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IHS Markit undertakes component-level research in the automotive industry through a combination of peer-level interviews and discussions with contacts and thought leaders. This is underpinned by their industry leading vehicle and powertrain-level forecasts. The approach generates a unique level of varied and comprehensive insight, which helps drive the business lines and investment decisions of our clients. With the move to electrified powertrain technology, the automotive supply chain is undergoing a transformational shift towards more compact configurations that will liberate interior space in the vehicle. Whilst this ‘end state’ might appear somewhat simplistic and uninspiring, the interim period will generate a huge number of creative technical evolutions. IHS Markit has undertaken component-level research focusing on the extent to which power electronics, transmission and e-motor technology as well as the thermal management will become increasingly integrated, analyzing the approaches of OEMs and interpolating the supply chain dynamics to understand how solutions will evolve with time.

Purpose Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) represents the most common subtype of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Most relapses occur in the first 2 years after diagnosis. Early response assessment with 18F-fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose (18F-FDG) positron emission tomography (PET) may facilitate early change of treatment, thereby preventing ineffective treatment and unnecessary side effects. We aimed to assess the predictive value of visually-assessed interim 18F-FDG PET on progression-free survival (PFS) or event-free survival (EFS) in DLBCL patients treated with first-line immuno-chemotherapy regimens. Methods For this systematic review and meta-analysis Pubmed, Embase, and the Cochrane Library were searched until July 11, 2017. Prospective and retrospective studies investigating qualitative interim PET response assessment without treatment adaptation based on the interim PET result were eligible. The primary outcome was two-year PFS or EFS. Prognostic and diagnostic measures were extracted and analysed with pooled hazard ratios and Hierarchical Summary Receiver Operator Characteristic Curves, respectively. Meta-regression was used to study covariate effects. Results The pooled hazard ratio for 18 studies comprising 2,255 patients was 3.13 (95%CI 2.52–3.89) with a 95% prediction interval of 1.68–5.83. In 19 studies with 2,366 patients, the negative predictive value for progression generally exceeded 80% (64–95), but sensitivity (33–87), specificity (49–94), and positive predictive values (20–74) ranged widely. Conclusions These findings showed that interim 18F-FDG PET has predictive value in DLBCL patients. However, (subgroup) analyses were limited by lack of information and small sample sizes. Some diagnostic test characteristics were not satisfactory, especially the positive predictive value should be improved, before a successful risk stratified treatment approach can be implemented in clinical practice. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s00259-018-4103-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Use of imaging for staging and response assessment of aggressive lymphomas has appropriately moved from anatomic imaging with CT scanning alone to capturing both anatomic and metabolic information with combined PET-CT. The poorer prognosis of patients who fail to obtain a complete metabolic response after rituximab-chemotherapy has driven interim PET-CT assessment applying the 5-point scale or measuring changes in the standardised uptake value (ΔSUV). However with variations in chemotherapy regimen, timing and methodology across studies, the positive predictive value of interim PET remains too low to recommend its uniform application in routine clinical practice.

When I wrote my chapter in the first book about Industrie 4.0 about three years ago, the entire situation in this area was characterized by vagueness as to the definition of Industrie 4.0. You could feel a great sense of anxiety and the impression that we were talking about something very significant, perhaps affecting the very existence of some companies, of branches of industry, and even entire national economies, such as in Germany, with a value creation structure characterized by small and midsize enterprises and oriented toward production. In the meanwhile, the fog has lifted a bit, and we think we can make out some sharper outlines. This chapter will attempt to further clarify these outlines here and there, as well as share some impressions I have collected in the area of digitalization in global business. At the 2016 Hanover Trade Fair, it was easy to get the impression that the general anxiety on this topic had diminished considerably. Yet, there were hardly any signs that great progress had been made in defining content. There was, however, to some extent, a conspicuously flexible use of the term ‘Industrie 4.0,’ overheard when some suppliers described their automation products and systems. If one wanted to make an interim summary about Industrie 4.0 at this point, one would have to admit that, even though not much useful content has been defined, awareness of the quickly progressing digitalization in industry and the resulting expected changes and necessary reactive measures have increased substantially. That fact alone may justify the efforts previously taken.

