Collaboration with citizens and users plays an increasing role in the transformation of public services towards new forms of production and delivery. Thus there is a need to modernize the civil service to accelerate innovation in governments, as civil servants will also have an important role to play. Digital civic engagement platforms can provide a more attractive and accessible means for part...

The age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the main cause of blindness among people over 50 years in developed countries and there are 150 million people affected worlwide. This disease can lead to severe loss central vision and adversely affect the patient’s quality of life. The appearance of drusen is associated with the early AMD, so we proposed a top-down methodology to detect drusen in ...

The Shark Reef Marine Reserve in Fiji is an ecotourism project designed to protect a small reef patch and its fauna while preserving the livelihood of local communities. It involves the local communities by using a participatory business planning approach to Marine Protected Area management, generating income through diver user fees, distributed to the local villages that have exchanged their t...

This paper presents a brief review of our recent work investigating a novel bottom-up approach to realize silicon-based nanoelectronics. We discuss fabrication technique, electronic properties, and device applications of silicon nanodots as a building block for various nanoscale silicon devices. r 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

The magnetostratigraphy of Sites 748 and 750 of Ocean Drilling Program Leg 120 is reported. About 260 sediment cubes were stepwise demagnetized with alternating fields to determine their characteristic direction of natural remanent magnetization. In general, the characteristic inclinations of the single samples have values similar to the inclination values obtained from whole-core measurements ...

A definition of distance measure between structural descriptions, which is based on a probabilistic interpretation of the matching predicate, is proposed. It aims at coping with the problem of classification when noise causes both local and structural deformations. The distance measure is defined according to a top-down evaluation scheme: distance between disjunctions of conjuncts, conjunctions...