Nearly half of California households have broadband (highspeed) Internet access. Broadband is more widely available in higher-income and higher-density areas, and there are large gaps in access between the urbanized coastal regions of California and the more rural inland areas. Differences in broadband adoption rates between different racial and ethnic groups are also significant, although some...

Managed care of some kind will dominate the future of health care, but the unresolved crucial question concerns ownership of the managed care plans. An investor-owned managed care industry now holds sway, but I do not expect it to last very long. In the long run, physicians must be in charge of medical care, but they must live within budgets and be accountable to payers and to their patients. T...

This paper traces the emergence of social movement unionism in Hamburg, Germany, as labor’s channels of influence have broken down and economic pressures have intensified. Trade unionists have responded to the privatization of the municipal hospitals by mobilizing members and building coalitions around issues beyond their members’ immediate interests, including democracy and public service qual...

Co-digestion is a widely used protocol for biologically stabilizing wastewaters and waste solids that otherwise might be sent to alternative disposal sites such as landfills. The number of applications is growing, within both farm (Frear et al., 2009) and municipal digester (Wallis et al., 2008; Zupancic et al., 2008) applications. In many cases, one of the motivations for practicing co-digesti...

OBJECTIVE Maternal mortality reduction is a Millennium Development Goal. In Colombia, there is a large disparity in the maternal mortality ratio (MMR) between and into departments (states) and also between municipalities. We examined socioeconomics variables at the municipal and departmental levels which could be associated to the municipal maternal mortality in Colombia. METHODS A multilevel...

This study uses a municipal e-government services framework to evaluate the development of municipal electronic government (e-Government) in Peruvian cities by assessing the web sites and services provided by each city. The findings show that the degree of development of e-Government in Peru is incipient, with the need to improve not only the municipal websites but also the municipal e-Governme...

Under the leadership of Mayor Shirley Franklin, the City of Atlanta introduced a new operating model for municipal government in early 2002. A central component of that effort has been a performance-measurement system—the “Atlanta Dashboard”—designed to assess various aspects of municipal performance and, through that assessment, to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of municipal services.

Based on an analysis of several municipal e-participation experiences, and of the virtual environments used in these, this article covers key aspects to be considered when designing an electronic Internet-based system for participation at the municipal level, whose aim would be to enhance communication between public officials and citizens while streamlining municipal civic participation and co...

The paper presents the design of municipal creditworthiness parameters. Municipal creditworthiness modelling is realized by fuzzy logic based systems. Therefore, current designs of hierarchical structures of Mamdanitype fuzzy inference systems and their analysis are introduced. Key-Words: Municipal creditworthiness, Mamdani-type fuzzy inference systems, hierarchical structures of fuzzy inferenc...