BACKGROUND Accurate tools for assessing household wealth are essential for many health studies in developing countries. Household survey and participatory wealth ranking (PWR) are two approaches to generate data for this purpose. METHODS A household survey and PWR were conducted among eight villages in rural South Africa. We developed three indicators of household wealth using the data. One i...

Based on an ethnographic study of community road signs, we argue that mobile location aware systems fit somewhat with an abundant practice where private persons make and post signs along the roads. People who live along roads have various reasons, and investigate in various ways, to communicate with passing drivers. Even though these road signs are mostly used for interaction outside of the nei...

U.S. consumers currently hold $880 billion in revolving debt, with a mean household credit card balance of approximately $6,000. Although economic factors play a role in this societal issue, it is clear that psychological forces also affect consumers' decisions to take on and maintain unmanageable debt balances. We examine three psychological barriers to the responsible use of credit and debt. ...

† Biological Sciences Center, Desert Research Institute, University of Nevada System, P.O. Box 60220, Reno, NV 89506-0220, U.S.A Island biogeography is the study of pattern in the distribution of species on islands as influenced by ecological and evolutionary processes related to island characteristics such as isolation and area. The MacArthur-Wilson theory of island biogeography asserts that t...

I nterest and experience in participatory research projects has been growing for some time in the North, yet lessons learned from these complex and still evolving community campus partnerships are still rarely shared in the general peer-reviewed literature. An electronic search of this Journal’s archives netted just four papers in the past five years that included Community Based Participatory ...

The paper presents a field study aimed at identifying and analyzing the role of boundary artifacts in cross-organization virtual communities of practice (CoP). Our analysis is informed by a recent case study in vacation package assembly (VPA), which is defined as the distributed collective practice carried out by members of a boundary-spanning virtual alliance inhabiting a ‘common’ information ...

Governments can play great roles in their countries, regions, and cities; facilitating or leading the resolution of festering problems and opening new pathways for progress. Examples are more numerous than one might imagine and raise an important question: ‘how do governments become great?’. This paper identifies ten cases of great governments to answer four dimensions of this question: What ki...

We report the development of the Translational Science Benefits Model (TSBM), a framework designed to support institutional assessment of clinical and translational research outcomes to measure clinical and community health impacts beyond bibliometric measures. The TSBM includes 30 specific and potentially measurable indicators that reflect benefits that accrue from clinical and translational s...

Communities of Practice make intensive use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to meet their needs of interaction among their members. At present, the main supporting tool for these communities is the Internet and the software tools available for their users. With the advent of digital TV, however, new resources have become available to these interactive communities. This study ...