Cash-like payments in electronic commerce and at the traditional point of sale are expected to be beneficial, e.g., because of privacy protection, low transaction costs, and irrevocability. Therefore, we discuss how to design electronic cash in a way that it both mirrors the most important characteristics of traditional cash, but also fulfils the expectations which arise towards electronic mean...

AIM To explore women's experiences of living with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) at home. DESIGN An explorative and descriptive qualitative design. METHODS A consecutive sample of nine women with COPD living at home. Data were collected in 2014 using semi-structured interviews and analysed using a qualitative content analysis. RESULTS Three main themes were identified: havin...

We present a first formal analysis of specific and complete local integration. Complete local integration was previously proposed as a criterion for detecting entities or wholes in distributed dynamical systems. Such entities in turn were conceived to form the basis of a theory of emergence of agents within dynamical systems. Here, we give a more thorough account of the underlying formal measur...

Most developed democracies have faced the challenge of priority setting in health care by setting up specialized agencies to take decisions on which medical services to include in public health baskets. Under the influence of Daniels and Sabin's seminal work on the topic, agencies increasingly aim to fulfil criteria of procedural justice, such as accountability and transparency. We assume, howe...

USARSim is a simulator used for rescuing tasks in the RoboCup Rescue based on the Unreal Engine. In order to fulfil the rising expectations of this cup, not only the robots but the environment has to keep up with the demands. Vital to the environment is a good representation of victims in need of rescue. Up to now victims in USARSim have not been capable of performing movement, controlled anima...

Davidson writes excellently about the risk of too much medicine in Oman and the Middle East suggesting that this may be related to traditional Arab culture that seeks to please or satisfy a guest.1 This is known as Ikram ad-Daif, an Arabic phrase which can be translated as ‘honouring one’s guest’; one of the most established practices in Arab and the wider Muslim tradition. Application of this ...

With advances in information and communication technologies (ICT), changes have been produced in physiotherapy provision. However, low adoption of the new technologies calls attention for better theoretical model and methods for ICT design, which may fulfil the needs of health professionals and their patients. In this work we discuss the framework for designing ICT for physiotherapy context bas...

ShopBots allow consumers to compare product offerings of online retailers and can thereby significantly reduce consumers’ search costs. Although it was expected that these comparisons would pull prices down to a single market price, prices in online markets have not even come close to those expectations. In this paper we show how retailers influence the quality of data and thereby successfully ...

Using data from the first seven waves of the Health and Retirement Study (1992 to 2004), the authors examined the extent to which joint retirement expectations were realized, the role of couple-level agreement in facilitating joint retirement, whether husbands' or wives' expectations were more likely to be realized in cases of disagreement, and factors associated with the realization of expecta...