The problem of environmental damage and risk assessment has grown to be recognized as critically important, reflecting the emphasis of governments and political bodies on the urgency of need to control environmental degradation. This chapter reviews a number of approaches that have been applied to support decision making relative to project impact on the environment. The traditional approach has been to apply cost-benefit analysis, which has long been recognized to have issues. Most of the variant techniques discussed in this chapter are modifications of CBA in various ways. Contingent valuation focuses on integrating citizen input, accomplished through surveys. Other techniques focus on more accurate inputs of value tradeoffs. Conjoint analysis is a means to more accurately obtain such tradeoffs, but at a high cost of subject input. Habitat equivalency analysis modifies the analysis by viewing environmental damage in terms of natural resource service loss. Compensatory restoration assessed reflects actions to compensate for interim losses. Focus is thus on cost of actual restoration. Rather than abstract estimates of the monetary value of injured resources, the focus is on actual cost of restoration to baseline.

We study a market model where a data analyst uses monetary incentives to procure private data from strategic data subjects/individuals. To characterize individuals' privacy concerns, we consider a local model of differential privacy, where the individuals do not trust the analyst so privacy costs are incurred when the data is reported to the data analyst. We investigate a basic model where the private data are bits that represent the individuals' knowledge about an underlying state, and the analyst pays each individual according to all the reported data. The data analyst's goal is to design a payment mechanism such that at an equilibrium, she can learn the state with an accuracy goal met and the corresponding total expected payment minimized. What makes the mechanism design more challenging is that not only the data but also the privacy costs are unknown to the data analyst, where the costs reflect individuals' valuations of privacy and are modeled by "cost coefficients." To cope with the uncertainty in the cost coefficients and drive down the data analyst's cost, we utilize possible negative payments which penalize individuals with "unacceptably" high valuations of privacy and explore interim individual rationality. We design a family of payment mechanisms, each of which has a Bayesian Nash equilibrium where the individuals exhibit a threshold behavior: the individuals with cost coefficients above a threshold choose not to participate, and the individuals with cost coefficients below the threshold participate and report data with quality guarantee. By choosing appropriate parameters, we obtain a sequence of mechanisms, as the number of individuals grows large. Each mechanism in this sequence fulfills the accuracy goal at a Bayesian Nash equilibrium. The total expected payment at the equilibrium goes to zero; i.e., this sequence of mechanisms is asymptotically optimal.

We describe our model, Strategic Leverage Through Learning © , and its development. Our model uses the system-level factors in the Burke-Litwin Model of Organizational Performance and Change to define the key dimensions of an organizational system. Following Burke and Litwin (Journal of Management 18:532–545, 1992), Strategic Leverage Through Learning © distinguishes between transformational and transactional dynamics. We have defined and added a set of interim learning and performance outcomes to the Burke-Litwin framework. We have also redefined the constructs for each of the transformational and transactional factors in their model to jointly optimize learning and performance. We describe how we developed and validated measures of the constructs in our model. Definitions of constructs are included. We demonstrate the use of the model to diagnose challenges and leverage change in a Federal Judicial Agency. We contrast our learning approach to change with planned change models.

For decades, there has been speculation that Belgium might split. Three models are regarded as being an option: two independent states of Flanders and Wallonia, Wallonia becoming part of France and Flanders joining the Netherlands, or an independent state of Flanders and a region of Wallonia that is affiliated to France. The speculation over division has been given new impetus by the result of the parliamentary elections in Belgium on 13 June 2010. The “New Flemish Alliance” (Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie, N-VA) and the radical national party “Flemish Interest” (Vlaams Belang, VB), which both advocate the independence of Flanders in different ways, together won 25.2 % of the vote, and 39 of 150 parliamentary seats in Belgium. However, the N-VA, as an interim solution, is merely demanding a transformation of the federal state into a union of states with a shared monarchy and foreign and security policy.

