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Card payments are getting more and more popular across the world. The dominant standard used for Electronic Funds Transfer transaction is EMV. It is widely used across Europe and Canada, and currently it is being introduced in the USA. The most frequently used Cardholder Verification Method in EMV transaction is PIN, which requires from the payment terminal to be equipped with pinpad - which increases the cost of the whole payment device. In this article I present an alternative Cardholder Verification Method (CVM) that can be used instead of traditional PIN. The key advantage of the presented mechanism is that it can be easily implemented in currently utilized authorization protocols, it does not affect rules of EMV specification and may decrease time of transaction processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses main developments in the organization and financing of health care in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. These countries exemplify different approaches to health care reform and different processes of institutional change of health care systems. The article charts main policy developments and offers explanation of dynamics of changes. It emphasizes the role of politics and broadly understood institutions, which are often neglected in the literature on health care reform in the region. It is argued that political institutions, party politics and rivalries within the governments influenced the scope and timing of policy changes. Institutional changes were also affected by the patterns of interest representation and organizational and normative developments that resulted from decisions and non-decisions taken in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emission of fine particles (FP) generated by biomass combustion poses a substantial health risk. The immediate emissions from biomass boilers are mainly influenced by the operating parameters. The authors of this article present the results of an experimental identification of the real FP emissions from small biomass boilers and residential stoves in Central Europe. A single method was used in the study to measure the FP emissions from an automatic boiler burning spruce pellets and from a manual stove burning beech logs. The measurement is extended by a thermo-gravimetric analysis of samples of the fuels used, supplemented with an analysis of the emitted particles. The boilers were tested in an operating cycle that included the phases of fuel ignition, steady combustion, and afterburning. The paper presents the concentrations and size distributions observed of the emitted FP ranging from 17 to 544 nm in size. Operating cycles including a "cold start" and "warm start" are compared. The results achieved are summarized by the expression of the nominal FP emission presenting the number and mass emission corresponding to burning 1 kg of fuel. The tested automatic boiler fed by spruce pellets produced a nominal FP emission of 173 mg kg−1 in the size range of 17–544 nm during the testing operation cycle. The tested manual stove, fed by beech logs, produced a nominal emission of 1043 mg kg−1 in the same size range of particles during the similar testing cycle. Image 1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]