Call admission control with two classes of users is investigated via a nonlinear stochastic knapsack model. The feasibility region represents the subset of the call space, where given constraints on the quality of service have to be satisfied.Admissible strategies are searched for within the class of coordinate-convex policies. Structural properties that the optimal policies belonging to such a...

New assessment guidelines for measuring the overall impact of mental health problems in Latin America have served as a catalyst for countries to review their mental health policies. Latin American countries have taken various steps to address long-standing problems such as structural difficulties, scarce financial and human resources, and social, political, and cultural obstacles in the impleme...

The real option management of commodity storage assets is an important practical problem. Practitioners heuristically solve the resulting stochastic optimization model using the rolling intrinsic (RI) and rolling basket of spread options (RSO) policies. Combined with Monte Carlo simulation, these policies typically yield near optimal lower bound estimates on the value of storage. This paper pro...

Acknowledgements This study would not have been possible without the hundreds of people in the European Structural Funds Community who offered their insights, provided data and information. The project team would like to thank all those who gave freely their time to support this work, including the representatives of the national administrations in charge of the coordination of the Structural F...

For Nigerians in need of them, obtaining viable, unadulterated pharmaceutical products has become much more difficult since the IMF/World Bank policies of structural adjustment destroyed the indigenous Nigerian pharmaceutical industry in the late 1980s. Structural adjustment policies called for a high tax on imported raw materials and the devaluation of the naira; between them these policies wi...

1 The Molecular Pathogenesis of Eye Infection Research Center, Dean A. McGee Eye Institute, Departments of Ophthalmology. 2 The Molecular Pathogenesis of Eye Infection Research Center, Dean A. McGee Eye Institute, Departments of Ophthalmology, Cell Biology, and Microbiology & Immunology, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA. E-mail: [email protected]...

BACKGROUND Reporting guidelines have been available for the past 17 years since the inception of the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials statement in 1996. These guidelines were developed to improve the quality of reporting of studies in medical literature. Despite the widespread availability of these guidelines, the quality of reporting of medical literature remained suboptimal. In this...

BACKGROUND Reporting of health research is often inadequate and incomplete. Complete and transparent reporting is imperative to enable readers to assess the validity of research findings for use in healthcare and policy decision-making. To this end, many guidelines, aimed at improving the quality of health research reports, have been developed for reporting a variety of research types. Despite ...

This Article-in-Press has been permanently withdrawn. The editorial policy of Medical Hypotheses makes it clear that the journal considers "radical, speculative, and non-mainstream scientific ideas", and articles will only be acceptable if they are "coherent and clearly expressed." However, we received serious expressions of concern about the quality of this article, which contains highly contr...

“This correspondence is now closed”: but in medical ethics the traditional editorial fiat is often less easy to issue. The quality of argument and counter-argument demonstrated by so many contributors to the Journal of Medical Ethics illustrates not so much that they are undefeated because they have gone on trying, but the existential importance, for them and for many of their readers, of the c...