Making the Connection: How Provider Dialogue and Network Clusters Can Spur Successful Collaboration

In 2005, the Forbes Funds commissioned a report called Service Clustering: Building Cohesive Public Service Capacity that described collaboration as a way to achieve greater efficiency through shared back-office or non-mission critical functions without reducing consumer choice. The researchers argued that collaboration could best be induced by focusing on providers that are geographically close together and that provide an overlapping set of services. According to the report, "It is easier to share, communicate, and collaborate with your neighbor than with an organization separated by distance." Though this idea is compelling, it has become clear in the years since the 2005 report that the identification of geographic clusters is not sufficient to inspire a host of new collaborations. Formal collaboration, the kind suggested in the past report and the focus of this work, remains a relatively rare phenomenon. Convinced that collaboration continues to promise greater efficiency and effectiveness when successfully implemented, The Forbes Funds revisited the topic this year, hoping to gain further insight into the factors that make collaboration successful and to identify additional clusters of providers that could provide the greatest potential for collaboration

Transmission parameters of the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic in Great Britain.

Despite intensive ongoing research, key aspects of the spatial-temporal evolution of the 2001 foot and mouth disease (FMD) epidemic in Great Britain (GB) remain unexplained. Here we develop a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for estimating epidemiological parameters of the 2001 outbreak for a range of simple transmission models. We make the simplifying assumption that infectious farms were completely observed in 2001, equivalent to assuming that farms that were proactively culled but not diagnosed with FMD were not infectious, even if some were infected. We estimate how transmission parameters varied through time, highlighting the impact of the control measures on the progression of the epidemic. We demonstrate statistically significant evidence for assortative contact patterns between animals of the same species. Predictive risk maps of the transmission potential in different geographic areas of GB are presented for the fitted models

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF SEISMIC RESEARCH WORKS FOR OIL AND GAS DEPOSITS IN THE BLACK SEA

Environmental impact of seismic research works for oil and gas deposits in the Black Sea. The prospecting and exploitation activity of hydrocarbon deposits in Romania has experienced a major development in the nineteenth century and has remained since a major component in achieving energy independence in our country. In 1970 the oil and gas production in Romania reached a peak of over 14.5 million tons of crude oil. Gas production reached 33 million tons of oil equivalents. After 1990 the production level fell again, because of the depletion of the existing resources and the lack of investment prevented the discovery and the development of new fields. They have led in the last few years to a decrease of the oil production level to less than 5.0 million tons of oil and of the gas production of 10,3 million oil equivalent. After 1990 the Romanian Government through THE NATIONAL AGENCY FOR MINERAL RESOURCES has decided to organize international auctions to award a series of contracts regarding exploration and participation to rates of production of specialized companies that run all the financial funds and necessary technologies for the development of hydrocarbon prospecting activities. That is why in the Black Sea, beside the oil and gas deposits leased to OMV Petrom, there were also leased 7 areas needed for research, exploration and possible exploitation of oil and gas deposits. This paper presents the effects of seismic research works on the environment, considering that these are the first that will run on the platform of the Black Sea shore

Higher response time moments for M/M/1 discriminatory processor sharing queues

© Copyright 2016 ICST.Obtaining response time moments in processor sharing (PS) queues is difficult due to serving of multiple jobs. Egaliatarian PS (EPS) queues are limited to one class of arriving jobs. Discriminatory PS (DPS) assigns weights to different job classes and offers more diverse modeling capabilities than EPS. It is known that response time is the representative metric for delay as specified in service level agreements (SLAs), which consider higher moments important. Hence, we build an automated numerical algorithm for calculating higher moments of response time in M/M/1-DPS queues for multiple job classes and test two different case studies

MANAGING THE VISITOR EXPERIENCE ON ROMANIAN RELIGIOUS SITES: MONASTERIES ABBOTS’ PERCEPTIONS

For thousands of years, people have been travelling to places considered sacred to meet or to worship Divinity. Religion-motivated tourism is extremely important in many parts of the world. The aim of this paper is to investigate the issue of the religious tourism experience for a religion considered to be conservative and traditionalist in relation to other denominations. In order to achieve this end we distinguish the behavioural characteristics and motivations of the religious sites’ visitors through the abbots’ gaze. The research method of this study is a questionnaire based survey among more than one hundred monasteries’ superiors from different regions of Romania, places known as “holy or sacred” destinations for the Romanian religious people.visitor experience, religious tourism, religious site management, Romanian monasteries