Any higher education department must provide a variety of information to several disparate audiences, recognising their diverse needs. Student expectations of learning support structures, institutional needs for quality assurance and enhancement and the demands of accountability from funding agencies continue to grow. The widespread use of IT, both at home and in schools, has led students to ex...

The growing global burden of non communicable diseases (NCDs) is now killing 36 million people each year and needs urgent and comprehensive action. This article provides an overview of key critical issues that need to be resolved to ensure that recent political commitments are translated into practical action. These include: (i) categorizing and prioritizing NCDs in order to inform donor fundin...

This paper studies the postwar economic and political reconstruction in Lebanon. The paper shows that the ‘reconstruction boom’ was short-lived. The economy experienced a growth trap early in the reconstruction period, and entered a cyclical crisis in 1998 which resulted from an ill-designed fiscal-monetary policy mix. The expansionary fiscal policy resulting from the high resource demands – du...

HEALTHCARE POLITICS The president's September speech recalled the passion and high public approval ratings that surrounded his state of the Union address . A September 22 Washington Post-ARC News poll reported that, after the speech, approval of the administration's plan jumped 13 percentage points, to 56 percent of those surveyed; 24 percent said they disapproved.' To achieve action on his pla...

democracy: an intergenerational perspective Introduction With a population of 250 million people there has been significant academic interest in Indonesia’s transition from authoritarian rule to democracy. The driving force toward democratic transition was the ‘1998 reform’, which changed the election system from indirect to direct elections. However, critics of the New Order regime claimed it ...

Personalized medicine has been presented in public and professional contexts in excessively optimistic tones. In the area of cancer what has become clear is the extraordinary heterogeneity and resilience of tumors in the face of numerous targeted therapies. This is the problem of cancer drug resistance. I summarize this problem in the first part of this essay. I then place this problem in the c...

Although skeptics continue to doubt that most people are “ideological,” evidence suggests that meaningful left-right differences do exist and that they may be rooted in basic personality dispositions, that is, relatively stable individual differences in psychological needs, motives, and orientations toward the world. Seventy-five years of theory and research on personality and political orienta...

Although the world is called a global village in present age, yet the political system based on ethnicity is still persisting in certain forms. From the time immemorial, humans have either inherited identity or are bound to adopt one. Language and religion based ethnic identities are the dominant issues in the history and evolution of multi-ethnic countries of former Soviet States, Eastern Euro...

The processes described under the misleading term “privatization” have been part of a major social restructuring in both the political and economic spheres. Most notably, widespread state failures have resulted in significant changes in the form and functions of the state. This reform encompasses not only the collapse of state socialism, but also crises and radical reforms in developed capitali...

Fat, sugar or sweetened beverage taxes are part of an overall public health nutrition approach to healthy eating. They are not approaches that on their own are likely to bring about change. Policy evidence from existing food tax implementation suggest that taxes need to be paralleled by subsidies and other interventions to encourage healthy eating. Such dual methods help not only contribute to ...