Transparent Criteria Research Articles

Prioritising quality.

The deluge of new initiatives, proposals and recommendations for solving the problems required to improve patient safety and quality of health care continues unabated. Implementing the proposed solutions for improving patient safety and quality of care requires setting priorities for action throughout the different levels of the health-care system. Currently, we face the dilemma of having to set priorities from the plentiful themes that are intuitively sensible and well accepted. There is an increasing number of examples of using systematic processes which contain explicit and transparent criteria for priority setting in patient safety and quality initiatives. These should be more widely adopted and become a key requirement for all future proposals for improving patient safety and quality of health care.

Tourism ecolabels

Ecolabels in tourism are commonplace but uncoordinated. Established by individual companies, industry associations, voluntary organizations and government agencies, ecolabels range in scale from single villages to worldwide, from single activities to entire destinations; and they include voluntary codes, awards, accreditation and certification schemes. The degree to which they affect consumer purchasing decisions and corporate environmental performance is largely unknown. If ecolabels contribute to informed tourist choice, they could be a valuable environmental management tool, but only if critical conditions are met. Ecolabels need broad coverage and penetration in relevant market sectors, well-defined and transparent entry criteria, independent audit, and penalties for non-compliance. They also need an effective underlying framework of environmental regulation.

Various aspects of quality beef production

The development of the beef market in Europe and especially in Germany will depend very much on the communication between producers and consumers. The product has to be healthy (no risks), lean and tasty and production should do no harm to the environment and the animals while they are kept on the farms. The entire production process should be transparent and quality criteria well defined. Young animals deliver more tender products than older animals. Although those do have the advantage of higher intramuscular fat contents, more care and energy is needed for the ageing process. Extensive and organic production systems do not necessarily guarantee a high meat quality, but housing and feeding conditions for the animals are considered positively by the consumer. Communication and information is needed to clarify the facts.

Ex ante-Kontrolle versus ex post-Kontrolle im Recht der Wettbewerbsbeschränkungen

Zusammenfassung Die EG-Kommission plant, das Kartellrecht der Europäischen Gemeinschaft durchgreifend zu verändern. Das bisherige System des Verbots in Artikel 81 Abs. 1 EG-Vertrag mit Freistellungsvorbehalt nach Abs. 3 der Vorschrift soll in ein System der Legalausnahme überfuhrt werden. Artikel 81 Abs. 1 und 3 EG-Vertrag sind dann integriert und unmittelbar anwendbar. Eine vorgängige Klärung seitens einer Kartellbehörde entfällt. Dies ist ein Übergang von einer ex ante-Kontrolle mittels Anmeldung zu einer ex post-Kontrolle mittels Abschreckung. Der Verfasser klärt für die deutsche, die europäische und die US-amerikanische Rechtsordnung, in welchem Mischungsverhältnis dort Elemente der ex ante-Kontrolle und der ex post-Kontrolle vorhanden sind. Er hält die Vorschläge der EG-Kommission für wettbewerbspolitisch riskant. Er prüft dies anhand der Kriterien Transparenz, Rechtssicherheit, Kohärenz der Rechtsanwendung, Subsidiarität, Abschreckungswirkung und Durchsetzungskosten. In der Logik der Kommissionsvorschläge dürfte die Einführung von Gefängnisstrafen als Sanktion für Kartellverstöße liegen.

Telecom reform: progress and prospects

The dominant activity in telecom reform is now shifting from policy development to implementation. This is a more difficult task that depends heavily on competent, independent regulation in both developed and developing countries. A speed up in the remaining steps to complete full institutional restructuring is needed, including clarification of the roles for national and regional regulation and for international governance. New national regulators must rapidly establish transparent participatory processes and decision criteria to minimise uncertainty and enhance credibility. Experience to date indicates that competition in reality may be a more limited instrument of policy than it has been in theory, and the goal of a global universal service will remain elusive unless given a higher priority in policy and practice. Telecom reform is leading to increasing integration of telecom with other sectors of the economy, and telecom policy with broader economic and social policy. Telecom networks are providing the foundation of information infrastructures, which in turn are rapidly becoming an indispensable component of the 21st century knowledge infrastructures. For the future, telecom policy and regulation must facilitate knowledge network development in new knowledge-based economies and societies. This raises a question of whether telecom regulation should assume a more proactive role in facilitating new network service applications, especially in the public sector.

