, Mazzucato reveals in case study after case study that in fact the opposite situation is true, with the private sector only finding the courage to invest after the entrepreneurial State has made the high-risk investments. Case studies include examples of the State’s role in the ‘green revolution’, in biotech and pharmaceuticals, as well as several detailed examples from Silicon Valley. In an intensely researched chapter, she reveals that every technology that makes the iPhone so ‘smart’ was government funded: the Internet, GPS, its touch-screen display and the voice-activated Siri. Mazzucato also controversially argues that in the history of modern capitalism the State has not on...

Cryptocurrency market making in the Ripple network

OpenAIRE

Brezigar, Jakob

2016-01-01

Market maker provides counterparty for buyers and sellers of financial instruments in transaction settlement. Market makers quote the bid price and the ask price at the same time. This price setting process is called market making. This thesis covers theoretical and practical basis for implementation of autonomous market making algorithm for a promising cryptocurrency market called Ripple. We summarize market making theory, how Ripple cryptocurrency protocol works and how price formation proc...

Guide to Decision-Making Getting it more right than wrong

CERN Document Server

Drummond, Helga

2012-01-01

We make decisions, and these decisions make us and our organisations. And in theory, decision-making should be easy: a problem is identified, the decision-makers generate solutions, and choose the optimal one - and powerful mathematical tools are available to facilitate the task. Yet if it is all so simple why do organisations, both private and public sector, keep making mistakes - the results of which are borne by shareholders, employees, taxpayers and ultimately society at large? This guide to decision making. by leading decision science academic Helga Drummond, aims to improve decision-maki

Using the cost distribution report in estimating private sector payments: what adjustments should researchers make?

Science.gov (United States)

Nugent, Gary; Grippen, Glen; Parris, Y C; Mitchell, Mary

2003-06-01

To reapportion Veterans Health Administration (VA) annual expenditures into benefit categories for comparison with estimated payments by private sector providers. Total expenditures for six VA medical centers for federal fiscal year 1999 were reapportioned by benefit category using the cost distribution report (CDR). Health benefit categories were based on those of health care insurers. Cost reapportionment was based on CDR data and reviews of source accounting and payroll documents. Actual expenditures for many benefits can be accurately identified and reapportioned using CDR data, but other expenditures were not identifiable in the CDR and required inspection of source documents. Inpatient expenditures amounting to $75,110,094 US dollars and outpatient expenditures amounting to $73,594,284 US dollars were reapportioned into other benefit categories, primarily professional fees. Expenditures for some VA benefits could not be identified because of differences in accounting and clinical practice between the VA and the community. Revisions to bring the CDR more in line with private sector payment categories would improve effectiveness for internal VA analyses and external expenditure comparisons. CDR revisions would require changes in recording some clinical workload (eg, rehabilitation and extended care) and classifying residential and domiciliary programs separate from inpatient care. Benefits that were not assigned expenditures for comparison with payments represent a potential liability if the VA were to purchase health care services in the marketplace. Variation among hospitals on expenditures not clearly identified in the CDR was significant and raises questions about the effectiveness of capitated budget methodologies using either the CDR or the decision support system.

Private Sector Savings

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Pitonáková Renáta

2018-03-01

Full Text Available The majority of household savings are in the form of bank deposits. It is therefore of interest for credit institutions to tailor their deposit policy for getting finances from non-banking entities and to provide the private sector with the loans that are necessary for investment activities and consumption. This paper deals with the determinants of the saving rate of the private sector of Slovakia. Economic, financial and demographic variables influence savings. Growth of income per capita, private disposable income, elderly dependency ratio, real interest rate and inflation have a positive impact on savings, while increases in public savings indicate a crowding out effect. The inflation rate implies precautionary savings, and dependency ratio savings for bequest. There are also implications for governing institutions deciding on the implementation of appropriate fiscal and monetary operations.

Women and Private Pensions.

Science.gov (United States)

Benson, Helene A.

This speech focuses on women and private pension plans, such as private pension coverage and smaller benefit amounts. Pension issues affecting women as employees include participation in plans, vesting, break-in service, benefit accruals, integration with Social Security, sex-based actuarial tables, portability, inflation, and individual…

Investigation of privatization by level crossing approach

Science.gov (United States)

Vahabi, M.; Jafari, G. R.

2009-09-01

Privatization - a political as well as an economic policy - is generally defined as the transfer of a property or the responsibility for it from the public to the private sector. But privatization is not merely the transfer of the ownership and efficiency of the market should be considered. A successful privatization program induces better profitability and efficiency, higher output, more investment, etc. The main method of privatization is through introducing new stocks to the market to motivate competition. However, for a successful privatization the capability of a market for absorbing the new stock should also be considered. Without paying attention to this aspect, privatization through the introduction of new stocks may lead to reduced market efficiency. We study, based on the complexity theory and in particular the concept of Level Crossing, the effect of the stages of the development, activity, risk, and the waiting times for special events on the privatization.

Mobile security how to secure, privatize and recover your devices

CERN Document Server

Speed, Timothy; Anderson, Joseph; Nampalli, Jaya

2013-01-01

Learn how to keep yourself safe online with easy- to- follow examples and real- life scenarios. Written by developers at IBM, this guide should be the only resource you need to keep your personal information private.Mobile security is one of the most talked about areas in I.T. today with data being stolen from smartphones and tablets around the world. Make sure you, and your family, are protected when they go online.

Privatization Financing Alternatives: Blending Private Capital and Public Resources for a Successful Project

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

BT Oakley; JH Holbrook; L Scully; MR Weimar; PK Kearns; R DiPrinzio

1998-10-19

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) launched the Contract Reform Initiative in 1994 in order to improve the effectiveness and effkiency of managing major projects and programs. The intent of this initiative is to help DOE harness both technical and market forces to reduce the overall cost of accomplishing DOE's program goals. The new approach transfers greater risk to private contractors in order to develop incentives that align contractor performance with DOE's objectives. In some cases, this goal can be achieved through public-private partnerships wherein the govermhent and the contractor share risks associated with a project in a way that optimizes its economics. Generally, this requires that project risks are allocated to the party best equipped to manage and/or underwrite them. While the merits of privatization are well documented, the question of how privatized services should be financed is often debated. Given the cost of private sector equity and debt, it is difficult to ignore the lure of the government's "risk free" cost of capital. However, the source of financing for a project is an integral part of its overall risk allocation, and therefore, participation by the government as a financing source could alter the allocation of risks in the project, diminishing the incentive structure. Since the government's participation in the project's financing often can be a requirement for financial feasibility, the dilemma of structuring a role for the government without undermining the success of the project is a common and difficult challenge faced by policymakers around the world. However, before reverting to a traditional procurement approach where the government enters into a cost-plus risk profile, the government should exhaust all options that keep the private entity at risk for important aspects of the project. Government participation in a project can include a broad range of options and can be applied with precision to bridge a

Music Societies in the 19th Century Oporto : Private Spaces of Amateur and Professional Music Making

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ana Maria Liberal

2009-05-01

Full Text Available A number of private societies and clubs flourished in Oporto in the 19th Century, whose aim was to encourage in their members "benevolence relationships and good society" offering them "an honest and civilized leisure times". Clearly elitist, these nineteenth century recreational clubs had strict membership admission policies, which generally belonged to the higher echelons of society, more specifically the bourgeois, since the titled aristocracy was scarce in Oporto. It is worth mentioning here in parenthesis that Oporto was an essentially bourgeois, commercial city, unlike the capital, Lisbon, where the court "drags with it the whole official and unofficial world which conceitedly flutters around it". Each association organised musical concerts, balls and soirées musicales – weekly, twice a week or once a month – which also offered members other amusements, like conversation, reading, playing cards or dancing. Events of a musical character were normally performed by the club members, usually amateurs – referred to as dilettanti – who would be joined by prestigious Portuguese or foreign professionals. The purpose of this article is to describe the musical activity of the five main venues for private socialising in Oporto in the 1800s, and their contribution to the development of the musical taste of the city's society, taking into account both amateur and professional practice and particularly the repertoire performed.

Private support and social securityPrivate support and social security

OpenAIRE

Frans van Dijk

1998-01-01

The issue is addressed whether assistance to persons in need can be left to the `family' and the `community'. In that case people depend on their social networks. The support a person receives through a given network of social ties is examined. However, ties are diverse and subject to change. By means of a model of the dynamics of social ties, the conditions for adequate private support are analyzed. The sustainability of private support over time is examined by incorporating the impact on so...

Public-private partnership in theory

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Blaž Vrhnjak

2007-07-01

Full Text Available Background: In political and other debates much of attention is paid to public – private partnerships (PPPs. These partnerships are perceived as a tool of meeting public demand by private supply. In theory there are at least four different forms of contract partnerships according to the amount of risks transferred to the private sector.Conclusions: Public – private partnerships are neither the only neither the preferred way of providing public service. On one hand they tend to lower financial burden of the public sector but on the other hand PPPs require complex ways of management and monitoring. It is highly important to consider specific circumstances of individual projects in question.

Resources to Manage a Private Practice.

