Advantages of urbanization such as access to clean water, health, and overall easier life in cities, as well as the disadvantages or its negative effects on environment cannot be ignored. Today, there are numerous environmental problems due to the reduction in ecologically valuable places within urban areas. Bringing nature to the cities appears to be essential to enhance urban environment and ...

The purpose of this article is to investigate the divergent approaches of Iranian couples towards purchasing activities. A questionnaire comprising 55 items was distributed among 400 couples in shopping centers in order to examine their decision-making styles. Analyses conducted included scale reliabilities and validities, as well as EFA and CFA were utilized. Seven decision making styles among...

background: various decisions have been made on technology application at all levels of the health system in different countries around the world. health technology assessment is considered as one of the best scientific tools at the service of policy- makers. this study attempts to investigate the current challenges of iran’s health technology assessment and provide appropriate strategies to es...

the main purpose of this research is designing model of factors that affect utilization of policy research with concept mapping technique and verifying it. for this in three stage, sequential-exploratory mixed methods design is used. in first stage, literature review, interview and focus group is used for identifying factors. the analysis is used for analyzing data. in second stage for designin...

OBJECTIVE To estimate the spatial intensity of urban violence events using wavelet-based methods and emergency room data. METHODS Information on victims attended at the emergency room of a public hospital in the city of São Paulo, Southeastern Brazil, from January 1, 2002 to January 11, 2003 were obtained from hospital records. The spatial distribution of 3,540 events was recorded and a unifo...

A simulation model called VirSim was developed to aid policy making in Sweden. The model simulates the spread of pandemic influenza, using real population data on a national and regional level. Swedish authorities wanted a model that was both quick to run and to implement as a complement to the existing model MicroSim. The possibility to interactively investigate the effect of varying different...

This paper presents a novel conceptualization of policy making as social drama. The selection and presentation of evidence for policy making, including the choice of which questions to ask, which evidence to compile in a synthesis and which syntheses to bring to the policy making table, should be considered as moves in a rhetorical argumentation game and not as the harvesting of objective facts...

this book makes abundantly clear the sustained freshness of snyder path-breaking and dauntingly original work, which has long set the agenda for the systematic explanation of foreign policy decisions. thevery thoughtful essays prepared for the present volume demonstrate dramatically the continued centrality of the issues snyder and his associates raised more than 40 years ago. prescient in its ...