Ethnic Bias in Jury Selection in Australia and New Zealand

Radioactive waste management and disposal raises complex and multilayered ethical issues, and achieving ethical acceptability is not the same as achieving public acceptance. The inevitable ethical and evaluative judgments must be explicit, and opened to fully inclusive reasoned debate at every stage. If the compensation of host communities is to be distinguished from bribery, three conditions are required. First, potential sites must be selected according to robust and transparent criteria, which make sense independently of the compensation offer. Secondly, future generations and others unable to directly participate must be adequately represented in deliberative processes: in this regard, significant additional issues arise if the establishment of a disposal facility legitimizes production of additional radioactive waste. Thirdly, compensation must be negotiated and offered by a trusted body independent of the nuclear industry. Utilitarian calculative approaches to compensation based on cost-benefit analysis fail for several reasons including value incommensurability and the “crowding out” of intrinsic motivations.

The preliminary economic evaluation of health technologies for the prioritization of health technology assessments. A discussion.

This paper critically evaluates methods for the preliminary economic evaluation of health technologies and the prioritization of health technology assessment projects. It reports on the literature, and considers methods currently employed and the purposes of preliminary appraisal. It concludes that a preliminary economic appraisal needs to be applied to the two main stages of the prioritization process; to have transparent criteria; to allow for an appropriate range of potential outcomes; to be practicable, flexible, and efficient; and to be relevant to the assessment of different research projects.

Optical effects in stratified colloidal particles near transparency

Non-isotropic scattering patterns showing a minimum for small and almost transparent core-shell particles are discussed. It is shown that for any particle size, close to transparency, a core-shell particle behaves optically differently from a non-structured particle due to the presence of a minimum in the scattering pattern. Transparency criteria are discussed in the light of the non-isotropic character of the scattered light. Direct experimental evidence of the existence of this minimum is presented and compared with the theoretical predictions of the scattering by colloids having a distribution of particle composition.

Interconnection Protocols for Interorganization Networks

This paper analyzes the technical implications of interconnecting networks across organization boundaries. Such Interorganizational Networks (ION's) are used increasingly to support exchange of CAD/CAM data between manufacturers and subcontractors, software distribution from vendors to users, customer input to suppliers' orderentry systems, and the shared use of expensive computational resources by research laboratories, as examples. We begin by demonstrating that interorganization connections are not satisfied by traditional network design criteria of connectivity and transparency. A primary high-level requirement is access control, and therefore, participating organizations must be able to limit connectivity and make network boundaries visible. We summarize an approach to access control in ION's, based on nondiscretionary control, that allows interconnecting organizations to combine gateway, network, and system-level mechanisms to enforce cross-boundary control over invocation and information flow while minimizing interference with internal operations [6], [4]. The focus of this paper is on the underlying interconnection protocols that are needed to support these access control mechanisms. We describe in detail a particular protocol, called a visa scheme [7]. The visa scheme uses access control servers to authorize a session request and visas to authenticate that successive packets belong to the authorized connection. Control is distributed among the ION participants and each may make its own design tradeoffs between performance and trust. In order to support interorganization communication two (or more) organizations must be able to communicate with one another's access control servers and their respective packet-level gateways and nodes (source/destination) must implement the visa scheme. The security of the proposed mechanism varies according to the security of an organization's components (access control server, gateway, and select hosts) and the encryption function used. The visa scheme's purpose is to allow an organization to modify and trust only those internal systems that require ION access; all other internal systems are inaccessible from and to the ION gateway. We conclude by comparing and contrasting the visa approach to the use of higher level gateways.

Inter-organization networks: implications of access control: requirements for interconnection protocol

When two or more distinct organizations interconnect their internal computer networks they form an Inter-Organization Network(ION) . IONs support the exchange of cad/cam data between manufacturers and subcontractors, software distribution from vendors to users, customer input to suppliers' order-entry systems, and the shared use of expensive computational resources by research laboratories, as examples. This paper analyzes the technical implications of interconnecting networks across organization boundaries. After analyzing the organization context in which IONs are used, we demonstrate that such interconnections are not satisfied by traditional network design criteria of connectivity and transparency. To the contrary, a primary high-level requirement is access control, and participating organizations must be able to limit connectivity and make network boundaries visible. We describe a scheme based on non-discretionary control which allows interconnecting organizations to combine gateway, network, and system-level mechanisms to enforce cross-boundary control over invocation and information flow, while minimizing interference with internal operations. Access control requirements such as these impose new requirements on the underlying interconnection protocols. We demonstrate such alternative interconnection protocols that support loose coupling across administrative boundaries and that accommodate the necessary control mechanisms. Message-based gateways that support non-real-time invocation of services (e.g., file and print servers, financial transactions, VLSI design tools, etc.) are a promising basis for such loose couplings.

On the Two-Layer Model of the Lunar Surface

Two-layer model of lunar surface analyzed, using criteria of transparency to microwave radiation