Science.gov (United States)

Aigner, John; Cheek, Fredricka; Donati, Georgia; Zuravicky, Dori

1997-01-01

Includes four theme articles: "The Digital Toolkit: Electronic Necessities for Private Practice" (John Aigner); "Organizing a Private Practice: Forms, Fees, and Physical Set-up (Fredricka Cheek); "Career Development Resources: Guidelines for Setting Up a Private Practice Library" (Georgia Donati); and "Books to…

Private school location and neighborhood characteristics

OpenAIRE

Lisa Barrow

2002-01-01

Any voucher program that is going to have a major impact on the public education system is likely to require an expansion of private schools in order to accommodate increased demand; however, very little is known about where private schools open and, therefore, how a major voucher program might affect private school availability in various communities. This article examines the relationship between the location of private schools and local neighborhood characteristics, hoping to shed some lig...

Walking Wounded or Living Dead? Making Banks Foreclose Bad Loans

OpenAIRE

Max Bruche; Gerard Llobet

2011-01-01

Due to limited liability, banks that are essentially insolvent may have incentives to roll over bad loans as a gamble for resurrection, even though it is socially inefficient to do so. This paper considers the problem of making such banks remove and/or foreclose bad loans, when the proportion of loans on a bank’s balance sheet that has gone bad is private information. The private information implies that many plausible schemes are likely to generate windfall gains for bank equity holders, whi...

Reconsidering Privatization in Cross-Border Engagements: The Sometimes Public Nature of Private Activity

Science.gov (United States)

Lane, Jason E.; Kinser, Kevin

2011-01-01

Privatization trends in higher education have typically been analyzed from the perspective of the institution and its relationship with the sponsoring state. The recent phenomenon of international cross-border higher education, however, represents a more complicated picture of privatization. Geographic separation from the sponsoring state is an…

Can vouchers make a difference to the use of private primary care services by older people? Experience from the healthcare reform programme in Hong Kong.

Science.gov (United States)

Yam, Carrie H K; Liu, Su; Huang, Olivia H Y; Yeoh, E K; Griffiths, Sian M

2011-10-07

As part of its ongoing healthcare reform, the Hong Kong Government introduced a voucher scheme, intended for encouraging older patients to use primary healthcare services in the private sector, thereby, reducing burden on the overwhelmed public sector. The voucher program is also considered one of the strategies to further develop the public private partnership in healthcare, a policy direction of high political priority as indicated in the Chief Executive Policy Address in 2008-09. This study assessed whether the voucher scheme, as implemented so far, has reached its intended goals, and how it might be further improved in the context of public-private partnership. This was a cross-sectional study using structured questionnaires by face-to-face interviews with older people aged 70 or above in Hong Kong, the target group of the demand-side voucher program. 71.2% of 1,026 older people were aware of the new voucher scheme but only 35.0% had ever used it. The majority of the older people used the vouchers for acute curative services in the private sector (82.4%) and spent less on preventive services. Despite the provision of vouchers valued US$30 per year as an incentive to encourage the use of private primary care services, after 12-months of implementation, 66.2% of all respondents agreed with the statement that "the voucher scheme does not change their health seeking behaviours on seeing public or private healthcare professionals". The most common reasons for no change in their behaviours included "I am used to seeing doctors in the public system" and "The amount of the subsidy is too low". Those who usually used a mix of public and private doctors and those with better self-reported health condition compared to last year were more likely to perceive a change in their own health seeking behaviours. Our study showed that despite a reasonably high awareness of the voucher scheme, its usage was low. The voucher alone was not enough to realize the government's policy of

PRIVATE LAW EFFECTS OF THE NON-RECOGNITION OF STATES' EXISTENCE AND TERRITORIAL CHANGES

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ioan-Luca VLAD

2015-07-01

Full Text Available The study presents an outline of the effects in private law (including private international law of the non-recognition of a state or a change of territory. Specifically, it addresses the question of what measures can another state take, in the field of private law, in order to give effect to its policy of not recognizing a state or a territorial annexation, and, in parallel, what are the means available to private parties with links to the unrecognized state or territory. The study is structured in two parts, namely 1 the effects in private law of the non-recognition of a state; and 2 the effect in private law of the non-recognition of an annexation of territory. I will make specific references in particular to the situation in Transnistria and Crimea, as examples of the two issues being addressed. The study intends to be a guide of past and present state practice at the legislative and judicial level, as well as presenting the connections between instruments of public international law, such as Sanctions Resolutions of the UN Security Council, and normative instruments of private law, such as rules of civil procedure, which must adapt to the policy of non-recognition adopted by (or imposed on states. The study also presents specific examples of situations or administrative practices which create practical problems, and result from the existence of a non-recognized entity or change of territory: issues like air traffic coordination, postal traffic, the change in the official currency of a territory, questions of citizenship etc., the aim being to present the reader with a full picture of the issues and intricacies resulting from irregularities existing at the level of the international community of states.

Prioritizing lean management practices in public and private hospitals.

Science.gov (United States)

Hussain, Matloub; Malik, Mohsin

2016-05-16

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to prioritize 21 healthcare wastes in public and private hospitals of United Arab Emirates (UAE). Design/methodology/approach - Seven healthcare wastes linked with lean management are further decomposed in to sub-criteria and to deal with this complexity of multi criteria decision-making process, analytical hierarchical process (AHP) method is used in this research. Findings - AHP framework for this study resulted in a ranking of 21 healthcare wastes in public and private hospitals of UAE. It has been found that management in private healthcare systems of UAE is putting more emphasis on the inventory waste. On the other hand, over processing waste has got highest weight in public hospitals of UAE. Research limitations/implications - The future directions of this research would be to apply a lean set of tools for the value stream optimization of the prioritized key improvement areas. Practical implications - This is a contribution to the continuing research into lean management, giving practitioners and designers a practical way for measuring and implementing lean practices across health organizations. Originality/value - The contribution of this research, through successive stages of data collection, measurement analysis and refinement, is a set of reliable and valid framework that can be subsequently used in conceptualization, prioritization of the waste reduction strategies in healthcare management.

Private Speech in Ballet

Science.gov (United States)

Johnston, Dale

2006-01-01

Authoritarian teaching practices in ballet inhibit the use of private speech. This paper highlights the critical importance of private speech in the cognitive development of young ballet students, within what is largely a non-verbal art form. It draws upon research by Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky and contemporary socioculturalists, to…

Feasibility of selected private money

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Lukáš Nevěděl

2012-01-01

Full Text Available The goal of the entry: “Feasibility of selected private money” is the assessment of practicability of selected private money types as future currency especially in terms of attributes that the currency should meet to fulfil all claims required by its users. In the first step the features that the widely used currency has to have will be described and it will be analysed which of these features are characteristic for nowadays currencies (Czech crown and Euro too. In the second step private (unnationalized money will be described as well as several concepts derived from it. The paper will concern mainly on Hayek’s concept of private money and on particular variations of Local exchange trading systems. In the next part there will be pointed out good and bad features of these types of money, mainly from the view of characteristics that the proper currency should have. At the end it will be carried out the comparison of bad and good effects resulting from using of particular currencies types and I will decide about the applicability of analysed private money types. The paper uses the standard methods of scientific work. Firstly, the method of description is used to describe the development of private money concepts and characteristic features that the currency should have. Then, a comparative analysis is used to discuss the differences between contemporary currencies and unnationalized currencies as well as between required and real features of particular private money. At the end the method of synthesis, deduction and induction is used.

Contracting Out of the Provision of Welfare Services to Private Actors and Liability Issues

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Ulfbeck, Vibe Garf; Andrecka, Marta

2017-01-01

there is no contract between the individual and the private service provider there may be several obstacles to a claim against the private service provider based on contract. At the same time it is a general tort law principle that there is no vicarious liability for independent contractors, making it difficult also......The article discusses liability issues related to the contracting out of welfare services. It focuses on the possible liability of the private actor and of the public entity towards the individual (the citizen) for non- performance or malperformance of the welfare service. It is argued that since...... to succeed with a claim against the public entity based on tort law. Thus, a liability gap seems to exist. However, the article demonstrates that there are signs in different jurisdictions that solutions are being found in case law to this problem allowing to some extent for the imposition of some kind...

Defining the private partners in PPP

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Van der Vleuten-Balkema, F.; Stam, N.

2004-01-01

Now that the public private partnerships are seen to be the way forward in solar electrification in developing countries, it is important to question who will be the private partner in the partnership? For decentralized energy technologies such as solar home systems, that are being disseminated to vast numbers of highly dispersed end-users, the private partners of today are the hundreds or thousands of often non specialized local entrepreneurs. The public private partnerships of tomorrow should be reoriented accordingly. (authors)

Beyond protocols

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Vanderhoeven, Sonia; Branquart, Etienne; Casaer, Jim

2017-01-01

Risk assessment tools for listing invasive alien species need to incorporate all available evidence and expertise. Beyond the wealth of protocols developed to date, we argue that the current way of performing risk analysis has several shortcomings. In particular, lack of data on ecological impact...... information on risk and the exploration of improved methods for decision making on biodiversity management. This is crucial for efficient conservation resource allocation and uptake by stakeholders and the public......., transparency and repeatability of assessments as well as the incorporation of uncertainty should all be explicitly considered. We recommend improved quality control of risk assessments through formalized peer review with clear feedback between assessors and reviewers. Alternatively, a consensus building...

Evaluation of svr: a wireless sensor network routing protocol

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Baloch, J.; Khanzada, T.J.S.

