This book presents the main macroeconomic models used in the central banks of the euro area. These include models of individual countries, multi-country models and aggregate euro-area models. In my view the important contribution of this volume is that it is the first attempt to provide a systematic comparison of these models in terms of their structures, main features and properties. In line w…
As a substantial part of the health budget in many countries is used to purchase pharmaceutical products, procurement of drugs is obviously a crucial function. Various types of tender mechanisms as well as direct procurement are described and discussed. A good way for small procurement agencies to ensure product quality is to conduct restricted tenders to which only prequalified suppli…
The business world is full of endless opportunity to make it big, or crash and burn. Small businesses crop up every day, but very few of them last to see a second anniversary, even when their basic idea was a good one. In this world, the difference between success and failure is in knowing how to work the numbers. Those who learn to unlock the secrets of nancial statements win; those who muddl…
In 2000, the World Health Organization (WHO) acknowledged the need to further explore the relationship between health and the economy by setting up the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (CMH). One of the main conclusions of the work of CMH was that investing in health could not only be of intrinsic value but could in addition produce important economic gains. In response to the growing …
Managing Human Resources in Europe provides an analysis of the most important themes in European human resource management (HRM) written by leading authorities based all over Europe. Unrivalled by any other text it provides a thematic approach with distinctive country examples in each chapter and is characterized by a critical approach with special attention given to dilemmas, controversies, pa…
Governments and state-owned enterprises purchase a wide variety of goods, services and public works from the private sector, from basic computer equipment to the construction of roads. Public procurement is a key economic activity of governments that represents a significant percentage of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) generating huge financial flows, estimated on average at 10-15% of GD…
In a world where no advantages seem to be sustainable for long, prowess in forming and managing strategic alliances has become one of the most-important sources of competitive advantage that firms can develop. Strategic alliances have changed the U.S. industrial landscape as dramatically as the telegraph and railroads did in their respective eras of innovation. Use of strategic alliances has pr…
In today's business environment, and under the influence of globalization and advances in the field of information technology, organizations are facing increasing demands for information processing. In order to respond to the demands of the current business context, modern organization are finding the solution in creating adequate capacity and infrastructure to support the establishment of harm…
This book contains the joint proceedings of the workshop on Boundaries that took place in Graz, from June 29–July 3, and the Alp-Workshop that was held immediately afterwards in Sankt Kathrein am Offenegg, on the weekend July 4–5, 2009
This chapter will teach you the basic elements of OpenCV and will show you how to accomplish the most fundamental tasks: reading, displaying, and saving images. Before you can start with OpenCV, you need to install the library. This is a simple process that is explained in the first recipe of this chapter. You also need a good development environment (IDE) to run your OpenCV applications. We pr…
Data-driven, or dynamic, programming is a series of techniques for modifying an application at runtime. You can accomplish this by storing screen definitions, business rules, and source code in a data source and then restoring them at runtime to alter the functionality of an application. The technology to perform data-driven programming encompasses many areas of software development. Language- …
This book is an updated and expanded version of Ruby in a Nutshell (O’Reilly) by Yukihiro Matsumoto, who is better known as Matz. It is loosely modeled after the classic The C Programming Language (Prentice Hall) by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, and aims to document the Ruby language comprehensively but without the formality of a language specification. It is written for experienced pro…
AWS is not easy; it combines skills of several different (established) crafts. It is different from traditional systems administration, and it’s not just developing a piece of software. If you have practiced one or both of these skills, all you need is to be inquisitive and open to learning. Our background is in software engineering. We are computer scientists with extensive software engineer…
It’s ten o’clock on Monday morning. The boss of the branch office is in a rage. He’s been waiting for hours for an important e-mail, and it still hasn’t arrived. It can only be the fault of the mail server; it’s probably hung yet again. But a quick check of the computer shows that no mails have got stuck in the queue there,and there’snomentioneitherinthelogfilethatamailfromthesend…
Gephi is an interactive graph and network analysis and visualization tool that allows its users to study the properties of graphs and networks in detail, without having to write any code. Gephi supports almost all types of graphical networks including complex networks, hierarchical networks, dynamic networks, and temporal networks. Gephi has a lot of ready-to-use features that allow users to cr…
To secure an Oracle database, you must modify your mindset to think about securing the data and not about securing the software. To secure the software is literally impossible, because the software is almost infinitely configurable and the software does not know anything about your system (apart from what you www.it-ebooks.info CHAPTER 15 ■ SECURING DATA 532 tell it), your applicatio…
Internet advertising is a multi-billion-dollar industry, as is evident from the phenomenal success of companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and continues to grow at a rapid rate. With broadband access becoming ubiquitous, Internet traffic continues to grow in both volume and diversity, providing a rich supply of inventory to be monetized. Fortunately, the surge in supply has been accompanie…
When I first became interested in research into one particular form of African oral literature in 1961, I found to my surprise that there was no easily accessible work to which I could turn to give me some idea of what was known in this field, the various publications available, or the controversies and problems that demanded further investigation. In fact, I gradually discovered, there was an …
virtual enterprise. It is therefore, about the ways we should be using Information Technology, the way we present the knowledge that could helps us organise and optimise the efforts to perform better and stay successful in this turbulent world. The book is organized in four major parts. The first part introduces some basic concepts on enterprise network infrastructures related to enterprise c…
Current research focuses on examining Facebook, one of the most popular social networking site, and education and social interaction. use in an undergraduate sample and explore time investment of the stud social network site. Social, daily and educational measured via a questionnaire administered to 1300 undergraduate students. indicate that only 6.2% st udents have no Facebook account. in this…
In response to a request from Congress, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) convened a committee to conduct an analysis of the federal government’s quality enhancement processes in six government programs—Medicare, Medicaid, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Department of Defense TRICARE and TRICARE for Life programs, the Veterans Health Administration program, and the Indian…
This chapter reports on longitudinal research which explores the experience of mentally ill, developing artists. Through a particular use of the interview space and biographic narrative interviews, an intimate portrait was drawn of the different lines of continua these artistic individuals were negotiating. Such lines were traced through their „wellnesses,‟ their crises, their creative and …
The present decade has seen a blossoming of software tools, research pro- jects, and everyday practice that can loosely be characterized under the heading of ‘online deliberation’. A community has formed around this con- cept, and has met in international conferences, workshops, and special in- terest group sessions. The present volume, which grew out of the Second Conference on Online Deli…
Logical complexity of software systems is one of the main factors causing problems and errors in their planning, design, development, testing, deployment, maintenance, and use. There is a common under- standing that building complex software systems requires careful planning, good architectural design, and well-controlled development processes. Many good books and papers, as well as all softwar…
Window functions, to me, are the most profound feature supported by both standard SQL and Microsoft SQL Server’s dialect—T-SQL. They allow you to perform calculations against sets of rows in a flexible, clear, and efficient manner. The design of window functions is ingenious, overcoming a number of shortcomings of the traditional alternatives. The range of problems that window functions hel…