forest and colleagues have persuasively made the case that policy capacity is a fundamental prerequisite to health reform. they offer a comprehensive life-cycle definition of policy capacity and stress that it involves much more than problem identification and option development. i would like to offer a canadian perspective. if we define health reform as re-orienting the health system from acut...

sustainable transportation with the aim of urban sustainable development aims to improve the environmental quality and the socio-economic condition. one of the most important strategies for achieving sustainable transportation is planning and designing for walking, or in other words increasing urban walkability. therefore, increased walkability has become a key issue in urban planning. understa...

stability and performance are two main issues in motion of bipeds. to ensure stability of motion, a biped needs to follow specific pattern to comply with a stability criterion such as zero moment point. however, there are infinity many patterns of motion which ensure stability, so one might think of achieving better performance by choosing proper parameters of motion. step length and step perio...

Voluntary use of family planning is instrumental to the health and social well-being of women, families and communities.Although contraceptive use in Sub-Saharan Africa is increasing, unmet need for family planning remains high. Even within countries that have achieved increases in contraceptive prevalence, use remains low among some population subgroups. Contraceptive prevalence is generally l...

Production process planning in real or virtual environment refers to the choice of parameters and sequencing of certain manufacturing processes with the aim to obtain the required product features with greater productivity, reduced production costs, shorter development time etc. Therefore, innovative systems for virtual process planning, based on intelligent agents, greatly improve adaptation t...

Vendor performance plays a key role in price, quality, timely delivery and service in achieving the goals of the supply chain. Given this, today's supplier performance has become a critical element in the success or failure of a company. In this study, an idealized planning model with multi-criteria decision-making approach with network analysis tool based on the expansion of fuzzy quality func...

BACKGROUND Meeting demand for family planning can facilitate progress towards all major themes of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): people, planet, prosperity, peace, and partnership. Many policymakers have embraced a benchmark goal that at least 75% of the demand for family planning in all countries be satisfied with modern contraceptive methods by the year 2030. OBJEC...

In this paper, the authors discuss an instrument for the assessment of enterprise coherence (Enterprise Coherence Assessment, ECA). The term ‘coherence’ is used rather than the more common term ‘alignment’, since the latter is generally associated with bringing two concepts in line (typically ‘Business’ and ‘IT’). The word coherence, however, stresses the need to go beyond this. Coherence invol...

Recently, artistic places and places known from movies induced an increasing tourism. However, the fast development also challenges the rural planning authorities that are not prepared to manage the high number of tourists. In this paper focus is put on two rural municipalities in southern Sweden. The purpose of this paper is to scrutinize and compare tourism development and tourism planning in...