2014-01-01

The advancement in technology has made it possible to create small in size, low cost sensor nodes. However, the small size and low cost of such nodes comesat at price that is, reduced processing power, low memory and significantly small battery energy storage. WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks) are inherently ad hoc in nature and are assumed to work in the toughest terrain. The network lifetime plays a pivotal role in a wireless sensor network. A long network lifetime, could be achieved by either making significant changes in these low cost devices, which is not a feasible solution or by improving the means of communication throughout the network. The communication in such networks could be improved by employing energy efficient routing protocols, to route the data throughout the network. In this paper the SVR (Spatial Vector Routing) protocol is compared against the most common WSN routing protocols, and from the results it could be inferred that the SVR protocol out performs its counterparts. The protocol provides an energy efficient means of communication in the network. (author)

Of Private, Common, and Public Property and the Rationale for Total Privatization

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

2011-02-01

Full Text Available In this paper, first, I want to clarify the nature and function of private property. Second, I want to clarify the distinction between “common” goods and property and “public” goods and property, and explain the construction error inherent in the institution of public goods and property. Third, I want to explain the rationale and principle of privatization.

Snore related signals processing in a private cloud computing system.

Science.gov (United States)

Qian, Kun; Guo, Jian; Xu, Huijie; Zhu, Zhaomeng; Zhang, Gongxuan

2014-09-01

Snore related signals (SRS) have been demonstrated to carry important information about the obstruction site and degree in the upper airway of Obstructive Sleep Apnea-Hypopnea Syndrome (OSAHS) patients in recent years. To make this acoustic signal analysis method more accurate and robust, big SRS data processing is inevitable. As an emerging concept and technology, cloud computing has motivated numerous researchers and engineers to exploit applications both in academic and industry field, which could have an ability to implement a huge blue print in biomedical engineering. Considering the security and transferring requirement of biomedical data, we designed a system based on private cloud computing to process SRS. Then we set the comparable experiments of processing a 5-hour audio recording of an OSAHS patient by a personal computer, a server and a private cloud computing system to demonstrate the efficiency of the infrastructure we proposed.

Private Sector Credit and Inflation Volatility

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Lorna Katusiime

2018-04-01

Full Text Available This paper investigates the effect of inflation volatility on private sector credit growth. The results indicate that private sector credit growth is positively linked to the one period lagged inflation volatility. Given that past monetary policy actions continue to affect the targeted variables due to the substantial lags in the transmission mechanism, the positive response of private sector credit growth to past inflation volatility suggests a credible monetary policy regime in Uganda, which has led to a reduction in the level of macroeconomic uncertainty and the restoration of favorable economic conditions and prospects, thus increasing the demand for credit. Further, the study finds that the lagged private sector credit growth, nominal exchange rate, and inflation have a statistically significant effect on private sector credit growth while financial innovation, interest rates, and GDP growth appear not to be important determinants of private sector credit growth. The robustness of our findings is confirmed by sensitivity checks.

The right of servitude between public interest and undisturbed use of private property

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Petovar Ksenija

2011-01-01

Full Text Available For obtaining the land in order to build the magistral pipeline a specific form of land expropriation is applied, namely the Right of servitude. The Right of servitude can be realized on the basis of established public interest, which can be defined according to the spatial plan of the relevant area. The Right of servitude is analyzed from the point of its influence on the respect of basic human rights of property owners to enjoy their property in safety and without disturbance. Current legal framework in Serbia that regulates procedures for acquiring land for the purpose of public interest allows for breach of private property rights. There is a mutual inconsistency between a number of decrees that regulate property rights for large infrastructural development projects. A specific, and possibly a greater problem, is the status of the local population, the land owner and other real estate. It concerns their awareness of their private and individual rights, as well as technical and other legal standards, which must be applied during the preparation, construction and working stages of an energy facility. Applying the Right of servitude as a way to acquire land for construction of the Pipeline, there is direct breach of the basic human right as stated in the first Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights, namely that ‘every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions’ (Article 1, Protocol 1. The Right of servitude allows the investor to use ‘public interest’ as a way of gaining access to another’s land, and under better financial conditions than if he were to apply permanent expropriation. While the owner retains his/her ownership of the land, inconvenienced by numerous limitations of its use, usability and market value of the land becomes substantially reduced.

The reaction of private physicians to price deregulation in France.

Science.gov (United States)

Carrere, M O

1991-01-01

French private physicians are paid on a fee-for-service basis and nearly all of them are under contract to the Social Security, which refunds part of the medical fee to the whole population. Previously the prices of medical services were fixed, but since 1980, a new option has been possible: a doctor can choose to fix the price of his services freely, provided he pays a higher social insurance contribution. But the amount refunded by Social Security does not vary, so that the consumer has to bear the extra charge. Our purpose here is to identify the factors that influence the physician's option. In Section 2, we define a model of the private physician's economic behaviour, of the classic income-leisure type. In Section 3, empirical tests are performed on a sample of observations in 95 'départements', gathering information about private GPs on the one hand, and the whole population on the other. According to our results, GPs' decisions depend on characteristics of both supply of and demand for GPs' services. One of our conclusions is that GPs seem to make up for low activity levels with higher prices, on condition the income of their practice allows it.

Private equity and public-to-private transactions

NARCIS (Netherlands)

P.G.J. Roosenboom (Peter)

2013-01-01

textabstractWhat considerations lie behind the decision to mount a management buy-out of a publicly listed firm, and should third party investors be involved? Indeed, does the involvement of private equity investors actually aid company performance after a deal is done?

European Private Law - Survey 1998-2000

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Hondius, E.H.

2000-01-01

From its conception, the European Review of Private Law has tried, sometimes in vain, to publish Chronicles (‘Chroniques’) or Surveys of the main areas of private law: Contract, Inheritance, Property, Tort, etc. The idea of these Chronicles or Surveys is that, within a specific area of private

Private vs. Public Higher Education Budgeting

Science.gov (United States)

Beamer, Sarah A.

2011-01-01

Private higher education institutions are those entities owned and operated by the private sector, while public institutions are those established, supported, and controlled by a governmental agency, most often a state. Key differences exist between private and public institutions that affect budgeting in critical ways. Such differences include…

Private Equity and Industry Performance

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Bernstein, Shai; Lerner, Josh; Sørensen, Morten

2017-01-01

The growth of the private equity industry has spurred concerns about its impact on the economy. This analysis looks across nations and industries to assess the impact of private equity on industry performance. We find that industries where private equity funds invest grow more quickly in terms...... of total production and employment and appear less exposed to aggregate shocks. Our robustness tests provide some evidence that is consistent with our effects being driven by our preferred channel....

Does Private Tutoring Work? The Effectiveness of Private Tutoring: A Nonparametric Bounds Analysis

Science.gov (United States)

Hof, Stefanie

2014-01-01

Private tutoring has become popular throughout the world. However, evidence for the effect of private tutoring on students' academic outcome is inconclusive; therefore, this paper presents an alternative framework: a nonparametric bounds method. The present examination uses, for the first time, a large representative data-set in a European setting…

Decision-Making for Induced Abortion in the Accra Metropolis, Ghana

African Journals Online (AJOL)

AJRH Managing Editor

2015-03-09

Mar 9, 2015 ... There are various dimensions to induced abortion decision-making among women who had an elective induced abortion in a .... clinics, 39 company clinics, 79 private maternity ... Ten trained nurses served as research.

A Collusion-Resistant and Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation Protocol in Crowdsensing System

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Chang Xu

2017-01-01

Full Text Available With the pervasiveness and increasing capability of smart devices, mobile crowdsensing has been applied in more and more practical scenarios and provides a more convenient solution with low costs for existing problems. In this paper, we consider an untrusted aggregator collecting a group of users’ data, in which personal private information may be contained. Most previous work either focuses on computing particular functions based on the sensing data or ignores the collusion attack between users and the aggregator. We design a new protocol to help the aggregator collect all the users’ raw data while resisting collusion attacks. Specifically, the bitwise XOR homomorphic functions and aggregate signature are explored, and a novel key system is designed to achieve collusion resistance. In our system, only the aggregator can decrypt the ciphertext. Theoretical analysis shows that our protocol can capture k-source anonymity. In addition, extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of our algorithms.

Private food law : governing food chains through contracts law, self-regulation, private standards, audits and certification schemes

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Meulen, van der B.M.J.

2011-01-01

Since the turn of the Millennium, world-wide initiatives from the private sector have turned the regulatory environment for food businesses upside down. For the first time in legal literature this book analyses private law initiatives relating to the food chain, often referred to as private

45 CFR 605.39 - Private education.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

... 45 Public Welfare 3 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false Private education. 605.39 Section 605.39 Public..., Elementary, and Secondary Education § 605.39 Private education. (a) A recipient that provides private elementary or secondary education may not, on the basis of handicap, exclude a qualified handicapped person...

38 CFR 18.439 - Private education.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 38 Pensions, Bonuses, and Veterans' Relief 2 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Private education. 18.439... Adult Education § 18.439 Private education. (a) A recipient that provides private elementary or secondary education may not on the basis of handicap, exclude a qualified handicapped person if the person...

Evaluation of Principal Performance in Public and Private Sector Schools

OpenAIRE

Akhtar, Iram; Cheema, Khaliq Ur Rehman

2013-01-01

The purpose of this study is to analyze the performance in context of student learning of principals in public sector and private sector schools. For this purpose five main domains were used as variables are: 1) teaching, learning and professional growth, 2) Inter-personal and inter-professional relationship and collaboration, 3) Parent and faculty involvement in decision making, 4) Vision and values, 5) Innovation and change. The population for this study was selected randomly. The target sa...

