In two remote northern provinces of the Lao People's Democratic Republic, provincial and district teams were trained and subsequently conducted a qualitative study using a participatory approach to investigate people's knowledge, attitudes, beliefs and practices in relation to women's and children's nutrition. Using focus group discussions, key informant interviews, and structured observation, ...

Professor Kristen Nygaard (1926-2002) was a multi-talented scientist whose achievements were amply honoured in his later years. For general readers of Computer Science history Nygaard will be recognized as the creator with Professor Ole-Johan Dahl of the SIMULA programming languages and object-oriented programming. But Nygaard also had a social and political engagement that over the years broug...

The article shows how judicial review has expanded around the globe from the United States, Western Europe, and Japan to become a regular feature of constitutional design in Africa and Asia. Although the formal power to exercise judicial review is now nearly universal in democratic states, courts have varied in the extent to which they are willing to exercise this power in practice. After decad...

This paper analyses a new framework for decision-making in e-democracies that exploits the power of Internet based public knowledge, which is called briefly e-cognocracy. This is not a procedure to improve technical aspects using the Internet (e.g. e-voting); it is rather a procedure to add a new quality to the democratic system by using the network. This proposed system of e-cognocracy would a...

This study assesses differences in use of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) and relates them to patterns of expressive political participation, mobilization efforts, and traditional civic participation. Relying on data collected in August 2008 from a random sample of respondents designed to represent Colombia’s adult urban population, this paper provides evidence that informational u...

Open and Distance Learning (ODL) is an emerging area to address the fundamental issues of access, retention and quality of higher education to improve human capabilities and achieving the vision of knowledge economy. In India, a higher proportion of younger population is found due to unique demographic transition. Providing quality higher education to such a large proportion of population, in a...

Offshore jacket-type towers are steel structures designed and constructed in marine environments for various purposes such as oil exploration and exploitation units, oceanographic research, and undersea testing. In this paper a newly developed meta-heuristic algorithm, namely Cyclical Parthenogenesis Algorithm (CPA), is utilized for sizing optimization of a jacket-type offshore structure. The a...

This article describes and evaluates the Jury Trial technique, an innovative educational instrument used in a pilot workshop on Social Control and Gender by health council members in Greater Metropolitan Florian polis, Santa Catarina, Brazil. The reliability and validity were studied based on the participants' opinions, complemented by qualitative observation of the work. There was consensus in...

Nurse managers who can observe their own behaviour and its effects on employees can adjust to a better leadership style. The intention of this study was to explore nurses' and supervisors' perceptions of nurse managers' leadership styles. Open-ended interviews were conducted with 11 nurses and 10 superiors. The data were analysed by content analysis. In the study, six leadership styles were ide...

Governments worldwide realize the importance of strengthening active participation of citizens in the political process. By recognizing the need for engaging the social intelligence of citizens, governments will be able to govern more effectively and credibly. The field of public participation has been recently enhanced with the adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) thus...