The application of the customary principle of State responsibility to damage resulting from the transboundary movement of hazardous wastes by sea as well as the application of civil liability conventions, whether in force or not, to such movements have been outlined in the previous chapter. As an overall result, it has been ascertained that the current legal situation at the international level regarding liability and compensation for damage resulting from hazardous waste movements is insufficient and unsatisfactory. The question now must be whether the Protocol to the Basel Convention can be regarded as an appropriate and effective solution and what can be done to encourage ratification of this convention. To this end, a first step entails examining in this chapter the basic preconditions for a feasible liability regime.

In a group-sequential trial, patients are recruited in groups, and their response to treatment is assessed. After each group is assessed, an interim analysis is conducted. At each interim analysis, the trial can stop for futility, stop for efficacy, or continue. The main advantage of group-sequential designs is that the expected number of patients is reduced compared to a design without interim analyses. There are infinitely many possible group-sequential designs to use, and the choice strongly affects the operating characteristics of the trial. This chapter discusses optimal and admissible group-sequential designs. Optimal designs minimise the expected sample size at some specified treatment effect; admissible designs optimise a weighted sum of trial properties of interest, such as expected sample size and maximum sample size. Methods for finding such designs are discussed, including a detailed description of an R package that implements a quick search procedure. Recent applications of group-sequential methodology to trials with multiple experimental treatments being tested against a single control treatment are also described.

Anthropogenic noise is a common but evolutionarily recent influence on communicating animals and evidence is accumulating of its adverse impacts on human health, therefore it has potential relevance to conservation. However, demonstrating that this potential is realised is not straightforward. A particular issue is the difficulty of assessing likely impacts from the limited evidence on the main factors influencing impacts—from the hearing abilities of animals of conservation concern through to the characteristics of emitted sound fields in natural environments. Further issues include the likely underestimation of behavioural effects, and a lack of knowledge of how animals trade off costs and benefits. In this chapter, we aim to highlight the main themes emerging from the growing interest in the effects of anthropogenic noise on conservation. We predominantly consider the marine environment (with examples drawn mainly from marine mammals) and the terrestrial environment (with bird examples). An important consideration that emerges from the increasing levels of anthropogenic noise and difficulties in assessing specific impacts is the need to develop interim guidance, while more detailed information is gathered and assessed.

This study sets out to contribute to making web pages more accessible especially with reference to people with visual impairments. Ways of evaluating of the interfaces of web sites and systems were investigated resulting in new, interim proposals which make use of W3C and Electronic Government tools combined with heuristics and. Thus, an assessment with greater emphasis on ergonomic criteria in terms of the human-computer interface is provided. A case study was used to evaluate three interfaces using the W3C validation tools HTML/ CSS validator and DaSilva. Thereafter, Jakob Nielsen's heuristcs were applied using a screen reader. The outcome was comparative charts and tables that illustrate the possibility of outside experts applying the methods together to achieve a substantially higher level of detailed information on errors. This would provide improvements in correcting errors on interfaces with a view to minimizing ergonomic problems and usability. These are problems that hinder the visually impaired from having full access to websites and systems.

The global economic crisis had a severe impact on the Hungarian economy at the end of 2008 due to the high public deficit and large FX debt/GDP ratio. Hungary had to take out emergency loans from the IMF and introduced measures such as cutting government expenditures (housing subsidies, pensions, etc.) and levying special taxes. The interim Hungarian government launched an austerity program that consolidated the budget and brought down the deficit to 3.8 % of GDP by 2009. After the election in 2010, the new government, which received 53 % of the votes and has two-thirds majority in Parliament, introduced “unorthodox” economic measures, provoking widespread discussion and criticism both in Hungary and abroad. The economic basis of this policy is a modified neo-Keynesian economic policy that tries to boost economic growth through state expenditures or tax cuts. The “unorthodox” economic policy aims to restore economic growth and fiscal balance without austerity measures.