PRIVATE SECURITY IN SPORT

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dragan Vukasović

2011-09-01

Full Text Available Given the importance of sport for international integration, affirmation, a sense of belonging and other values of general interest, in order to maintain and open new prospects of development, it is necessary to form the private security system along with state security system, with a view to creating conditions for development sports athletes to achieve better results both in domestic and international competitions. Private security is only one element of an integrated security system which, with its efficient organization with the use of adequate means and measures should provide answers to new challenges, risks and threats. Private security in line with the new understanding of the concept of security has an important role in providing athletes.

More "Private" than Private Institutions: Public Institutions of Higher Education and Financial Management

Science.gov (United States)

Adams, Olin L., III; Robichaux, Rebecca R.; Guarino, A. J.

2010-01-01

This research compares the status of managerial accounting practices in public four-year colleges and universities and in private four-year colleges and universities. The investigators surveyed a national sample of chief financial officers (CFOs) at two points in time, 1998-99 and 2003-04. In 1998-99 CFOs representing private institutions reported…

The privately owned timber resources of western Oregon.

Science.gov (United States)

Donald R. Gedney

1983-01-01

Timber resource statistics from a 1973-76 inventory are presented for private timberland in western Oregon. Inventories usually classify private owners as either forest industry or nonindustrial private. For this report, however, the nonindustrial private classification has been further disaggregated into farmer, individual, and corporate owners. For all private owner...

The Effects of Using Multimodal Approaches in Meaning-Making of 21st Century Literacy Texts Among ESL Students in a Private School in Malaysia

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Malini Ganapathy

2016-04-01

Full Text Available In today’s globalised digital era, students are inevitably engaged in various multimodal texts due to their active participation in social media and frequent usage of mobile devices on a daily basis. Such daily activities advocate the need for a transformation in the teaching and learning of ESL lessons in order to promote students’ capabilities in making meaning of different literacy texts which students come across in their ESL learning activities. This paper puts forth the framework of Multimodality in the restructuring of the teaching and learning of ESL with the aim of investigating its effects and students perspectives on the use of multimodal approaches underlying the Multiliteracies theory. Using focus group interviews, this qualitative case study examines the effectiveness of ESL teaching and learning using the Multimodal approaches on literacy in meaning-making among 15 students in a private school in Penang, Malaysia. The results confirm the need to reorientate the teaching and learning of ESL with the focus on multimodal pedagogical practices as it promotes positive learning outcomes among students. The implications of this study suggest that the multimodal approaches integrated in the teaching and learning of ESL have the capacity to promote students’ autonomy in learning, improve motivation to learn and facilitate various learning styles. Keywords: Multimodal Approaches; Multiliteracies; Monomodal; Flipped Classroom; Literacy; Multimodal texts; Ipad

Private Equity for Retail Investors : How to efficiently involve Finnish retail investors in private equity

OpenAIRE

Moita, Angelo

2017-01-01

Private equity has been the best performing asset class for institutional investors. Meanwhile, retail investors have been left out from the asset class for several reasons, such as legislation and wealth profiling. This study aims at assessing the types of private equity vehicles that could be the most appropriate for Finnish retail investors. The study solely focuses on the investment opportunities, hence it does not cover investment behaviour. Private equity should not be a primary as...

45 CFR 84.39 - Private education.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

... 45 Public Welfare 1 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false Private education. 84.39 Section 84.39 Public... Secondary Education § 84.39 Private education. (a) A recipient that provides private elementary or secondary education may not, on the basis of handicap, exclude a qualified handicapped person if the person can, with...

Private sector approaches to workforce enhancement.

Science.gov (United States)

Wendling, Wayne R

2010-06-01

This paper addresses the private practice model of dental care delivery in the US. The great majority of dental care services are delivered through this model and thus changes in the model represent a means to substantially change the supply and availability of dental services. The two main forces that change how private practices function are broad economic factors, which alter the demand for dental care and innovations in practice structure and function which alter the supply and cost of services. Economics has long recognized that although there are private market solutions for many issues, not all problems can be addressed through this model. The private practice of dentistry is a private market solution that works for a substantial share of the market. However, the private market may not work to resolve all issues associated with access and utilization. Solutions for some problems call for creative private - public arrangements - another form of innovation; and market-based solutions may not be feasible for each and every problem. This paper discusses these economic factors and innovation as they relate to the private practice of dentistry, with special emphasis on those elements that have increased the capacity of the dental practice to offer services to those with limited means to access fee-based care. Innovations are frequently described as new care delivery models or new workforce models. However, innovation can occur on an ongoing and regular basis as dental practices examine new ways to combine capital and human resources and to leverage the education and skill of the dentists to a greater number of patients. Innovation occurs within a market context as the current and projected economic returns reward the innovation. Innovation can also occur through private-public arrangements. There are indications of available capacity within the existing delivery system to expand service delivery. The Michigan Medicaid Healthy Kids Dental program is discussed as

Public-Private Partnership as Political Phenomenon: Perspectives of Adaptation of Successful Foreign Practices to the Russian Reality

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Надежда Викторовна Шуленина

2013-12-01

Full Text Available Public-private partnership show great development in modern Russia. Since the technology of interaction between business and government came from abroad it requires detailed consideration of the successes and current practices in the modern world. It is particularly important to identify relationships between form of government and decision making, both for political and economic decisions, as in most cases, these factors have the strongest influence on the formation of public-private partnership as an institution of the modern political process in Russia.

Bolivian petroleum privatization taking shape

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Anon.

1995-01-01

Bolivia is boldly embracing a free market philosophy that extends to liberalization of the country's petroleum sector. Although petroleum industry privatization is being considered by several South American countries, only Argentina has so far completely opened its oil sector and fully privatized its state oil company. The Bolivian government's own version of privatization, capitalization, is a groundbreaking attempt to attract massive investment from the private sector without leaving the government open to accusations of stripping the country's assets for short term electoral gain. The paper discusses the government's strategy to sell the state owned company either as a single unit or to split it into upstream and downstream units. Questions still to be resolved, international interest in the move, bolivian potential, and the gas supply infrastructure are also discussed

Private sector and stabilisation in Afghanistan

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Magaard, Tina

I briefet opsummerer Tina Magaard de vigtigste konklusioner fra konferencen ”Private sector and stabilisation in Afghanistan – a neglected match?”, som blandt andet gav indsigt i udfordringerne og mulighederne for den private sektor i Afghanistan. Ved at kombinere perspektiver fra strategiske...... studier med forretnings- og udviklingsstudier tilbød konferencen en dybere indsigt i udfordringerne og mulighederne for den private sektor i Afghanistan. Samtidig blev der åbnet en række nye perspektiver for interaktionen mellem den private sektor og stabiliseringsoperationer i en post-krigskontekst som...... Afghanistan. Selvom udgangspunktet var Afghanistan, er konferencens konklusioner i høj grad relevante for andre konflikt/post-konfliktområder. Konferencen var organiseret i et samarbejde mellem Centre for Business and Development Studies (Copenhagen Business School), Public-Private Platform (Copenhagen...

An Authentication Protocol for Future Sensor Networks.

Science.gov (United States)

Bilal, Muhammad; Kang, Shin-Gak

2017-04-28

Authentication is one of the essential security services in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for ensuring secure data sessions. Sensor node authentication ensures the confidentiality and validity of data collected by the sensor node, whereas user authentication guarantees that only legitimate users can access the sensor data. In a mobile WSN, sensor and user nodes move across the network and exchange data with multiple nodes, thus experiencing the authentication process multiple times. The integration of WSNs with Internet of Things (IoT) brings forth a new kind of WSN architecture along with stricter security requirements; for instance, a sensor node or a user node may need to establish multiple concurrent secure data sessions. With concurrent data sessions, the frequency of the re-authentication process increases in proportion to the number of concurrent connections. Moreover, to establish multiple data sessions, it is essential that a protocol participant have the capability of running multiple instances of the protocol run, which makes the security issue even more challenging. The currently available authentication protocols were designed for the autonomous WSN and do not account for the above requirements. Hence, ensuring a lightweight and efficient authentication protocol has become more crucial. In this paper, we present a novel, lightweight and efficient key exchange and authentication protocol suite called the Secure Mobile Sensor Network (SMSN) Authentication Protocol. In the SMSN a mobile node goes through an initial authentication procedure and receives a re-authentication ticket from the base station. Later a mobile node can use this re-authentication ticket when establishing multiple data exchange sessions and/or when moving across the network. This scheme reduces the communication and computational complexity of the authentication process. We proved the strength of our protocol with rigorous security analysis (including formal analysis using the BAN

Public and Private Hospital Services Reform Using Data Envelopment Analysis to Measure Technical, Scale, Allocative, and Cost Efficiencies

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ali Emrouznejad

2012-07-01

Full Text Available Background: The aim of this study was to suggest a suitable context to develop efficient hospitalsystems while maintaining the quality of care at minimum expenditures.Methods: This research aimed to present a model of efficiency for selected public and privatehospitals of East Azerbaijani Province of Iran by making use of Data Envelopment Analysis approachin order to recognize and suggest the best practice standards.Results: Among the six inefficient hospitals, 2 (33% had a technical efficiency score of lessthan 50% (both private, 2 (33% between 51 and 74% (one private and one public and the rest(2, 33% between 75 and 99% (one private and one public.Conclusion: In general, the public hospitals are relatively more efficient than private ones; it isrecommended for inefficient hospitals to make use of the followings: transferring, selling, orrenting idle/unused beds; transferring excess doctors and nurses to the efficient hospitals orother health centers; pensioning off, early retirement clinic officers, technicians/technologists,and other technical staff. The saving obtained from the above approaches could be used to improveremuneration for remaining staff and quality of health care services of hospitals, rural andurban health centers, support communities to start or sustain systematic risk and resource poolingand cost sharing mechanisms for protecting beneficiaries against unexpected health carecosts, compensate the capital depreciation, increasing investments, and improve diseases preventionservices and facilities in the provincial level.

