A (truly) integrated approach to the management of urban water should take into account, further to the characteristics of the technical system, a range of socio-economic processes and interactions – combined into what has been termed the “socio-technical system”. This is by no means an easy endeavour: conventional simulation tools often fail to capture socio-economic processes and their intera...

Many large-scale disasters have a strong human component. They cannot be solved by technical approaches alone, but require an understanding of the collective social dynamics. This is maybe most obvious for financial crises, famines and other shortages of resources, epidemic spreading of diseases, wars and international terrorism, revolutions, or the collapse of trust and cooperation in societie...

Healthcare delivery system can immensely benefit from the use of HIT (Healthcare Information Technology). Clinical and administrative automation in hospitals can improve clinical quality through reduced mortality. Previous literature has failed to identify the impact of security technology usage and socio-economic factors on clinical quality improvement. Our paper addresses this gap through the...

The local community is a complex socio-economic system, and its ability to function for an indefinitely long period of time (viability) is not investigated sufficiently today. The purpose of the research was, using the cognitive mapping, propose to the local community management developing their own management strategies to ensure its viability. Considering the weakly structured subject area of...

The standard socio-economic science model (SSSM) assumes very considerable cognitive powers on behalf of its individual agents. Agents are able both to gather a large amount of information and to process this efficiently so that they can carry out maximising behaviour. Criticisms of this approach are widespread, even within the discipline of economics itself. We set up agent based models in whi...

BACKGROUND The influence of social support on health was explored among gender and socio-economic groups with the aim of contributing to the explanation of socio-economic health differences among Slovak adolescents. METHODS The sample consisted of 2616 Slovak adolescents (52.4% male, 47.6% female, mean age 15 years). The data were assessed by a self-reported questionnaire including measures o...

Water systems evolve through time, changing constantly due to physical pressures or as a result of how we manage them. Changing socio-economic conditions drastically increase the uncertainty associated with such changes, particularly with regards to the outcome of water resources management decisions. There is an increasing need for such uncertainties to be recognised and addressed by more adap...

Among the numerous factors that influence the pattern of children's growth and development there are factors of the changeable socio-economic environment. The inequalities among the socio-economic strata in the Hungarian society have increased during last decades. The main objective of the study was to examine the body structure of children and adolescents living in different socio-economic bac...