Despite the best efforts of software engineers, faults still escape into deployed software. Developers need time to prepare and distribute fixes, and in the interim, deployments must either avoid failures or endure their consequences. Self-adaptive systems–systems that adapt to changes internally, in requirements, and in a dynamic environment– can often handle these challenges automatically, depending on the nature of the failures.

This paper first reviews some methods of classifying interim products during shop manufacturing. Then, the general cluster analysis is present. The progress of classifying interim products based on cluster analysis is given, and seven features of interim products are present to analysis. Finally, a case is calculated to show the effective of the method, which provides a useful way for effective classification of the intermediate products in the shipbuilding process.

The almost depleted Altmark gas field was chosen by the owner and operator GDF SUEZ E&P Deutschland GmbH (GDF SUEZ) for an Enhanced Gas Recovery (EGR) project. GDF SUEZ took part in the joint research project CLEAN providing this site as a basis for the scientific work of the partners from academia and industry. In November 2007, GDF SUEZ filed the application for injection of up to 100,000 t of CO2 with the State Office for Geology and Mining of Saxony Anhalt. The permitting process came to a halt towards the end of 2008, because the responsible mining authority considered a national CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) law to be the only legal basis for approval. The national CCS law still has not been enacted in Germany. In January 2009, the erection of the interim CO2 storage and conditioning unit in Maxdorf was completed. New flow lines between the Maxdorf and the potential injection wells were fully planned but never build. Corrosion resistant re-completion of the injection wells did not take place either. Within the funding period of the CLEAN project (2008–2011), there was no injection of CO2.

This chapter will explore the nature and depth of military reforms since Nigeria’s last democratic transition in 1999. Reforming civil-military relations in the largest West African country was inevitable, if the military’s decision to hand over power to civilians after the unexpected death of military dictator Gen. Sani Abacha on 8 June 1998 was genuine. Doubts about the military’s sincerity indeed lingered at the time as the Nigerian military had a record of not honouring transition promises. The last attempt to civilianize Nigerian politics ended with the annulment of the presidential elections of 12 June 1993 by Gen. Babangida. The decision paved the way to power for Gen. Abacha, who toppled a weak interim government installed by outgoing President Babangida and subsequently sought to perpetuate his repressive rule with the support of the armed forces. These legacies raise the question of how deep and lasting the new Nigerian democratic order and the military’s political abstinence are.

In international law, jurisdiction serves the same principal aim as in national law, namely the settlement of disputes in order to maintain (legal) peace and security. In international law, as in national law, judicial procedures take time, sometimes a lot of time, during which the rights at stake may be negatively affected by acts of one of the parties potentially resulting in an ineffective judgment. A remedy against such an occurrence has been developed through an instrument of interim protection by which the court directs the parties to leave the rights as they stand and not to interfere with the situation.1 Such an instrument appears indispensable in order to ensure that a court or tribunal is able to effectively exercise its function.2 At the national level, interim protection is usually unproblematic since the competence of the tribunals is mostly comprehensive.

The college graduates is the main power of improving Chinese modernization. But most of them are unable to obtain a satisfactory living environment when they make important economic contributions. On the other hand, Chinese Housing-for-all program is designed for urban residents who have local census register and pay for the enough social security, most of the graduates can not match them. How to resolve this problem is very important. This paper uses shanghai’s data as an example. The survey found the housing problem of college graduates in Shanghai, propose college graduates interim housing model.

It has been explained in detail on p. 25 et seq. above which requirements a protection system against natural hazards must meet in view of climate change: • For social and national economic reasons, rapid, well-planned and controlled rebuilding must be ensured.

