OBJECTIVE To describe variation in U.S. state elementary school physical education (PE) policies and to assess associations between state PE policy enactment and education funding, academic achievement, sociodemographic disadvantage, and political characteristics. METHODS U.S. state laws regarding school PE time, staffing, curriculum, fitness assessment, and moderate-to-vigorous physical acti...

Although legal interventions are responsible for many sentinel public health achievements, law is underutilized as a tool for advancing population health. Our purpose was to identify critical opportunities for public health lawmaking. We articulated key criteria and illustrated their use with 5 examples. These opportunities involve significant health problems that are potentially amenable to ch...

Several US states are enacting 'right-to-die' laws, in the wake of the Karen Quinlan case. But the way such a law is drafted may cast doubt on a patient's existing common law right to control all aspects of his own treatment; it may give legal sanction to a lower standard of medical care that society at present expects from doctors; and it may lead to conflict between the patient's directive an...

INTRODUCTION Increasing tobacco excise taxes and implementing comprehensive smoke-free laws are two of the most effective population-level strategies to reduce tobacco use, prevent tobacco use initiation, and protect nonsmokers from secondhand smoke. We examined state laws related to smoke-free buildings and to cigarette excise taxes from 2000 through 2014 to see how implementation of these law...

OBJECTIVES We sought to evaluate the effect of ratifying the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) on countries enacting smoke-free laws covering indoor workplaces, restaurants, and bars. METHODS We compared adoption of smoke-free indoor workplace, restaurant, and bar laws in countries that did versus did not ratify the FCTC, accounting for years since the r...

The increase in the number of scientific disciplines, the continuing significant rise in the production of literature and the journal crisis at libraries has led the actors to seek new models for the publication of scientific results. The concept of Open Access comprises a whole number of different models. The spectrum ranges from simple institutional document servers to fully edited ejournals,...

The lack of automatic, personalized services of information, which were easily accessible to tourists and citizens when they are in public spaces, negatively impacts the tourism sector, since it reduces the use of the services offered by the city and the satisfaction degree of the users. The SOPAT project has developed a personalized service of information and city guide that facilitates all ki...

Recent technological developments have provided us with opportunities for novel ways of mediating and supporting different user activities by interconnecting different devices for distributing, broadcasting and accessing information. However, little is known about how best to design such ‘shared information spaces’ to augment current work practice and promote new forms of cooperative access to ...

Paralleling the development of the information society, European Union institutions are making more and more information available electronically. The progress of this process is reviewed. It is a process which contributes to the openness of the EU institutions. How effective are electronic media in providing access to information? It is concluded that the journalistic and library professions w...