New Communication Network Protocol for a Data Acquisition System

Science.gov (United States)

Uchida, T.; Fujii, H.; Nagasaka, Y.; Tanaka, M.

2006-02-01

An event builder based on communication networks has been used in high-energy physics experiments, and various networks have been adopted, for example, IEEE 802.3 (Ethernet), asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), and so on. In particular, Ethernet is widely used because its infrastructure is very cost effective. Many systems adopt standard protocols that are designed for a general network. However, in the case of an event builder, the communication pattern between stations is different from that in a general network. The unique communication pattern causes congestion, and thus makes it difficulty to quantitatively design the network. To solve this problem, we have developed a simple network protocol for a data acquisition (DAQ) system. The protocol is designed to keep the sequence of senders so that no congestion occurs. We implemented the protocol on a small hardware component [a field programmable gate array (FPGA)] and measured the performance, so that it will be ready for a generic DAQ system

75 FR 72965 - Federal Travel Regulation; Removal of Privately Owned Vehicle Rates; Privately Owned Automobile...

Science.gov (United States)

2010-11-29

... rate based on the type of POV you actually use (privately owned airplane, privately owned automobile... HOUSEHOLD GOODS AND PROFESSIONAL BOOKS, PAPERS, AND EQUIPMENT (PBP&E) 0 29. The authority citation for 41...

When the private sphere goes public: exploring the issues facing family caregiver organizations in the development of long-term care policies.

Science.gov (United States)

Rozario, Philip A; Palley, Elizabeth

2008-01-01

Though family caregiving forms the backbone of the long-term care system in the United States, long-term care policies have traditionally focused on paid services that frail older people and people with disabilities utilize for their day-to-day functioning. Part of the exclusion of family caregiving from the long-term care discourse stems from the traditional separation of the private sphere, where family caregiving occurs, from the public sphere of policy making. However, the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), the National Family Caregiver Support Program (NFCSP) and Medicaid waiver legislation may reflect recent changes in the government's position on their role in addressing issues related to the "private spheres." In this article, we explore the nature of family caregiving in the United States, the divide between the public and private spheres and provide an overview of family caregiving-related policies and programs in the U.S. In our review, we examine the provisions in the FMLA, NFCSP, and Medicaid waiver legislation that support family caregiving efforts. We also examine the roles of family caregiver organizations in making family caregiving an important element of long-term care policy and influencing policy-making.

Private Sector in Indian Healthcare Delivery: Consumer Perspective and Government Policies to promote private Sector

OpenAIRE

Utkarsh Shah, Ragini Mohanty

2011-01-01

This research paper attempts to collate literature from various sources, in an attempt to answer three pertinent questions related to healthcare in India. Firstly, what is it meant by ‘private sector’ in healthcare delivery system of India, secondly how has the private sector evolved over the decades and what has been the role of the government in propelling the growth. Finally, the paper tries to highlight some of the factors that have promoted the growth of private sector in India with spec...

Transport fleet sizing by using make and buy decision-making

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Stojanović Đurđica

2011-01-01

Full Text Available Cost reduction is among the main quoted reasons for logistics outsourcing, while transport capacities and operations are among the most outsourced logistics areas. However, according to transaction costs theory, there is often room for transport insourcing. Furthermore, nowadays many authors stress that mixed solutions can give better results than “make” or “buy” alternatives. “Make or buy” decision-making normative models, methods, and procedures in transport planning are not much explored. Instead, research is rather focused on carrier selection techniques, whereby it is supposed that outsourcing transport capacities is the most suitable solution. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the body of literature on classical “makeor-buy” decision-making in transport fleet sizing in a non-logistics enterprise. It goes beyond the basic “make or buy” decisionmaking, and intermediate solutions (i.e., “make and buy” are explored. Practical directions are given according to theoretical principles, and a case study is used to exemplify the main deductions. The research also has practical implications. Many enterprises in transition economies have faced the question of what to do with their in-house transport fleets. The obtained results are of interest to merchants and manufacturing enterprises that already have a private transport fleet and are considering how to rationalize it.

Harnessing private sector expertise to improve complementary feeding within a regulatory framework: Where is the evidence?

Science.gov (United States)

van Liere, Marti J; Tarlton, Dessie; Menon, Ravi; Yellamanda, M; Reerink, Ietje

2017-10-01

Global recognition that the complex and multicausal problems of malnutrition require all players to collaborate and to invest towards the same objective has led to increased private sector engagement as exemplified through the Scaling Up Nutrition Business Network and mechanisms for blended financing and matched funding, such as the Global Nutrition for Growth Compact. The careful steps made over the past 5 to 10 years have however not taken away or reduced the hesitation and scepticism of the public sector actors towards commercial or even social businesses. Evidence of impact or even a positive contribution of a private sector approach to intermediate nutrition outcomes is still lacking. This commentary aims to discuss the multiple ways in which private sector can leverage its expertise to improve nutrition in general, and complementary feeding in particular. It draws on specific lessons learned in Bangladesh, Côte d'Ivoire, India, Indonesia, and Madagascar on how private sector expertise has contributed, within the boundaries of a regulatory framework, to improve availability, accessibility, affordability, and adequate use of nutritious foods. It concludes that a solid evidence base regarding the contribution of private sector to complementary feeding is still lacking and that the development of a systematic learning agenda is essential to make progress in the area of private sector engagement in nutrition. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Governing the Rule-Making of Organic Agriculture

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Linneberg, Mai Skjøtt

of Denmark and Sweden. Although the cases illustrate two modes of governance: in the former, rule-making is formally internalized in the State and in the latter, in a private-interest organization, a similar set of stakeholders participate in the actual rule-making processes. The analysis provides...... an interesting avenue into understanding the relationship between local and supranational rule-makers, and how local rule-makers may act to secure local circumstances and demands from supranational legislators concurrently. Moreover, the analysis offers suggestions as to possible consequences of striving...

Do private hospitals outperform public hospitals regarding efficiency, accessibility, and quality of care in the European Union? A literature review.

Science.gov (United States)

Kruse, Florien M; Stadhouders, Niek W; Adang, Eddy M; Groenewoud, Stef; Jeurissen, Patrick P T

2018-03-02

European countries have enhanced the scope of private provision within their health care systems. Privatizing services have been suggested as a means to improve access, quality, and efficiency in health care. This raises questions about the relative performance of private hospitals compared with public hospitals. Most systematic reviews that scrutinize the performance of the private hospitals originate from the United States. A systematic overview for Europe is nonexisting. We fill this gap with a systematic realist review comparing the performance of public hospitals to private hospitals on efficiency, accessibility, and quality of care in the European Union. This review synthesizes evidence from Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Greece, Austria, Spain, and Portugal. Most evidence suggests that public hospitals are at least as efficient as or are more efficient than private hospitals. Accessibility to broader populations is often a matter of concern in private provision: Patients with higher social-economic backgrounds hold better access to private hospital provision, especially in private parallel systems such as the United Kingdom and Greece. The existing evidence on quality of care is often too diverse to make a conclusive statement. In conclusion, the growth in private hospital provision seems not related to improvements in performance in Europe. Our evidence further suggests that the private (for-profit) hospital sector seems to react more strongly to (financial) incentives than other provider types. In such cases, policymakers either should very carefully develop adequate incentive structures or be hesitant to accommodate the growth of the private hospital sector. Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Sociopolitical development of private school children mobilising for disadvantaged others

Science.gov (United States)

Hoeg, Darren; Lemelin, Nathalie; Bencze, John Lawrence

2015-12-01

A contemporary focus on democratic decision-making has occurred in school science through curricular developments such as socioscientific issues (SSIs) and Science, Technology, Society and Environment (STSE), creates opportunities for inclusion of activist education. However, it appears these components are often taught, if at all, as simply add-on content. Private schools represent a domain of education that has received relatively little attention in research literature regarding sociopolitical activism for addressing SSIs. In this study, we aimed to document the extent to which private school students were able to implement socioscientific activism and to map their socio-political development in the context of a project on child labour. Data collected from student projects and interviews indicate, in many cases, dramatic development of socially critical views and activist orientations that took place over time, and in various steps. A discussion of the factors enabling students' activist development, such as the school culture, the curriculum, and their teacher, are discussed.

Comparing replacement rates under private and federal retirement systems.