Based on cross-sectional regression, this paper investigates the performance persistence of stock fund. The empirical result shows that there is some persistence in the stock fund’s short, interim or long-term performance, though it is not stable. However, there is even some reversal in several periods.

In this chapter, the design of pharmacokinetic studies and phase III trials in children is discussed. Classical approaches and relatively novel approaches, which may be more useful in the context of drug research in children, are discussed. The burden of repeated blood sampling in pediatric pharmacokinetic studies may be overcome by the population pharmacokinetics approach using nonlinear mixed effect modeling as the statistical solution to sparse data. Indications and contraindications for phase III trials are discussed: only when there is true “equipoise” in the medical scientific community, it is ethical to conduct a randomized clinical trial. The many reasons why a pediatric trial may fail are illustrated with examples. Inadequate sample sizes lead to inconclusive results. Twelve classical strategies to minimize sample sizes are discussed followed by an introduction to group sequential design, boundaries design, and adaptive design. The evidence that these designs reduce sample sized between 35 and 70% is reviewed. The advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches are highlighted to give the reader a broad idea of the design types that can be considered. Finally, working with DMCs during the conduct of trials is introduced. The evidence regarding DMC activities, interim analysis results, and early termination of pediatric trials is presented. So far reporting is incomplete and heterogeneous, and users of trial reports may be misled by the results. A proposal for a checklist for the reporting of DMC issues, interim analyses, and early stopping is presented.

In many material processing and storing plants an inspector performs during some reference time interval a number of inspections because it can not be excluded that the operator acts illegally by violating agreed rules, e.g., diverts precious or dangerous material. In many situations it is necessary to allow incomplete detections and the possibility of false alarms. In this contribution a model for unobservable interim inspections due to Diamond is extended to include first and second kind errors in case of one or two unannounced interim inspections per reference time interval. In both cases a Nash equilibrium is determined and its properties are discussed. This contribution is also intended to bring Diamonds brilliant idea of solving those kind of games back to awareness.

This paper presents an approach which performs a Style Analysis of Academic Writing in terms of formal voice, readability and scientific language. Our intention is an analysis of academic writing style as a feedback for the authors and editors. The extracted features of a document collection are used to create Self-Organizing Maps which are the interim results to generate reports in our Full Automatic Paper Analysis System (Fapas). To evaluate this method, the system has to solve different tasks to verify the informative value of the generated maps and reports.

Traditionalists will argue that conventional classroom lectures have been and always will be the most effective form of teaching. In contrast, people focusing on progress will put pure e-teaching on a pedestal. Confronted with these two extremes, a natural reflex is to search for a compromise. Hybrid learning could be such a compromise. However, the important question is whether this is only a compromise for the anxious, an interim arrangement on the transition to pure e-teaching, or the best conceivable solution, that is meant to stay. In the present paper we are giving evidence for the latter position based on practitioners' experiences of more than ten years of technology enhanced teaching. We address the need for university wide learning management systems and advocate simple, cost-effective, and sustainable solutions not asking too much from lecturers, but-nevertheless-causing a significant added value for the students.

This research in progress paper reports on the results of a pilot study investigating the transfer of knowledge in a social network, such as a Community of Practice, that comprises members of various organisations and therefore represents knowledge transfer at an inter-organisational level. The study aims to identify and analyse knowledge transfer structures and processes in inter-organisational social networks, which are embedded in the larger R&D network. This paper presents some interim results using a mixed method approach of case research and social network analysis. Specifically, initial relations between tie strength, type of knowledge transferred as well as preferred media characteristics were discovered. Most central organisations in the network were identified. From these findings, the overarching goal is to investigate where information and communication technology could be utilised for continuous online knowledge transfer.

