Technological advances, financial possibilities and changes of demands have increasingly affected the pavement maintenance environment for outsourcing in recent years. This induces complexity in the contracting methods of pavement maintenance activities. Despite the fact that current contracting practices on pavement maintenance activities are not sufficient to deal with changes providing the i...

Skeletal muscle perfusion during exercise is impaired in heart failure, but the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. One possibility is that sympathetic vasoconstriction is enhanced in exercising muscle in heart failure as a result of impaired counterregulatory mechanisms that normally act to attenuate vasoconstrictor responses. In healthy animals, sympathetic vasoconstriction in contra...

In 1996, a newly elected government in the Province of Ontario, Canada, introduced a managed competition environment into the home care sector through the establishment of a competitive contracting process for home care services. Through 65 in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted between November 1999 and January 2001, we trace the implementation of this competitive contracting policy wi...

Retiring group purchasing veteran Robert “Bud” Bowen says he is optimistic the industry will convince critics in government that it is capable of regulating itself and thus avoid passage of limiting legislation. Bowen, who retired March 31 as CEO of Amerinet in St. Louis, says there are laws in place to provide the oversight of contracting methods and vendor relationships that critics have dema...

With the formation of European Monetary Union (EMU) in 1999, the eleven countries that adopted the Euro began to conduct a single monetary policy oriented towards unionwide objectives. The objective of this paper is to construct a small model of the Euro area, which may serve as a laboratory for evaluating the performance of alternative monetary policy strategies for the Euro area in the vein o...

We characterize those Lie groups (as well as algebraic groups over a local field of characteristic zero) whose first reduced L-cohomology is zero for all p > 1, extending a result of Pansu. As an application, we obtain a description of Gromov-hyperbolic groups among those groups. In particular we prove that any non-elementary Gromov-hyperbolic algebraic group over a non-Archimedean local field ...

Coordination is essential in distributed computing, which involves a group of loosely coupled agents cooperating in order to solve problems in a decentralised fashion. One of the popular approaches of coordination is the generative tuple space based communication, where agents interact via a shared data space. This paper discusses the implementation of Contract Net protocol (CNP) in a number of...