This teaching case features a situation at Belgacom, the leading telecommunications company in Belgium, end of April 2005. Wim Bouckenooghe, newly appointed finance director of Belgacom’s Network and IT division within the Fixed Line Services (FLS) segment, is troubled by the effectiveness of the selection of the discretionary IT projects, particularly the larger ones. He is especially concerne...

• Uniformity of growth. A county may grow by 10 percent in population, that growth may be very unevenly distributed around the county. In one extreme case, all the growth is in one township with no change in any of the other townships. Another extreme would have all townships growing at exactly the same rate of increase. We will use two measures—the range of growth rates and the coefcient of v...

OBJECTIVE To assess adolescents' satisfaction with reproductive health services in Mdantsane Township, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. METHOD A structured questionnaire was used to assess the levels of participants' satisfaction with reproductive health services. The sample consisted of 200 adolescents within the ages of 16 to 19 years. A response of "yes" indicated that the person was s...

Over the 14 years since economic reform began, and the restructuring of the economy to encourage international trade, a large number of township enterprises have been developed and put into operation in the Peoples Republic of China. From 1978 to 1991, the number of enterprises has increased 11.5 times; the number of employees has increased 2.4 times; the fixed assets have increased 13.7 times;...

BACKGROUND Many studies have examined the risk factors for HCC (including hepatitis B virus, hepatitis C virus, aflatoxin, retinol, cigarette smoking, and alcohol consumption). However, data from previous studies on the association between iron exposure, land subsidence, and HCC mortality/incidence were limited, especially in Taiwanese population. We aimed to explore the geographical distributi...

Quantitative analysis for the risk of human cancer from the ingestion of inorganic arsenic has been based on the reported cancer mortality experience in the blackfoot disease (BFD) -endemic area of southwest Taiwan. Linear regression analysis shows that arsenic as the sole etiologic factor accounts for only 21% of the variance in the village standardized mortality ratios for bladder and lung ca...

OBJECTIVE To compare the primary care quality among different health care structures in Tibet, China. METHODS A self-administered questionnaire survey including Primary Care Assessment Tool-Tibetan version was used to obtain data from a total of 1386 patients aged over 18 years in the sampling sites in two prefectures in Tibet. Multivariate analysis was performed to assess the association bet...

In this study, inductive coupled plasma-optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES) is employed for the evaluation of soil pollution for selected metals in the Vanderbijlpark area of South Africa. Soil samples investigated were collected from five different sites in the city based on their proximity to the industrial areas of Vanderbijlpark. Soil samples were collected from close to traffic robots,...

PROBLEM The Chinese central government launched the Health System Reform Plan in 2009 to strengthen disease control and health promotion and provide a package of basic public health services. Village doctors receive a modest subsidy for providing public health services associated with the package. Their beliefs about this subsidy and providing public health services could influence the quality ...