OBJECTIVE To identify factors associated with service quality provided by agencies implementing a basic package of health services in Afghanistan. DESIGN Cross-sectional survey of outpatient health facilities, health workers, patients and caretakers. SETTING Primary health care facilities in every province of Afghanistan. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Composite scale measuring the quality of clin...

This paper analyses the theme of international service (or international volunteering as it is perhaps better known in the UK) in relation to ideas about globalization and development and presents a framework for future research. Agencies such as the United States Peace Corps, the United Nations Volunteers or a range of specialised non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have long promoted volunt...

Electronic procurement can provide great efficiencies to governmental agencies. This paper reports a real case in a small Midwestern state where an old purchase order process was replaced with a much more efficient electronic procurement system. Interviews with the manager in charge enabled modeling the old and new processes with a simulation model, which produced output that was verified as ac...

The Local Unit Criteria and Indicator Development (LUCID) project was a pilot project conducted from 1999 through 2002 by the USDA Forest Service Inventory and Monitoring Institute in conjunction with eight national forests on six sites to appraise the feasibility of monitoring sustainable systems at the forest management unit scale. The sustainability assessment will: provide forest managers a...

Nowadays, data analysts are confronted with new challenges: they are asked to process data that go beyond the classical framework, as in the case of data concerning more or less homogeneous classes or groups of individuals (second-order objects) instead of single individuals (first-order objects). A typical situation is that of census data, which raise privacy issues in all governmental agencie...

This article presents the ETL4LinkedProv approach to manage the collection and publication of provenance with distinct levels of granularity as Linked Data. The proposed approach uses ETL-workflows and a component named Provenance Collector Agent to collect two kinds of provenance (prospective and retrospective) integrating them with domain data. The component also set the granularity of the pr...

The EPA and state governmental agencies are in­ vestigating means of controlling the emissions of toxic metals from waste incinerators. In order to aid in the development of effective regulations and control stra­ tegies, an analytical procedure to estimate the emission of metals from combustion devices is being developed. The procedure includes analysis of key phenomena such as particle entrai...

With the increasing demand of wireless application, the insufficiency of the electromagnetic radio spectrum is getting more and more serious. Spectrum is regulated by governmental agencies that license their use to individuals or organisations on a long-term basis, normally over huge geographical regions. The Nov. 2002 report of the FCC speaks of spectrum access in many bands as a more signific...

Over the past decade, governmental agencies, medical schools, influential voices in the media, and the public at large have seen a remarkable surge of interest in alternative medicine in the United States. While many therapies focus on unproven but otherwise spiritually neutral approaches (for example, nutritional supplements), others arise from or validate worldviews — especially the monism ("...

The breakpoints used to interpret antimicrobial susceptibility tests should be carefully determined initially, using microbiological, pharmacokinetic, pharmacodynamic, and clinical data, and then reevaluated periodically as changes in bacterial resistance, susceptibility test methods, or antibiotic formulations occur. Throughout the world, different governmental agencies and professional organi...