Treating ‘Territorial Cohesion’ (TC) is similar to Plato’s cave parable: you are watching phenomena, like shadows on the wall of a cave, which could be interpreted in one way or another, but you cannot perceive the reality hidden from you which causes these phenomena on the wall. Contrary to political demands for more transparency in European policies and more opportunities for the involvement of citizens, the insight into TC policy procedures appears to be widely secluded from the public and even hidden from research interests, and perhaps from many official experts involved in the debates as well. When lengthy procedures have come to an (interim) end and formal, political decisions have materialized in final (conference) documents which are submitted to the public, and are hence available to the scientific community, it is too late in most cases for any public or scientific involvement in the procedure and its results.

In the past few years, I have been coaching several clients and numerous projects on Agile management methodology. Unanimously, I was asked the same question many times: Can we track QA (Quality Assurance) work as we do with development? In another word, can we capture all the QA activities and work in a backlog list and do the iteration and release planning based on the QA staff plan, and assumed QA velocity? Can we also generate QA status report such as the burn up or burn down chart? Before answering these questions, my first response would be why. No doubt, QA is a core part for an Agile project. Suppose developers achieve the throughput per iteration as scheduled, does it mean the project will be released as planned? Not necessarily, what if QA could not complete testing all stories from previous dev iterations? What if QA has to support interim release testing? What if QA is pulled into other activities than iteration testing? What if QA team is mixed of on shore and offshore members, and has to support multiple dev teams at the same time? All these questions become the reasons behind the very first one – “Can we track QA as we do with our Dev?” The first project I worked on was for an investment banking client who had a QA team of 6 people with 4 on shore and 2 off shore, supporting testing for 5 development teams of almost 30 developers. The team faced several issues: There was no QA estimation for story; QA spent lots of time on non-story activities without tracking; the ratio QA to developers was 1:5. The second team I worked with was a QA team of an e-commerce retailer IT department. The team had 3 people supporting 6 developers. The team mixed the dev velocity with QA’s. By their definition, velocity was the amount of work that passed UAT in an iteration, measured in dev estimation points, while at the same time, Iteration planning only took dev velocity into consideration. The QA estimation for each story was well off mark. And as same as the first team, QA team members were pulled regularly to support release testing and other non project related activities. We helped both teams by adopting similar tracking mechanism we used for the dev team. We first created a complete QA backlog list including all the stories, plus the non-story QA tasks. In the backlog list, we indicated which dev iteration and QA iteration each story was schedule in. We then did QA estimation for each story using the “triangulation” rule. We separated QA velocity from Dev’s. We planned QA iteration as we did for Dev, and provided QA status report and burn up chart per iteration. Both projects achieved good results

In this paper we introduce a new model of ex ante contracting for economies with asymmetric information to examine endogenously determined communication plans for information sharing in the interim stage. In contrast to the models used in previous research, in the present model agents negotiate not only on a contract of state contingent allocations but also on a communication plan, a set of rules describing how agents will reveal part of their private information at the interim stage to execute the trade contracts. We prove a result about the nested structure of the set of allocations implementable by various communication plans and establish the existence of core strategies for this cooperative game under various regularity conditions.

In a situation where agents have private information, we investigate the stability of mechanisms with respect to coalitional deviations. In the cooperative tradition, we first extend the notion of Core, taking into account the information a coalition may have when it forms and the conjectures of outsiders. This leads us to propose a family of Cores rather than a single one. Secondly, we study the stability of Core mechanisms to secession proposals in simple noncooperative games. The two different stability analyses, normative and strategic, tend to give support to the more natural extension of the Core, called Statistical Core, only in situations where some strong form of increasing returns to coalition is met. Without this property, arguments for a concept of Core that is non empty in a reasonably large class of problems are less compelling. Applications to taxation and insurance are given.