Science.gov (United States)

Martin, Patricia P

(100 percent) high earners (160 percent), and maximum earners (earnings at the taxable maximum amount). Overall, this analysis found that: Excluding Social Security benefits and TSP and defined contribution annuities, CSRS retirees have a higher pre-retirement salary replacement rate than either FERS or private-sector retirees. Private-sector retirees, however, have higher replacement rate than their FERS counterparts. Including Social Security benefits but not TSP and defined contribution plan annuities, CSRS retirees who are maximum earners have a higher pre-retirement salary replacement rate (despite receiving no Social Security benefits) than FERS retirees with the same earnings. Private-sector retirees in all earnings categories have a higher replacement rate than federal retirees with the same earnings. Including Social Security and TSP and defined contribution plan annuities, private-sector retirees in all earnings categories have a higher replacement rate than federal retirees, but their rate is close to that of FERS retirees. The rate is higher for FERS retirees than for CSRS retirees in all earnings categories. This analysis shows that replacement creates could exceed 100 percent for FERS employees who contribute who contribute 6 percent of earnings to the TSP over full working career. Private-sector replacement rates were quite similar for those with both a defined benefit and a defined contribution pension plan. Social Security replacement rates make up the highest proportion of benefits for th private sector's lowest income quartile group. The replacement rate for 401(k) plans and the TSP account for a higher proportion of benefits than does Social Security for all other income groups, assuming the absence of a defined benefit plan.

Privatizing Schooling and Policy Making: The American Legislative Exchange Council and New Political and Discursive Strategies of Education Governance

Science.gov (United States)

Anderson, Gary L.; Donchik, Liliana Montoro

2016-01-01

In this article, we examine the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as an example of a unique node within larger policy networks composed of new policy entrepreneurs (e.g., venture philanthropists, think tanks, private "edubusinesses" and their lobbyists, advocacy organizations, and social entrepreneurs). These new policy…

Private Security Contractors in Darfur

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Leander, Anna

2006-01-01

This article argues that the role of Private Security Contractors in Darfur reflects and reinforces neo-liberal governmentality in contemporary security governance. It is an argument (in line with other articles in this special issue) which is more interested in discussing how the privatization....... It underlines that governance is increasingly taking place through a set of (quasi-) markets, it is marked by entrepreneurial values, and a hands off approach to governance. We then discuss the way this overall change is reflected in and reinforced by the role of private security contractors in Darfur. Drawing...... at these processes is necessary to understand the role of private security contractors in Darfur. But more than this, practices in Darfur entrench neo-liberal governmentality in security more generally. The managerial and `de-politicizing' approach to security in Darfur displaces alternative views not only...

THE PERFORMANCE OF SERVQUAL TO MEASURE SERVICE QUALITY IN PRIVATE UNIVERSITY

OpenAIRE

Leonnard

2018-01-01

The increasing number of educational services has caused a high competition in this industry. In Indonesia, the number of private universities is the highest compared to state universities and other forms of higher education institutions. Ability to predict factors that are important in providing educational services to achieve student satisfaction and make them loyal to the university is highly necessary. In this study, we investigated the main factors of service quality that affect student ...

What is the private sector? Understanding private provision in the health systems of low-income and middle-income countries.

Science.gov (United States)

Mackintosh, Maureen; Channon, Amos; Karan, Anup; Selvaraj, Sakthivel; Cavagnero, Eleonora; Zhao, Hongwen

2016-08-06

Private health care in low-income and middle-income countries is very extensive and very heterogeneous, ranging from itinerant medicine sellers, through millions of independent practitioners-both unlicensed and licensed-to corporate hospital chains and large private insurers. Policies for universal health coverage (UHC) must address this complex private sector. However, no agreed measures exist to assess the scale and scope of the private health sector in these countries, and policy makers tasked with managing and regulating mixed health systems struggle to identify the key features of their private sectors. In this report, we propose a set of metrics, drawn from existing data that can form a starting point for policy makers to identify the structure and dynamics of private provision in their particular mixed health systems; that is, to identify the consequences of specific structures, the drivers of change, and levers available to improve efficiency and outcomes. The central message is that private sectors cannot be understood except within their context of mixed health systems since private and public sectors interact. We develop an illustrative and partial country typology, using the metrics and other country information, to illustrate how the scale and operation of the public sector can shape the private sector's structure and behaviour, and vice versa. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Private Military and Security Contractors

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

In Private Military and Security Contractors: Controlling the Corporate Warrior a multinational team of 16 scholars and a practitioner from political science, sociology, and law address a developing phenomenon: controlling the use of privatized force by states in international politics. Robust...

Public by Day, Private by Night: Examining the Private Lives of Kenya's Public Universities

Science.gov (United States)

Wangenge-Ouma, Gerald

2012-01-01

This article examines the emergence of the public university in Kenya as a key provider of private higher education, characterised mainly by the phenomenon of the "private public university student." It probes the broader socio-economic reforms circumscribing the privatisation of Kenya's public universities and the local and global…

Ecuador still grappling over privatization as oil flow rises

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Anon.

1993-01-01

Ecuador continues to grapple with efforts to privatize its petroleum sector a year after disclosing its plans to withdraw from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. One of OPEC's smallest members, Ecuador last year said it would leave the group in March 1993, citing high membership costs and minimal benefits. Industry observers also noted at the time Ecuador's plans to sharply boost production this century might run afoul of its OPEC quota. Political controversy is stalling efforts to implement a new reform oriented hydrocarbon law in Ecuador that would open the country's petroleum sector to greater participation by foreign companies and privatize state petroleum companies, including Petroleos del Ecuador (Petroecuador). That comes even as foreign contractors' participation in Ecuador's upstream sector are making a significant contribution to boosting the country's oil production, which had remained flat for a number of years. The paper discusses the status of the new law, the controversy surrounding reforms, the master plan, environmental concerns, reserves and production, Petroecuador activity, planned pipeline work, service contracts, start-up of Oxy, details of Oxy development, and Elf's start-up

Protocol for VOC-Arid ID remediation performance characterization

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Tegner, B.J.; Hassig, N.L.; Last, G.V.

1994-09-01

The Volatile Organic Compound-Arid Integrated Demonstration (VOC-Arid ID) is a technology development program sponsored by the US Department of Energy's Office of Technology Development that is targeted to acquire, develop, demonstrate, and deploy new technologies for the remediation of VOC contaminants in the soils and groundwaters of arid DOE sites. Technologies cannot be adequately evaluated unless sufficient site characterization and technology performance data have been collection and analyzed. The responsibility for identifying these data needs has been placed largely on the Principal Investigators (PIs) developing the remediation technology, who usually are not experts in site characterization or in identification of appropriate sampling, analysis, and monitoring techniques to support the field testing. This document provides a protocol for planning the collection of data before, during, and after a test of a new technology. This generic protocol provides the PIs and project managers with a set of steps to follow. The protocol is based on a data collection planning process called the Data Quality Objectives (DQO) process, which was originally developed by the US Environmental Protection Agency and has been expanded by DOE to support site cleanup decisions. The DQO process focuses on the quality and quantity of data required to make decision. Stakeholders to the decisions must negotiate such key inputs to the process as the decision rules that will be used and the acceptable probabilities of making decision errors

An evaluation of two large scale demand side financing programs for maternal health in India: the MATIND study protocol

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sidney Kristi

2012-08-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background High maternal mortality in India is a serious public health challenge. Demand side financing interventions have emerged as a strategy to promote access to emergency obstetric care. Two such state run programs, Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSYand Chiranjeevi Yojana (CY, were designed and implemented to reduce financial access barriers that preclude women from obtaining emergency obstetric care. JSY, a conditional cash transfer, awards money directly to a woman who delivers in a public health facility. This will be studied in Madhya Pradesh province. CY, a voucher based program, empanels private obstetricians in Gujarat province, who are reimbursed by the government to perform deliveries of socioeconomically disadvantaged women. The programs have been in operation for the last seven years. Methods/designs The study outlined in this protocol will assess and compare the influence of the two programs on various aspects of maternal health care including trends in program uptake, institutional delivery rates, maternal and neonatal outcomes, quality of care, experiences of service providers and users, and cost effectiveness. The study will collect primary data using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, including facility level questionnaires, observations, a population based survey, in-depth interviews, and focus group discussions. Primary data will be collected in three districts of each province. The research will take place at three levels: the state health departments, obstetric facilities in the districts and among recently delivered mothers in the community. Discussion The protocol is a comprehensive assessment of the performance and impact of the programs and an economic analysis. It will fill existing evidence gaps in the scientific literature including access and quality to services, utilization, coverage and impact. The implementation of the protocol will also generate evidence to facilitate decision making

An evaluation of two large scale demand side financing programs for maternal health in India: the MATIND study protocol.

