INTRODUCTION Modern medicine is more and more based on protocols and guidelines; clinical laboratory data play very often a relevant role in these documents and for this reason the need for their harmonization is increasing. To achieve harmonized results the harmonization process must not be limited to only the analytical part, but has to include the pre- and the post-analytical phases. RESUL...

BACKGROUND Proper understanding of the roles of, and interactions between genetic, lifestyle, environmental and psycho-social factors in determining the risk of development and/or progression of chronic diseases requires access to very large high-quality databases. Because of the financial, technical and time burdens related to developing and maintaining very large studies, the scientific commu...

It is a widely acknowledged result of the literature on capital tax competition that underprovision of public goods can only be avoided if tax coordination between governments is intensive and residence-based capital taxation can be enforced. In this paper we use a model where commodity and factor taxes are available and we show that governments competing for tax bases will choose a globally ef...

We propose a representation for musical chords that allows us to include domain knowledge in probabilistic models. We then introduce a graphical model for harmonization of melodies that considers every structural components in chord notation. We show empirically that root notes progressions exhibit global dependencies that can be better captured with a tree structure related to the meter than w...

Knowledge management solutions relying on central repositories sometimes have not met expectations, since users often create knowledge ad-hoc using their individual vocabulary and using their own decentral IT infrastructure (e.g., their laptop). To improve knowledge management for such decentralized and individualized knowledge work, it is necessary to, first, provide a corresponding IT infrast...

This paper examines the implications of tax evasion for "scal competition and tax harmonization policies in an economic union. First, for symmetric countries, it proves that the equilibrium values of the tax and audit rates are less than optimal. Tax harmonization alone will also lead to a less than optimal audit rate. Second, for asymmetric countries, the paper shows that integration may turn ...

In daily life, voice qualities are often harmonized to word meanings. To investigate effects of harmonization, psychological experiments manipulating harmonization between word meanings and voice qualities were conducted using four different voices. Half the test items were presented in an (incidental) learning phase, then an auditory word-fragment completion (WFC) and auditory recognition task...

almost all countries in the world are party to the rio conventions. this entails a number of responsibilities, including reporting periodically on aspects of environmental health and national implementation of the convention. these reports can cover hundreds of pages, so completing reports is often a significant undertaking. since countries can be party to numerous multilateral environmental ag...