At an interim stage players possessing only their private information freely communicate with each other to coordinate their strategies. This results in a core strategy, which is interpreted as an equilibrium set of players’ alternative type-contingent contract offers to their fellows. From this set of offers each player then chooses an optimal one and engages in some subsequent action, thus possibly revealing some private information to the others. Now with new information thus obtained from each other, the players play a new game to re-write their contract. In all of the optimization and gaming just described, Bayesian incentive compatibility plays a central role. These ideas are formulated within a model of a profit-center game with incomplete information which formally describes interaction of the asymmetrically informed profit-centers in Chandler’s multidivisional firm.

Organizations often encounter problems in the Product Integration process. The difficulties include finding errors at integration related to mismatch between the different components and problems in other parts of the system than the one that was changed. The question is if these problems can be decreased if the awareness of the integration process is increased in other activities. To get better understanding of this problem we have analyzed the integration process in two product development organizations. One of the organizations has two different groups with slightly different integration routines while the other is basing the development on well defined components. The obstacles found in product integration are highlighted and related to best practices as described in the interim standard EIA-731.1. Our conclusion from this study is that the current descriptions for best practices in product integration are available in standards and models, but are insufficiently used and can be supported by technology to be accepted and utilized by the product developers.

We introduce several efficiency notions depending on what kind of expected utility is used (ex ante, interim, ex post) and on how agents share their private information, i.e., whether they redistribute their initial endowments based on their own private information, or common knowledge information, or pooled information. Moreover, we introduce several Bayesian incentive compatibility notions and identify several efficiency concepts which maintain (coalitional) Bayesian incentive compatibility.

Given the water scarcity in the Middle East, the Jordan River as well the West Bank Mountain Aquifer are prime examples of internationally shared water resources that hold the potential for conflict. The last century witnessed substantial tension among the co-riparian states and included skirmishes over water (Wolf/Ross 1992; Reguer 1993; Lowi 1995). Between 1950 and 1990, the U.S. government attempted to mediate a number of water disputes with limited success. By the early 1990’s, no water agreements existed between Israel and its neighbours, and the de facto water use regime was heavily disputed. During the course of the Middle East peace talks, several agreements were concluded which contain provisions on water, notably the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty of 1994 and the Interim (Oslo B) Agreement between Israelis and Palestinians of 1995. In addition, in 1996, a trilateral Declaration of Principles for cooperation on water-related matters was signed by Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority.

Multiplayer online games represent one of the most popular forms of networked group communication on the Internet today. We have been running a server for a first-person shooter game, Half-Life. In this paper we analyse some of the delay characteristics of different players on the server and present some interim results. We find that whilst network delay has some effect on players' behaviour, this is outweighed by application-level or exogenous effects. Players seem to be remarkably tolerant of network conditions, and absolute delay bounds appear to be less important than the relative delay between players.

Analysis is now complete of approximately half the galaxies to be studied in the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project on the extragalactic distance scale. Galaxy scaling relations are among the secondary distance indicators calibrated by the project. An interim calibration of the Tully—Fisher relation yields H0 = 73 ± 10 km/sec/Mpc.

The Fisher Medical Centre is a highly computerised general practice based in Skipton, North Yorkshire. We decided to try to implement the BMA interim guidelines on maintaining security in computerised patient information systems. This paper outlines the management processes by which a modified set of the BMA guidelines have been implemented in our practice. We also assessed the effects of implementing the nine principles outlined in the BMA security policy document. We describe the problems that we faced, the solutions we found and some of the issues that we were unable to resolve.

The regulation of disinfection by-products (DBPs) in the United States was based on the discovery of the presence of chloroform as a by-product of chlorination in drinking water in the early 1970s. This suspected human carcinogen was indirectly regulated as one of the four trihalomethanes (THMs) under the interim total THM (TTHM) regulation established by the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) in 1979. An interim maximum contaminant level (MCL) of 0.10 mg/1 was established for water utility systems serving more than 10,000 people, based on the running annual average of four quarterly samples.