Science.gov (United States)

Sidney, Kristi; de Costa, Ayesha; Diwan, Vishal; Mavalankar, Dileep V; Smith, Helen

2012-08-27

High maternal mortality in India is a serious public health challenge. Demand side financing interventions have emerged as a strategy to promote access to emergency obstetric care. Two such state run programs, Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY)and Chiranjeevi Yojana (CY), were designed and implemented to reduce financial access barriers that preclude women from obtaining emergency obstetric care. JSY, a conditional cash transfer, awards money directly to a woman who delivers in a public health facility. This will be studied in Madhya Pradesh province. CY, a voucher based program, empanels private obstetricians in Gujarat province, who are reimbursed by the government to perform deliveries of socioeconomically disadvantaged women. The programs have been in operation for the last seven years. The study outlined in this protocol will assess and compare the influence of the two programs on various aspects of maternal health care including trends in program uptake, institutional delivery rates, maternal and neonatal outcomes, quality of care, experiences of service providers and users, and cost effectiveness. The study will collect primary data using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, including facility level questionnaires, observations, a population based survey, in-depth interviews, and focus group discussions. Primary data will be collected in three districts of each province. The research will take place at three levels: the state health departments, obstetric facilities in the districts and among recently delivered mothers in the community. The protocol is a comprehensive assessment of the performance and impact of the programs and an economic analysis. It will fill existing evidence gaps in the scientific literature including access and quality to services, utilization, coverage and impact. The implementation of the protocol will also generate evidence to facilitate decision making among policy makers and program managers who currently work with or

Scaling HEP to Web size with RESTful protocols: The frontier example

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Dykstra, Dave

2011-01-01

The World-Wide-Web has scaled to an enormous size. The largest single contributor to its scalability is the HTTP protocol, particularly when used in conformity to REST (REpresentational State Transfer) principles. High Energy Physics (HEP) computing also has to scale to an enormous size, so it makes sense to base much of it on RESTful protocols. Frontier, which reads databases with an HTTP-based RESTful protocol, has successfully scaled to deliver production detector conditions data from both the CMS and ATLAS LHC detectors to hundreds of thousands of computer cores worldwide. Frontier is also able to re-use a large amount of standard software that runs the Web: on the clients, caches, and servers. I discuss the specific ways in which HTTP and REST enable high scalability for Frontier. I also briefly discuss another protocol used in HEP computing that is HTTP-based and RESTful, and another protocol that could benefit from it. My goal is to encourage HEP protocol designers to consider HTTP and REST whenever the same information is needed in many places.

Consumer Preferences for Public and Private Sector Certifications for Beef Products in the United States and the United Kingdom

OpenAIRE

Christensen, Bryan J.; Bailey, DeeVon; Hunnicutt, Lynn; Ward, Ruby A.

2003-01-01

Focus groups and street surveys are used in the US and the UK to determine consumer perceptions of the ability of different agencies, associations, and groups to certify beef products for quality, food safety, animal welfare, social responsibility, and environmental responsibility. US consumers see the role of the federal government primarily as assuring food safety but desire the private sector to make other types of certifications. UK consumers prefer the private sector to assure food safet...

We do not recognise anything 'private': public interest and private law under the socialist legal tradition and beyond

OpenAIRE

Mańko, R.; Sitek, B.; Szczerbowski, J.J.; Bauknecht, A.W.; Szpanowska, M.; Wasyliszyn, K.

2015-01-01

In line with Lenin’s famous quote that Bolsheviks "do not recognise anything private" and that private law must be permeated with public interest, the private (civil) law of the USSR and other countries of the Soviet bloc, including Poland underwent reform aimed at furthering the public interest at the expense of the private one. Specific legal institutions were introduced for this purpose, in the form of legal innovations, loosely, if at all, based on pre-existing Western models. In the Poli...

Legitimacy, trustee incentives, and board processes: the case of public and private non-profit nursing homes.

Science.gov (United States)

Dewaelheyns, Nico; Eeckloo, Kristof; Van Hulle, Cynthia

2011-01-01

Using a unique data set, this study explores how type of ownership (government/private) is related to processes of governance. The findings suggest that the neo-institutional perspective and the self-interest rationale of the agency perspective are helpful in explaining processes of governance in both government- and privately owned non-profit organizations. Due to adverse incentives and the quest for legitimacy, supervising governance bodies within local government-owned non-profit institutions pay relatively less attention to the development of high quality supervising bodies and delegate little to management. Our findings also indicate that governance processes in private institutions are more aligned with the business model and that this alignment is likely driven by a concern to improve decision making. By contrast, our data also suggest that in local government-owned institutions re-election concerns of politicians-trustees are an important force in the governance processes of these institutions. In view of these adverse incentives - in contrast to the case of private organizations - a governance code is unlikely to entail much improvement in government-owned organizations. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Gastroenterology training in private hospitals: India vs South Africa

Science.gov (United States)

Mulder, Chris Jacob Johan; Puri, Amarender Singh; Reddy, Duvvur Nageshwar

2010-01-01

In South Africa, nurses and doctors are emigrating in significant numbers. Job satisfaction, safety and ensuring career progression are important in retaining doctors to make a career in Republic of South Africa (RSA). Due to budgetary constraints many hospitals have not been upgraded. Coming home after overseas training seems difficult. In RSA it takes a minimum of 13 years for a young specialist to become registered and 15 years for subspecialists. Career progression, creating more specialist trainees in public and private hospitals and shortening the period of professional training are potential solutions to the problem. India, which has a population of more than 1 billion people, is struggling with similar problems. For the past 10-15 years, private hospitals have assisted in manpower development for medical specialist and subspecialist careers. Currently their private sector trains 60% of their recognised (sub)specialities fellows. A national task force for specialist training in RSA should be instituted. It should discuss, based on the current status and projected specialist and subspecialist personnel requirements, the future structure and logistics of training needs. This is required in all subspecialities including gastroenterology, as has been done in India. It is hoped that as a consequence well-trained doctors, similar to those in India, might move to provincial hospitals in rural areas, upgrading the medical services and keeping medical power in South Africa. South Africa should become a model for Sub-Saharan Africa, as India already is for South-East Asia. PMID:20180232

Perancangan dan Analisis Redistribution Routing Protocol OSPF dan EIGRP

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

DWI ARYANTA

2014-07-01

OSPF (Open Shortest Path First and EIGRP (Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol are two routing protocols are widely used in computer networks. Differences between the characteristics of routing protocols pose a problem in the delivery of data packets. Redistribution technique is the solution for communication between routing protocols. By using the software Cisco Packet Tracer 5.3 in this study were made simulating OSPF and EIGRP redistribution linked by technique, then compared its quality with a single EIGRP and OSPF routing protocols. Testing parameters in this study is the value of the time delay and trace route. Value trace route based on direct calculation of cost and metric compared with the simulation results. The result can be OSPF and EIGRP redistribution process. Value delay redistribution 1% better than OSPF and EIGRP 2-3% under traffic density dependent. In calculating the trace route redistribution is done 2 calculations, the cost for OSPF area and the area of the EIGRP metric. Making primary and alternate paths based on the packet delivery rate and the cost of the smallest metric, it is proved by calculation and simulation. Keywords: OSPF, EIGRP, Redistribution, Delay, Cost, Metric.

Private benefits in corporate control transactions

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Poulsen, Thomas

This paper presents an analytical framework from which it can be inferred whether sellers or buyers in corporate control transactions value private benefits highest. I am thus able to suggest an answer to the question: Are blocks of shares traded because the buyer is a more efficient monitor...... with high security benefits, or because the buyer has high private benefits from the control rights that come with the shares? Using voting rights as the vehicle for private benefits, I find that the selling shareholders in block transactions attach more value to private benefits than the buyers. In tender...... offer transactions, the answer is that private benefits are insignificant to both sides of the transaction. As an alternative measure of the transaction premium, I calculate the abnormal return premium. This represents the stock market's valuation of the transaction. I find that the stock market puts...

BioBlocks: Programming Protocols in Biology Made Easier.

Science.gov (United States)

Gupta, Vishal; Irimia, Jesús; Pau, Iván; Rodríguez-Patón, Alfonso

2017-07-21

The methods to execute biological experiments are evolving. Affordable fluid handling robots and on-demand biology enterprises are making automating entire experiments a reality. Automation offers the benefit of high-throughput experimentation, rapid prototyping, and improved reproducibility of results. However, learning to automate and codify experiments is a difficult task as it requires programming expertise. Here, we present a web-based visual development environment called BioBlocks for describing experimental protocols in biology. It is based on Google's Blockly and Scratch, and requires little or no experience in computer programming to automate the execution of experiments. The experiments can be specified, saved, modified, and shared between multiple users in an easy manner. BioBlocks is open-source and can be customized to execute protocols on local robotic platforms or remotely, that is, in the cloud. It aims to serve as a de facto open standard for programming protocols in Biology.

Privatization of oil companies in Latin America

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Forsyth, A.; Mommer, B.; McBeth, B.

1995-01-01

Three linked articles explore the current movement towards privatization in the various countries of South America. While the progress away from state control varies from country to country, the first article argues that the movement will offer economic benefits to the Latin American petroleum industry as a whole, despite the political difficulties which must be overcome. In the second article, public distaste for the nationalization of the Venezuelan oil industry back in 1943, petroleum engineers, economists, private sector representatives and oil industry employees all oppose wholesale privatization, favouring national and private investment within Venezuela. The last author argues for an efficient regulatory framework to oversee privatization schemes. (UK)

We do not recognise anything 'private': public interest and private law under the socialist legal tradition and beyond

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Mańko, R.; Sitek, B.; Szczerbowski, J.J.; Bauknecht, A.W.; Szpanowska, M.; Wasyliszyn, K.

2015-01-01

In line with Lenin’s famous quote that Bolsheviks "do not recognise anything private" and that private law must be permeated with public interest, the private (civil) law of the USSR and other countries of the Soviet bloc, including Poland underwent reform aimed at furthering the public interest at

D-RATS 2011: RAFT Protocol Overview

Science.gov (United States)

Utz, Hans

2011-01-01

A brief overview presentation on the protocol used during the D-RATS2011 field test for file transfer from the field-test robots at Black Point Lava Flow AZ to Johnson Space Center, Houston TX over a simulated time-delay. The file transfer actually uses a commercial implementation of an open communications standard. The focus of the work lies on how to make the state of the distributed system observable.

