background: the pabon lasso model was  applied to assess the performance of six state-run hospitals in the province of kohgilooyeh & boyer-ahmad, to produce information that used by policy makers in their attempt to make the health care sys­tem more productive. methods: this cross-sectional study involved all the six public hospitals in the province, with 607 registered beds. data collec­tion a...

How flexible can encryption be? This question motivated the invention of public key encryption that began modern cryptography. A lot has happened since then. I will focus on two lines of research that I find especially interesting (mainly the second) and the mysterious gap between them. The first line of research asks: how flexibly can encryption handle compu-tation? The answer seems to be " ve...

I am writing this adjacent to a tropical forest in Panama where I have worked for several decades. I continue to be struck by the number and diversity of organisms here, and how well they function in the world around them. How did all this happen? In this chapter I will focus this general question on themore specific topic of the evolution and mechanisms of sexual communication, and I will draw...

In this paper I am going to explore how ideas of Europe and European identity are used to articulate popular discourses on immigration and immigrants. In contrast with the literature on European identity and immigration which has mostly looked at institutions, adopting a top-down approach, I will look at popular discourses, adopting an approach from the bottom-up. I will base my analysis on eth...

In recent years energy efficiency in different levels become of prime importance. Studies have been shown that urban planning can play a critical role in this area. At the same time in oil-producing countries like Iran, energy efficiency has not been considered as a national priority. However, in recent years with increase in the population growth, rapid urbanization and acceleration of environ...

With demand for health services continuing to grow as populations age and new technologies emerge to meet health needs, healthcare policy-makers are under constant pressure to set priorities, ie, to make choices about the health services that can and cannot be funded within available resources. In a recent paper, Smith et al apply an influential policy studies framework – Kingdon’s multiple str...