In this paper, we describe, how agents can support collaborative planning within international coalitions, formed in an ad-hoc fashion as a response to military and humanitarian crises. As these coalitions are formed rapidly and without much lead time or co-training, human planners may be required to observe a plethora of policies that direct their planning effort. In a series of experiments, w...

Schumpeter chastised Ricardo for his alleged "vice" - the so-called "Ricardian Vice" - of drawing far reaching policy conclusions from utterly simplistic models, which, moreover, were underdetermined. The paper first argues that Schumpeter saw Ricardo's approach to the theory of value and distribution through a marginalist lens and therefore arrived at a distorted picture of the latter. Several...

Just as for people, a new year is a good time for a journal to stop, look back, and start a new beginning, hoping for a good season ahead. This is what we have been doing each year in the Croatian Medical Journal for the last twenty years. We will probably never stop doing this, even when we become an august journal, because the world of scientific publishing rapidly changes. This year, we pres...

The journals of the International Union of Crystallography have grown in size and number over the past 60 years to match developments in scientific practice and technique. High quality of publication has always been at the forefront of editorial policy and ways in which this has been achieved are described. In particular, the development of standard exchange and archive formats for crystallogra...

We introduce here the inaugural issue of the new scientific journal Translation. The overarching aim of this endeavor is to establish a new forum for a broad spectrum of research in the area of protein synthesis in living systems ranging from structural biochemical, evolutionary and regulatory aspects of translation to the fundamental questions related to post-translational control of somatic p...

Evaluating an influence diagram (ID) is a challenging problem because its complexity increases exponentially in the number of decision nodes in the diagram. In this paper, we examine the problem for a special class of IDs where multiple decisions must be made simultaneously. We describe a brief theory that factorizes out the computations common to all policies in evaluating them. Our evaluation...

A COST MINIMIZATION APPROACH By CHRIS ROHLFS A wide range of costly government policies are designed to extend citizens’ lives and to reduce the risk of premature death. Using economic reasoning, one can evaluate such policies on the basis of efficiency. Life-saving policies pass a cost-benefit test if and only if their costs fall below the beneficiaries’ willingness-to-pay for the reduced fata...

with the rise of nicholas sarkozy to power, in an evident spin, france’s foreign policy became american in essence. from the very first year of his presidency sarkozy adopted a parallel policy to the u.s. atlanticism is considered an important and inevitable leverage in sarkozy’s foreign policy and his government marked a high point in foreign policy after de goulle. this new approach is comple...

BACKGROUND To sustain progress toward injury reduction and other health promotion goals, public health organizations need a systematic approach based on data and an evaluation of existing scientific evidence on prevention. This paper describes a process and criteria developed to systematically and objectively define prevention program and policy priorities. METHODS Military medical surveillan...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to identify and describe the knowledge and attitudes of cigarette smoking that are associated with smoking habits among young military conscripts in Taiwan. METHODS We conducted a cross-sectional survey of young conscripts in southern and eastern Taiwan between August 1 and December 31, 2001. We selected 3,249 young military conscripts who had served m...