The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has extensive experience in allocating health service funds to regions and localities using funding formulae. This paper focuses on England. Special attention is given to recent policy concerns to reduce avoidable health inequalities by broadening the remit of the resource allocation formulae. The paper also examines the issues that arise...

Bridging virtualized environments with physical environments, virtual network plays an important role in Cloud Computing infrastructures. How to allocate physical resources for virtual nodes/links to construct virtual network is known as Virtual Network Embedding (VNE) problem. It is a crucial issue that draws wide attention. This paper surveys existing VNE methods and algorithms and how they w...

An innovative approach for high-level synthesis of digital circuits with semi-concurrent selfchecking abilities is introduced, achieving a compromise between redundancy and checking effectiveness. Attention is mainly focused on the data path, described as a general Sequencing Graph including linear paths as well as loops and branches. A reference architecture is defined; a technique allowing to...

A variety of phenomena in associative learning suggest that people and some animals are able to learn how to allocate attention across cues. Models of attentional learning are motivated by the need to account for these phenomena. We start with a different, more general motivation for learners, namely, the need to learn quickly. Using simulated evolution, with adaptive fitness measured as overal...

Poor individuals often engage in behaviors, such as excessive borrowing, that reinforce the conditions of poverty. Some explanations for these behaviors focus on personality traits of the poor. Others emphasize environmental factors such as housing or financial access. We instead consider how certain behaviors stem simply from having less. We suggest that scarcity changes how people allocate at...

The aim of the paper is to address the issue of operational improvements in manufacturing firms, especially when yield losses result in a significant increase of the production cost. In a multistage production environment the firm must decide which production stage(s) should receive more “attention” in order to minimize the overall cost incurred from yield losses. Yield variability is a factor ...

Tracking word-object co-occurrence statistics can reduce referential uncertainty during word learning. But human learners are constrained by limits on attention and memory, and therefore must store a subset of the information available—how do they select what information to store? We hypothesize that the presence of referential cues like eye gaze guides how learners allocate their attention. In...

Previous research suggests that action video game play improves attentional resources, allowing gamers to better allocate their attention across both space and time. In order to further characterize the plastic changes resulting from playing these video games, we administered the Attentional Network Test (ANT) to action game players and non-playing controls aged between 7 and 22 years. By emplo...

The current study investigates how young children allocate their attention in learning environments. Prior research has shown that elementary school students spend between 25% and 50% of instructional time off-task. However, the available research has not clearly identified the common sources of distraction, nor specified the relationship between the distraction source and learning outcomes. In...

The effectiveness of advertising messages is widely believed to be moderated by audience involvement. In this paper, psychological theories of attention and levels of processing are used to establish a framework that can accommodate the major consumer behavior theories of audience involvement. Four levels of involvement are identified (in order from low to high) as preattention, focal attention...