The involvement of faith‐based organizations in the provision of social welfare has been popular in discourse and policy over the last several decades. This policy is often recommended as a remedy to ...the underfunded and underdeveloped social welfare system in late industrializing countries. This paper aims to discuss the implications of this recommended policy on women in the MENA region. This question is significant because women in the MENA region need social services as they have the lowest labor market participation in the world and they have been disproportionately affected by poverty over the last decade, a trend exacerbated during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Based on fieldwork and utilizing both qualitative and quantitative sources, this paper discusses evidence from two country cases in the MENA region, Egypt and Turkey. The paper argues that the provision of social welfare by faith‐based organizations falls short in providing a substitute or alternative to publicly funded and universally provided social services for women because the provision of these services is inconsistent and unreliable and could be coopted by the government. Egypt represents a case in which the al‐Sisi regime adopted a confrontational strategy toward the Muslim Brotherhood and dismembered its services, while Turkey represents a case in which government coopts faith‐based organizations for political gain.
过去几十年，宗教组织参与提供社会福利一事普遍存在于话语和政策中。这项政策经常被推荐为较晚工业化国家中资金不足与不发达的社会福利体系的补救措施。本文旨在探讨这项推荐政策对中东和北非地区妇女的影响。这个问题很重要，因为中东和北非地区的妇女需要社会服务，她们的劳动力市场参与度是全球最低的，并且在过去十年中遭受了严重的贫困影响，这一趋势在COVID‐19大流行期间有所恶化。基于实地调查并利用定性和定量来源，本文探讨了来自埃及和土耳其这两个国家案例的证据。本文认为，宗教组织提供的社会福利不足以替代以妇女为对象的公共资助及普遍提供的社会服务，因为宗教组织的社会福利提供并不持续且不可靠，还可能会被政府利用。埃及案例中，塞西政权对穆斯林兄弟会采取对抗战略并分割了后者提供的服务，而土耳其案例中，政府拉拢宗教组织以获取政治利益。
La participación de organizaciones basadas en la fe en la provisión de bienestar social ha sido popular en el discurso y la política durante las últimas décadas. Esta política a menudo se recomienda como un remedio para el sistema de bienestar social subdesarrollado y con fondos insuficientes en los países de industrialización tardía. Este documento tiene como objetivo discutir las implicaciones de esta política recomendada sobre las mujeres en la región MENA. Esta pregunta es importante porque las mujeres de la región MENA necesitan servicios sociales, ya que tienen la participación en el mercado laboral más baja del mundo y se han visto afectadas de manera desproporcionada por la pobreza durante la última década, una tendencia exacerbada durante la pandemia de COVID‐19. Basado en el trabajo de campo y utilizando fuentes tanto cualitativas como cuantitativas, este documento analiza la evidencia de dos casos de países de la región MENA, Egipto y Turquía. El documento argumenta que la provisión de bienestar social por parte de las organizaciones religiosas se queda corta a la hora de proporcionar un sustituto o una alternativa a los servicios sociales para mujeres financiados con fondos públicos y provistos universalmente porque la provisión de estos servicios es inconsistente y poco confiable y podría ser cooptada por el Gobierno. Egipto representa un caso en el que el régimen de Al‐Sisi adoptó una estrategia de confrontación hacia la Hermandad Musulmana y desmembró sus servicios, mientras que Turquía representa un caso en el que el gobierno coopta organizaciones religiosas para obtener beneficios políticos.
•A theoretical model focusing on IP-based content is presented.•Different components of the IP-based content are analyzed.•Provision model for platforms depends on maximum demand, cost efficiency, ...and the capacity to generate content-derived revenue.•A win-win-win outcome for the platform, the IP holder, and overall consumers can arise.
To increase the provision of digital content based on a pre-existing intellectual property (IP-based content), digital content platforms can either procure finished IP-based content made by IP holders (the IP-holder-led provision model) or develop IP-based content themselves after obtaining adaptation licenses from IP holders (the platform-led provision model). This study develops a stylized analytical model and finds that the platform's choice of provision model is determined by maximum demand, cost efficiency, and the difference in the capacity to generate content-derived revenue between the platform and the IP holder. We also examine the conditions under which a win-win-win outcome for the platform, the IP holder, and consumers can arise.