Dual scaling quantifies such categorical data as contingency tables, multiple-choice data, sorting data, paired comparison data, rank-order data, and successive categories data. These data can be classified into two types, incidence data and dominance data. The present study is an overview of some key formulas and several conceptual problems, which require further investigations. Most of them are peculiar to data types, and some remedial procedures are suggested for them as interim measures. Awareness of these difficulties in dual scaling and other related methods seems to be the most notable recent development.

During the negotiations on the Unification Act in 1990 a serious problem occurred: The system of intergovernmental fiscal relations would have been overstrained in a non manageable degree, if the new East German Lander were included. This system was constructed for a quite homogenous federal state and not for managing the extreme differences between the West German and the new East German Lander. It was therefore not possible to immediately integrate the new Lander into the current system. Since restructuring the system within a short period of time was also out of the question, flexible and provisional interim regulations had to be worked out. After about three years, when sufficient data for the new Lander was available, the system of intergovernmental fiscal relations was restructured; this common effort considered the problems of unified Germany up to the year 2000 and beyond. Thus the German system of intergovernmental fiscal relations has changed from an obstacle for unification to the major element in the completion of economic and social unification.

The entity of professional emergency medical services (EMS) has enjoyed a popular reputation for “saving lives”. However, this public notion has come under recent scrutiny and the value of certain prehospital critical care services has now been debated. In addition, with the evolving introduction of scientific evaluation into the prehospital care arena, there also comes a growing concern about evolving ethical issues, not only regarding the prehospital care services, but also the actual scientific evaluation process itself. The purpose of this chapter will be to examine some of these issues and then suggest some interim resolutions for these academic and clinical dilemmas in the important and maturing discipline of prehospital critical care.

This paper examines the current advantages and limitations of the developing Global Information Infrastructure (GII) for commerce from the point of view of today's players. It is based on the interim results of an Expert Survey being carried out as part of the ACTS project SEMPER (Secure Electronic Marketplace for Europe) 1. The findings can be broadly categorised as ‘network’ and ‘non-network’ influences on participation in electronic commerce, i.e. those directly related to the use of computer technology for connecting to and navigating in open networks and the non-technical influences on the willingness or ability to conduct business in this environment. The analysis is primarily based on use of the Internet because it is currently the most widely used precursor of the GII.

One: Reports.- The Indication of Provisional Measures by the International Court of Justice.- Interim Measures in the Law and Practice of the Court of Justice of the European Communities.- Interim Measures in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.- Interim Measures of Protection under the European Convention on Human Rights.- Two: Colloquium.- Opening Address.- List of Participants.

Studies that are well conducted, rigorously analysed and reliably reported are increasingly needed to determine the value of the range of potentially beneficial agents available now and in the forseeable future [14]. Head injuries are very common but there are many different mechanisms of injury and great variations in severity. Therefore, the criteria for entry of patients to the study must be well defined in advance, both to ensure internal consistency and to enable comparison with other reports. Events during the trial need to be monitored, not only in order to determine if an agent has adverse side effects, often the prime concern of the parent company, but to seek also for clues to the mechanisms of injury and how these are affected by the treatment. Assessments of outcome must be made at a time that is appropriate biologically and socially but also convenient for the purposes of acquiring the data in a reasonable time period.

In this study some important aspects of monetary policy in Germany are theoretically and empirically investigated. In die first part, we analyse the institutional framework for the Bundesbank and point out preconditions for the policy of monetary targeting. Especially, we show, that the Bundesbank is neither able to achieve the final goals of monetary policy directly nor to control the interim target money supply exactly in the short run. The available instruments are only suitable to influence money market rates and liquidity within the banking system. In the second part, we empirically examine some of the mentioned preconditions and problems of monetary policy with data for West Germany. Three subjects are of our main interest. First the money demand function and second the money market control of the Bundesbank to give an answer to the questions of controllability of money supply by monetary instruments. Our final point concerns the determinants of the behaviour of the Bundesbank due to a monetary reaction function.