This article shares experience on aspects related to the methodology and modeling of a framework of City E-Governance Readiness. We discuss Europe’s progress in this domain using an “e-readiness” assessment methodology: the Integrated City E-Governance Policy Model of the IntelCities Research Project (2004-2007). Practices and trends in 12 European cities are analyzed, drawing on the results of...

World Asthma Day is an annual event organised by the Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA) in collaboration with healthcare groups and asthma educators to improve asthma awareness and the care of asthma patients around the world. Each year GINA chooses a theme and prepares and distributes World Asthma Day materials and resources. This year’s World Asthma Day was 5 May 2009, with the theme “You Ca...

Layer-sequential unit-variance (LSUV) initialization – a simple method for weightinitialization for deep net learning – is proposed. The method consists of the twosteps. First, pre-initialize weights of each convolution or inner-product layer withorthonormal matrices. Second, proceed from the first to the final layer, normaliz-ing the variance of the output of each layer to be e...

Healthcare projects that intend to decrease the economical and social costs of the real ageing population phenomenon, through the de-localisation of healthcare services delivery and management to the home, have been arising in the scientific community. The VirtualECare project is one of those, so called, Ambient Assisted Living environments, which we have taken a step forward with the introduct...

H igh-sensitivity cardiac troponin (hs-cTn) assays reportedly allow early definitive triage of patients with possible acute myocardial infarction (AMI). To be confident that one can implement such strategies safely, fastidious data are required. In their paper in this issue of the Journal, Mokhtari et al. (1) build on the protocol included in the European Society of Cardiology guidelines to rul...

The advent of molecular and other analytical technologies has resulted in a dramatic increase in the need for biological sample storage. As science and medical fi ction become fact, specimens such as blood, serum, and tissue may hold the key to understanding disease processes or outcomes and represent invaluable intellectual property. As such, the services that support this progress need to be ...