The health of the worker must nowadays be considered against a background of improved social conditions, of death rates which have fallen continuously for a century, and of a reduction in communicable diseases. At one time industrial medicine was preoccupied with the direct and demonstrably harmful effects of certain occupations on health (Schilling, 1956). Now that many of these situations hav...

The phone-hacking scandal that led to the closure of the News of the World newspaper in Britain has prompted international debate about media practices and regulation. It is timely to broaden the discussion about journalistic ethics and conduct to include consideration of the impact of media practices upon the population's health. Many commercial organisations cultivate relationships with journ...

In the 1970s, a Baltimore city senator who also owned a tavern backed legislation that helped his business. Accused of having a conflict of interest, Joseph J. Staszak, responded, ‘‘What conflict of interest? How does this conflict with my interest?’’ [1]. According to the Institute of Medicine, a conflict of interest is ‘‘a set of circumstances that creates a risk that professional judgment or...

This paper addresses the influence of managerial decision-making processes on the evolution of industries. Managers face very complex investment decisions due to uncertainties about customer acceptance, market size, technology, actions of competitors, and a dynamic complex feedback system. Managerial decision-making processes are almost the most influential variable to manipulate the evolution ...

If medical journals and public health advocates are concerned with corporate conflicts of interest, inappropriate marketing to children, impotent self-regulation, and general flouting of the rules, why are we ignoring the alcohol industry? The crisis of confidence that surrounds the behavior and practices of Big Tobacco and Big Pharma [1,2]—bias in funded research, unsupported claims of benefit...

We show the soundness of automated con­ trol of machine vision systems based on in­ cremental creation and evaluation of a par­ ticular family of influence diagrams that rep­ resent hypotheses of imagery interpretation and possible subsequent processing decisions. In our approach, model-based machine vi­ sion techniques are integrated with hierarchi­ cal Bayesian inference to provide a framewor...

Many multichannel retailers are now offering customers the option to place their orders online and then pick them up from the retailers’ physical stores. As a relatively new type of multichannel retail service, the factors that influence consumers to use “online order/in-store pickup” (OOIP) remains largely unknown. This study uses the Behavioral Reasoning Theory to examine the factors that inf...

To facilitate interactive design, the solutions to configuration problems can be compiled into a decision diagram. We develop three heuristics for reducing the time and space required to do this. These heuristics are based on the distinctive clustered and hierarchical structure of the constraint graphs of configuration problems. The first heuristic attempts to limit the growth in the size of th...

This study tests the hypothesis of linguistic relativity along two lines of research: a) how L2 learners of Chinese and English, respectively, syntactically package semantic components for caused motion (cause, manner, path) in an experimental situation in which they are asked to describe video clips showing caused motion events to an imagery addressee, and b) how monolingual native speakers of...

Purpose: This paper seeks to answer two research questions which are " What are key factors which influence Chinese to adopt mobile technology? " and " Do these key factors differ from factors which are identified from Western context? " Design/methodology: The findings from a pilot study with 45 in-depth interviews are used to develop questionnaires and test across 800 residents from the three...