The transition to a circular economy, where the value of resources is preserved in the technosphere, must be supported by policies and operational decision-making based on evidence. Existing methods ...used to provide this evidence (e.g. LCA, LCSA, CBA) are not robust enough to adequately address the creation and dissipation of systemic and multidimensional value that spans the social, environmental, economic and technical domains. This study proposes a novel, conceptual approach that seeks to assess how complex value is created, destroyed and distributed in resource recovery from waste systems. This approach expands beyond conventional methods of estimating value. It combines scientific and engineering methods with a socio-political narrative grounded in the systems of provision (sop) approach, and provides a comprehensive, analytical framework for making the transition to a resource-efficient future. This framework has the potential to connect bottom-up and top-down approaches in assessing resource recovery from waste systems, and address systemic challenges through transparency and flexibility, while accounting for the dynamic and non-linear nature of commodities flow and infrastructure provision in the overall system. This creates the pathway towards circular economy, and lays the foundations for future advances in computational and assessment methodologies in the field of RRfW.
Background
Epilepsy is a neurological disorder affecting both children and adults. Epileptic seizures are the result of excessive and abnormal cortical cell electrical activity in the brain. In ...response to criticism that epilepsy care for children has little impact on long‐term outcomes, healthcare professionals and administrators have developed various service models and strategies to address perceived inadequacies.
This is an updated version of a Cochrane Review previously published in 2018.
Objectives
To assess the effects of any specialised or dedicated intervention for epilepsy versus usual care in children and adolescents with epilepsy and their families.
Search methods
We searched the following databases on 14 January 2020: the Cochrane Register of Studies (CRS Web), MEDLINE (Ovid, 1946 to 13 January 2020), PsycINFO (1887 to 14 January 2020), CINAHL Plus (1937 to 14 January 2020), ClinicalTrials.gov, and the World Health Organization International Clinical Trials Registry Platform. The Cochrane Register of Studies (CRS Web) includes the Cochrane Epilepsy Group Specialised Register and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL). We also contacted experts in the field seeking information on unpublished and ongoing studies and checked the websites of epilepsy organisations and the reference lists of included studies.
Selection criteria
We included randomised controlled trials recruiting children and adolescents with epilepsy.
Data collection and analysis
Two review authors independently selected trials for inclusion and extracted the relevant data. We assessed the following outcomes: 1. Seizure frequency and severity; 2. Appropriateness and volume of medication prescribed (including evidence of drug toxicity); 3. Participants' reported knowledge of information and advice received from professionals; 4. Participants' reports of health and quality of life; 5. Objective measures of general health status; 6. Objective measures of social or psychological functioning (including the number of days spent on sick leave/absence from school or work, and employment status); and 7. Costs of care or treatment. The results of the data extraction and quality assessment for each study were presented in structured tables and as a narrative summary. All summary statistics were extracted for each outcome.
Main results
We included nine studies of eight interventions in the review, reporting on seven distinct self‐management programmes for educating or counselling children with epilepsy and their parents, and one new model of care. Based largely on self‐reported outcomes, each programme showed some benefits for the well‐being of children with epilepsy; however, all of the included studies had methodological flaws. No single programme was evaluated with different study samples, and in no instance was the same outcome measured and reported in the same way across studies, precluding any possible meta‐analysis, even if the interventions were considered sufficiently similar to include in meta‐analysis.
We chose the outcomes for which data might be important for decisions about the interventions as per guidance in the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions. We found moderate certainty evidence that one of the educational interventions reduced seizure frequency. There was low certainty evidence that two other educational interventions reduced seizure severity, seizure control, and seizure cure rates. The evidence for all other outcomes (drug adherence, knowledge, self‐efficacy and self‐perception of epilepsy on quality of life) was mixed.
Authors' conclusions
Whilst each of the programmes evaluated in this review showed some benefit to children with epilepsy, their impact was extremely variable. No programme showed benefits across the full range of outcomes, and all studies had methodological problems. There is currently insufficient evidence in favour of any single programme. Further evidence from randomised controlled trials using validated measures and considering clinical meaningfulness as well as statistical significance of results is required.
This document describes the comparison scheme and reports the results of the APMP.M.F-S1 supplementary comparison for 2 MN Force, in which two force transducers of 2 MN capacity were used.
To reach ...the main text of this paper, click on
Final Report
. Note that this text is that which appears in Appendix B of the BIPM key comparison database
kcdb.bipm.org/
.
The final report has been peer-reviewed and approved for publication by the CCM, according to the provisions of the CIPM Mutual Recognition Arrangement (CIPM MRA).
