functionality, sustainability indicators, sustainable development. Abstract—The index of sustainable functionality (ISF) is an adaptive, multi-criteria technique that is used to measure sustainability; it is a concept that can be transposed to many regions throughout the world. An ISF application of the Southern Regional Organisation of Councils (SouthROC) in South East Queensland (SEQ) – the f...

This article argues that "game-changing" approaches to risk analysis must focus on "democratizing" risk analysis in the same way that information technologies have democratized access to, and production of, knowledge. This argument is motivated by the author's reading of Goble and Bier's analysis, "Risk Assessment Can Be a Game-Changing Information Technology-But Too Often It Isn't" (Risk Analy...

Relying on a powerful collective narrative through which political, legal and social decision-making is guided in the name of science, the authority of scientific experts reaches beyond the boundaries of their certified knowledge base. Therefore, expertise constitutes and is constituted by transgressive competence. The author argues that (1) changes in the decisionmaking structure of liberal We...

We present a formalized account of decision making as a multi-step process that involves several classes of participating entities. A series of increasingly formal representations of the decision problem are developed, from a mental model conceived by the decision maker to a knowledge base that may be used in a decision support system.

OBJECTIVES To: (i) identify key assumptions of the scientific 'paradigm' that shapes clinical communication research and education in cancer care; (ii) show that, as general rules, these do not match patients' own priorities for communication; and (iii) suggest how the paradigm might change to reflect evidence better and thereby serve patients better. METHODS A critical review, focusing on ca...

There is considered a problem of information profiles and information resources collection forming in distributed dataand/or knowledge bases as a result of an attempt to satisfy the information requirements of the customers represented by their information profiles. It is shown that the interests of managers of dataand knowledge bases are not fully convergent and that they participate in a comp...

We first develop a criterion to determine normal bases (Theorem 2.4), and by making use of necessary lemmas which were refined from [3] we further prove that singular values of certain Siegel functions form normal bases of ray class fields over all imaginary quadratic fields other than Q( √−1) and Q( √−3) (Theorem 4.5 and Remark 4.6). This result would be an answer for the Lang-Schertz conjectu...

The emergence of new devices and new technologies has led to signifi cant and important changes in the practice of spine surgery over the past decade. Spine surgeons are responsible for continuously learning about new implants, instruments, bone graft substitutes, and new procedures. Making informed decisions on the adoption of new technologies in spine surgery is an important challenge for all...

Marketing is under increased pressure to demonstrate its economic value to the firm. The challenge is exacerbated by the fact that marketing uses attitudinal (e.g. brand awareness), behavioral (e.g. brand loyalty) and financial (e.g. sales revenue) performance metrics, which, unfortunately, do not correlate highly with each other. Thus marketing initiatives could be viewed as successful by one ...