What Role for Private Higher Education in Europe?

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Teixeira, Pedro N.; Biscaia, Ricardo; Rocha, Vera

2016-01-01

In recent decades, we have seen the emergence of private higher education in many European countries. This has been associated with the waves of significant expansion of the higher education system and with changes in regulation patterns, which have promoted a growing private-like behavior...... of public higher education institutions and the development of private provision in several European countries. The aim of this text is to discuss the relevance of the various dimensions of privatization in European higher education and to explore the relationship between public and private sectors...... in several European countries. This analysis points out some major patterns of the private higher education sector in Europe and reflects about the major issues faced by those systems regarding the potential contribution of private higher education....

Making Decisions about Workforce Development in Registered Training Organisations

Science.gov (United States)

Hawke, Geof

2008-01-01

The purpose of this research activity is to understand further how large and small registered training organisations (RTOs) make decisions about the allocation of resources for developing their workforces. Six registered training organisations--four technical and further education (TAFE) institutes and two private providers--were selected for…

Data-driven CT protocol review and management—experience from a large academic hospital.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Da; Savage, Cristy A; Li, Xinhua; Liu, Bob

2015-03-01

Protocol review plays a critical role in CT quality assurance, but large numbers of protocols and inconsistent protocol names on scanners and in exam records make thorough protocol review formidable. In this investigation, we report on a data-driven cataloging process that can be used to assist in the reviewing and management of CT protocols. We collected lists of scanner protocols, as well as 18 months of recent exam records, for 10 clinical scanners. We developed computer algorithms to automatically deconstruct the protocol names on the scanner and in the exam records into core names and descriptive components. Based on the core names, we were able to group the scanner protocols into a much smaller set of "core protocols," and to easily link exam records with the scanner protocols. We calculated the percentage of usage for each core protocol, from which the most heavily used protocols were identified. From the percentage-of-usage data, we found that, on average, 18, 33, and 49 core protocols per scanner covered 80%, 90%, and 95%, respectively, of all exams. These numbers are one order of magnitude smaller than the typical numbers of protocols that are loaded on a scanner (200-300, as reported in the literature). Duplicated, outdated, and rarely used protocols on the scanners were easily pinpointed in the cataloging process. The data-driven cataloging process can facilitate the task of protocol review. Copyright © 2015 American College of Radiology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Shared decision making for stroke prevention in atrial fibrillation: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial.

Science.gov (United States)

Kunneman, Marleen; Branda, Megan E; Noseworthy, Peter A; Linzer, Mark; Burnett, Bruce; Dick, Sara; Spencer-Bonilla, Gabriela; Fernandez, Cara A; Gorr, Haeshik; Wambua, Mike; Keune, Shelly; Zeballos-Palacios, Claudia; Hargraves, Ian; Shah, Nilay D; Montori, Victor M

2017-09-29

Nonvalvular atrial fibrillation (AF) is a common ongoing health problem that places patients at risk of stroke. Whether and how a patient addresses this risk depends on each patient's goals, context, and values. Consequently, leading cardiovascular societies recommend using shared decision making (SDM) to individualize antithrombotic treatment in patients with AF. The aim of this study is to assess the extent to which the ANTICOAGULATION CHOICE conversation tool promotes high-quality SDM and influences anticoagulation uptake and adherence in patients with AF at risk of strokes. This study protocol describes a multicenter, encounter-level, randomized trial to assess the effect of using the ANTICOAGULATION CHOICE conversation tool in the clinical encounter, compared to usual care. The participating centers include an academic hospital system, a suburban community group practice, and an urban safety net hospital, all in Minnesota, USA. Patients with ongoing nonvalvular AF at risk of strokes (CHA 2 DS 2 -VASc score ≥ 1 in men, or ≥ 2 in women) will be eligible for participation. We aim to include 999 patients and their clinicians. The primary outcome is the quality of SDM as perceived by participants, and as assessed by a post-encounter survey that ascertains (a) knowledge transfer, (b) concordance of the decision made, (c) quality of communication, and (d) satisfaction with the decision-making process. Recordings of encounters will be reviewed to assess the extent of patient involvement and how participants use the tool (fidelity). Anticoagulant use, choice of agent, and adherence will be drawn from patients' medical and pharmacy records. Strokes and bleeding events will be drawn from patient records. This study will provide a valid and precise measure of the effect of the ANTICOAGULATION CHOICE conversation tool on SDM quality and processes, and on the treatment choices and adherence to therapy among AF patients at risk of stroke. ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT

Dead public spaces - live private corners: (Recontextualization of musically public and private

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jakovljević Rastko

2009-01-01

Full Text Available The expressions of private and public musical life and experience are mostly discussed separately. This article joins these two concepts into one scope and surveys the identity of both. In ideal (utopian? traditional context between private and public music experience (life, the context shows ideal vitality and consistence, while in an 'irregular' context these two concepts begin to distance themselves, opening space for marginality or so called 'errors'. This article studies bagpipe tradition in Serbia, at different stages of its development and in different periods, specifically focusing on rural and urban contexts in diverse sociopolitical conditions. Although bagpipe tradition still exists in Serbia it is far removed from what it once was, and the idea is to represent the contexts of that process, private and public, sociopolitical, and marginal aspects, from the 19th century (or hypothetically before then until today.

Entrepreneurial Crowdfunding without Private Claims

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Boudreau, Kevin J.; Jeppesen, Lars Bo; Reichstein, Toke

Today's crowdfunding raises funds for tiny, private entrepreneurial ventures without granting funders private claims to a project's future value. Rather than “investments,” these are “contributions.” This paper argues that for such crowdfunding neither producer nor consumer surplus – i.e., project...

Is Nordic Private Equity Different?

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Spliid, Robert

2013-01-01

Most research on private equity is based on American theory, tested on American empirical data. Nevertheless, the private equity concept has gained a solid foothold in the Nordic region, especially in Sweden. This article analyzes whether American-biased assumptions prevail in the Nordic countries...

The structure of privatization plans

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Perotti, E.C.; Guney, S.E.

1992-01-01

In recent years a vast transfer of state-owned assets to the private sector has taken place in many countries, irrespective of their level of development or the political affiliation of their government. Privatization is believed to improve economic incentives; attract managerial and technological

Role of the private sector in vaccination service delivery in India: evidence from private-sector vaccine sales data, 2009-12.

Science.gov (United States)

Sharma, Abhishek; Kaplan, Warren A; Chokshi, Maulik; Zodpey, Sanjay P

2016-09-01

India's Universal Immunization Programme (UIP) provides basic vaccines free-of-cost in the public sector, yet national vaccination coverage is poor. The Government of India has urged an expanded role for the private sector to help achieve universal immunization coverage. We conducted a state-by-state analysis of the role of the private sector in vaccinating Indian children against each of the six primary childhood diseases covered under India's UIP. We analyzed IMS Health data on Indian private-sector vaccine sales, 2011 Indian Census data and national household surveys (DHS/NFHS 2005-06 and UNICEF CES 2009) to estimate the percentage of vaccinated children among the 2009-12 birth cohort who received a given vaccine in the private sector in 16 Indian states. We also analyzed the estimated private-sector vaccine shares as function of state-specific socio-economic status. Overall in 16 states, the private sector contributed 4.7% towards tuberculosis (Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG)), 3.5% towards measles, 2.3% towards diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus (DPT3) and 7.6% towards polio (OPV3) overall (both public and private sectors) vaccination coverage. Certain low income states (Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Assam and Bihar) have low private as well as public sector vaccination coverage. The private sector's role has been limited primarily to the high income states as opposed to these low income states where the majority of Indian children live. Urban areas with good access to the private sector and the ability to pay increases the Indian population's willingness to access private-sector vaccination services. In India, the public sector offers vaccination services to the majority of the population but the private sector should not be neglected as it could potentially improve overall vaccination coverage. The government could train and incentivize a wider range of private-sector health professionals to help deliver the vaccines, especially in the low

Peru turnaround tied to privatization

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Anon.

1993-01-01

Petroleos del Peru predicts a 10% increase in Peru's oil production this year and a further increase in 1994. Petroperu also forecasts a sharp increase in drilling in Peru this year. After several years of declining oil production, a gradual turnaround in the cash strapped country's petroleum industry is largely tied to its progress in privatization. The government last year began a campaign to privatize all state owned companies by the end of July 1995. The paper discusses forecasts by Petroperu; the contract of Occidental del Amazonas Inc.; the Petromar privatization; Great Western's contract; development of the Aguaytia gas field; and refinery contracts

Venture Capital and Other Private Equity: A Survey

OpenAIRE

Andrew Metrick; Ayako Yasuda

2010-01-01

We review the theory and evidence on venture capital (VC) and other private equity: why professional private equity exists, what private equity managers do with their portfolio companies, what returns they earn, who earns more and why, what determines the design of contracts signed between (i) private equity managers and their portfolio companies and (ii) private equity managers and their investors (limited partners), and how/whether these contractual designs affect outcomes. Findings highlig...

Private labels : The brands of the future

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Keller, Kristopher

2017-01-01

This dissertation consists of three essays that study private labels’ evolution from private labels as brand class to individual private-label brands from three different perspectives. In the second chapter of this dissertation (essay 1), I study the antecedents and performance implications of