The role of medical schools is in a process of change. The World Health Organization has declared that they can no longer be ivory towers whose primary focus is the production of specialist physicians and cutting edge laboratory research. They must also be socially accountable and direct their activities towards meeting the priority health concerns of the areas they serve. The agenda must be se...

This article explains the impetus in the United States behind the drive to extend test-based accountability to teachers and the growing interest in employing valueadded models to generate the indicators to be used in teacher evaluation. The empirical literature finds that teaching quality is the most important school-related determinant of student. Yet, in the main, teacher evaluations are done...

It has long been recognised that standard process algebra has difficulty dealing with actions of different priority, such as for instance an interrupt action of high priority. Various solutions have been proposed. We introduce a new approach, involving the addition of “priority guards” to Milner’s process calculus CCS. In our approach, priority is unstratified, meaning that actions are not assi...

Accountable decision-makers are required to legitimize their priority setting decisions in health to members of society. In this perspective we stress the point that fair, legitimate processes should reflect efforts of authorities to treat all stakeholders as moral equals in terms of providing all people with well-justified, reasonable reasons to endorse the decisions. ...

Preemption threshold scheduling (PTS) enhances real-time schedulability by controlling preemptiveness of tasks. This benefit of PTS highly depends on a proper algorithm that assigns each task feasible scheduling attributes, which are priority and preemption threshold. Due to the existence of an efficient optimal preemption threshold assignment algorithm that works with fully assigned priority o...

Type 2 diabetes mellitus, driven by overweight and obesity linked to unhealthy diets, is the fastest-growing non-communicable disease in Australia. Halting the rise of diabetes will require a paradigm shift from personal to shared responsibility, with greater accountability from Australian governments and the food industry. It will also require governments to try something different to the prev...

The application of pesticides to fruit throughout the Northeastern US, as in the rest of the world, gives rise to concern, primarily due to inaccurate application, which often results in high residues and environmental pollution. Inaccuracy, due to overor under-application, may result in high levels of disease or insect activity. Air and water pollution resulting from pesticide drift is a major...

To be effective and sustain themselves over time, public-private partnerships must make evaluation a priority. Specifically, partnerships should evaluate 1) their infrastructure, function, and processes; 2) programs designed to achieve their mission, goals, and objectives; and 3) changes in health and social status, organizations, systems, and the broader community. This article describes how t...

There is growing recognition that critical decisions concerning investments in new health care technologies and services should incorporate society's values along with the scientific evidence. From a normative perspective, public engagement can help realize the democratic ideals of legitimacy, transparency, and accountability. On a more pragmatic level, public engagement can help stakeholders u...