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The study utilizes the method of Material Flow, Ecological Footprint Model and other related indicators to establish the Indicator System of Sustainable Development. Principal Component Analysis is used to abstract the representative factors in order to estimate the indicators of ecological sustainable development during 1998~2005 in Taiwan, as well as to make policy recommendations. The research indicates following results: (1) The Direct Material Input (DMI) of Taiwan shows constant instability and depends on heavy import activity. The annual increase of considerable greenhouse gas emission leads to a comparative growth of the Domestic Process Output (DOP). The both material consumption and inventory formation of the economy are unsteady. In addition, the Physical Trade Balance (PTB) indicates that supply exceeds demand, as well as the occasional shortage of building materials. (2) The 2005 per capita Ecological Demand footprint in Taiwan is 6.5392 hm2, making the Ecological Deficit per capita 4.8569 hm2. The figures reflect that productivity and life intensity of residents have exceeded the carrying capacity of Taiwan’s ecological economic system. (3) The overall Synthetic Trend Indicators of Sustainable Development in Taiwan are decreasing. Therefore, if proper measures are not adopted in time, the current weak sustainability will lead into the vicious circle which departs from sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The epitaxial growth of (FeCo)xGe1-x films on Ge and GaAs (001) substrates has been studied systematically with x in the range between 0 and 17 at. %, using combinatorial molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) techniques. Complementary doping using the two transition metal dopants into Ge (001) during MBE growth is shown to produce high quality coherent epitaxial films for transition metal concentrations as high as 11 at. %. As the doping level increases, rough growth occurs, which is accompanied by an increasing amount of stacking faults along the <111> directions. The crystal lattice that resulted from the rough growth exhibits a large out-of-plane tetragonal distortion. There are no detectable secondary phases up to a combined transition metal concentration of 17 at. %. The behaviors are shown to be invariant with respect to the choice of substrates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The structural and magnetic phase diagrams of Co a(1−x)Mn ax Ge b epitaxial films near the composition of Heusler alloy Co2MnGe have been studied using combinatorial molecular beam epitaxy techniques. Epitaxial growth on Ge (111) has been stabilized over nearly the entire composition range of the ternary system. Epitaxial constraints play an important role for the small number of observed structural phases. The variety of high-temperature magnetic properties, and the structural and chemical compatibilities with group IV elements make the ternary system promising for the science and applications of spintronics. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Objective: To determine whether sales of electrolyte products contain a signal of outbreaks of respiratory and diarrheal disease in children and, if so, how much earlier a signal relative to hospital diagnoses.Design: Retrospective analysis was conducted of sales of electrolyte products and hospital diagnoses for six urban regions in three states for the period 1998 through 2001.Measurements: Presence of signal was ascertained by measuring correlation between electrolyte sales and hospital diagnoses and the temporal relationship that maximized correlation. Earliness was the difference between the date that the exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) method first detected an outbreak from sales and the date it first detected the outbreak from diagnoses. The coefficient of determination (r2) measured how much variance in earliness resulted from differences in sales' and diagnoses' signal strengths.Results: The correlation between electrolyte sales and hospital diagnoses was 0.90 (95% CI, 0.87-0.93) at a time offset of 1.7 weeks (95% CI, 0.50-2.9), meaning that sales preceded diagnoses by 1.7 weeks. EWMA with a nine-sigma threshold detected the 18 outbreaks on average 2.4 weeks (95% CI, 0.1-4.8 weeks) earlier from sales than from diagnoses. Twelve outbreaks were first detected from sales, four were first detected from diagnoses, and two were detected simultaneously. Only 26% of variance in earliness was explained by the relative strength of the sales and diagnoses signals (r2 = 0.26).Conclusion: Sales of electrolyte products contain a signal of outbreaks of respiratory and diarrheal diseases in children and usually are an earlier signal than hospital diagnoses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2002 Olympic Winter Games were held in Utah from February 8 to March 16, 2002. Following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and the anthrax release in October 2001, the need for bioterrorism surveillance during the Games was paramount. A team of informaticists and public health specialists from Utah and Pittsburgh implemented the Real-time Outbreak and Disease Surveillance (RODS) system in Utah for the Games in just seven weeks. The strategies and challenges of implementing such a system in such a short time are discussed. The motivation and cooperation inspired by the 2002 Olympic Winter Games were a powerful driver in overcoming the organizational issues. Over 114,000 acute care encounters were monitored between February 8 and March 31, 2002. No outbreaks of public health significance were detected. The system was implemented successfully and operational for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games and remains operational today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 2001 AMIA Annual Symposium, the Anesthesia, Critical Care, and Emergency Medicine Working Group hosted the Roundtable on Bioterrorism Detection. Sixty-four people attended the roundtable discussion, during which several researchers discussed public health surveillance systems designed to enhance early detection of bioterrorism events. These systems make secondary use of existing clinical, laboratory, paramedical, and pharmacy data or facilitate electronic case reporting by clinicians. This paper combines case reports of six existing systems with discussion of some common techniques and approaches. The purpose of the roundtable discussion was to foster communication among researchers and promote progress by 1) sharing information about systems, including origins, current capabilities, stages of deployment, and architectures; 2) sharing lessons learned during the development and implementation of systems; and 3) exploring cooperation projects, including the sharing of software and data. A mailing list server for these ongoing efforts may be found at http://bt.cirg.washington.edu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A surge of development of new public health surveillance systems designed to provide more timely detection of outbreaks suggests that public health has a new requirement: extreme timeliness of detection. The authors review previous work relevant to measuring timeliness and to defining timeliness requirements. Using signal detection theory and decision theory, the authors identify strategies to improve timeliness of detection and position ongoing system development within that framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report the growth, epitaxial arrangement, and electrical and magnetic properties of epitaxial thin films of hexagonal BaRuO[sub 3] on (001) cubic perovskite substrates. Four-circle x-ray diffraction reveals that the BaRuO[sub 3] films are predominantly grown with two distinct orientations normal to the (001) SrTiO[sub 3] substrate: (022¯3) of the four-layered hexagonal structure (4H) in the sputter-grown films and (202¯5) of the nine-layered hexagonal structure (9R) in the pulsed laser deposited films. (022¯3)-oriented 4H films consist of four orthogonal domains with the in-plane relationship of BaRuO[sub 3][21¯1¯0]//SrTiO[sub 3]<110>. The temperature dependent resistivity of the (022¯3) 4H film shows metallic behavior. In contrast, a resistivity minimum is observed at low temperatures in the (202¯5) 9R film. Both films exhibit Pauli paramagnetism. © 2001 American Institute of Physics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]