Financial provision is one of the important elements of community resource provision. There is quite a number of bases of financial resources that territorial communities can take from, therefore, ...for their effective use, it is advisable to classify them, establish the appropriate features, and the possibilities of use them rationally. Currently, it is important for communities to be able to form the necessary amount of financial resources that will allow them to be financially capable. Also important is the legally defined powers of communities within which they carry out their activities and use accumulated funds. The publication analyzes the peculiarities of the formation of financial relations in territorial communities of Ukraine. The corresponding shortcomings in shaping the financial capacity of communities are singled out. The sources of filling the community budget are analyzed. It is found that today the majority of territorial communities need to provide appropriate investment financing of their projects for their sustainable development. Sources of filling financial resources of territorial communities are identified. It is proved that the main financial source of the territorial budgets is the activities of small and medium-sized businesses located in communities. It is determined that for the effective implementation of measures for the socioeconomic development of communities, the principle of their autonomy in matters of budget and tax activities should be implemented. The main directions of influence of financial decentralization on the socioeconomic development of the regions is formed. Based on the identified directions of development of territorial communities, the importance of public participation in decision-making on the implementation of projects on sustainable development of communities is determined. The need to form a favorable image of the territorial community, thanks to which it is possible to attract investment funds for the implementation of community development projects, is proved.
So far, the research of wireless powered communication networks (WPCNs) mainly considers the scenarios with a single radio-frequency (RF) energy transmitter (ET) and a single sink. However, in ...practice, there are many applications where multiple ETs and sinks need to be deployed. This study focuses on large-scale WPCNs having multiple RF ETs and sinks. Specifically, the authors aim to minimise the total energy provision by optimising ETs' transmit powers with the node-throughput demand and sum-throughput demand, respectively. For the node-throughput demand case, they firstly formulate it to be a convex optimisation problem, then transform it to be a linear programming (LP) problem, and finally present a distributed algorithm to obtain the optimal solution. For the sum-throughput demand case, they firstly formulate it to be a non-linear optimisation problem, then prove its convexity and finally propose an efficient dual subgradient algorithm to obtain the optimal solution. Simulation results demonstrate that compared to the sum-throughput demand, imposing the node-throughput demand can effectively alleviate the throughput unfairness at the cost of increased energy provision; the proposed optimal algorithms can substantially decrease the total energy provision of ETs; the energy provision reduction percentage achieved by their schemes increases as the number of ETs increases.
Abstract
Aims
The European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Atlas has been compiled by the European Heart Agency to document cardiovascular disease (CVD) statistics of the 56 ESC member countries. A major ...aim of this 2017 data presentation has been to compare high-income and middle-income ESC member countries to identify inequalities in disease burden, outcomes, and service provision.
Methods and results
The Atlas utilizes a variety of data sources, including the World Health Organization, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, and the World Bank to document risk factors, prevalence, and mortality of cardiovascular disease and national economic indicators. It also includes novel ESC-sponsored survey data of health infrastructure and cardiovascular service provision provided by the national societies of the ESC member countries. Data presentation is descriptive with no attempt to attach statistical significance to differences observed in stratified analyses. Important differences were identified between the high-income and middle-income member countries of the ESC with regard to CVD risk factors, disease incidence, and mortality. For both women and men, the age-standardized prevalence of hypertension was lower in high-income countries (18% and 27%) compared with middle-income countries (24% and 30%). Smoking prevalence in men (not women) was also lower (26% vs. 41%) and together these inequalities are likely to have contributed to the higher CVD mortality in middle-income countries. Declines in CVD mortality have seen cancer becoming a more common cause of death in a number of high-income member countries, but in middle-income countries declines in CVD mortality have been less consistent where CVD remains the leading cause of death. Inequalities in CVD mortality are emphasized by the smaller contribution they make to potential years of life lost in high-income countries compared with middle-income countries both for women (13% vs. 23%) and men (20% vs. 27%). The downward mortality trends for CVD may, however, be threatened by the emerging obesity epidemic that is seeing rates of diabetes increasing across all the ESC member countries. Survey data from the National Cardiac Societies showed that rates of cardiac catheterization and coronary artery bypass surgery, as well as the number of specialist centres required to deliver them, were greatest in the high-income member countries of the ESC. The Atlas confirmed that these ESC member countries, where the facilities for the contemporary treatment of coronary disease were best developed, were often those in which declines in coronary mortality have been most pronounced. Economic resources were not the only driver for delivery of equitable cardiovascular health care, as some middle-income ESC member countries reported rates for interventional procedures and device implantations that matched or exceeded the rates in wealthier member countries.
Conclusion
In documenting national CVD statistics, the Atlas provides valuable insights into the inequalities in risk factors, health care delivery, and outcomes of CVD across the ESC member countries. The availability of these data will underpin the ESC’s ambitious mission ‘to reduce the burden of cardiovascular disease’ not only in its member countries but also in nation states around the world.
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