Quality of public expenditures: Budgeting for performance, results and value-for-money

Author(s):  
Author(s):  
Hoang Nhu Dong ◽  
Hoang Nam Nguyen ◽  
Hoang Trong Minh ◽  
Takahiko Saba

Femtocell networks have been proposed for indoor communications as the extension of cellular networks for enhancing coverage performance. Because femtocells have small coverage radius, typically from 15 to 30 meters, a femtocell user (FU) walking at low speed can still make several femtocell-to-femtocell handovers during its connection. When performing a femtocell-to-femtocell handover, femtocell selection used to select the target handover femtocell has to be able not only to reduce unnecessary handovers and but also to support FU’s quality of service (QoS). In the paper, we propose a femtocell selection scheme for femtocell-tofemtocell handover, named Mobility Prediction and Capacity Estimation based scheme (MPCE-based scheme), which has the advantages of the mobility prediction and femtocell’s available capacity estimation methods. Performance results obtained by computer simulation show that the proposed MPCE-based scheme can reduce unnecessary femtocell-tofemtocell handovers, maintain low data delay and improve the throughput of femtocell users. DOI: 10.32913/rd-ict.vol3.no14.536


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chengshu Xie ◽  
Shaurya Jauhari ◽  
Antonio Mora

Abstract Background Gene Set Analysis (GSA) is arguably the method of choice for the functional interpretation of omics results. The following paper explores the popularity and the performance of all the GSA methodologies and software published during the 20 years since its inception. "Popularity" is estimated according to each paper's citation counts, while "performance" is based on a comprehensive evaluation of the validation strategies used by papers in the field, as well as the consolidated results from the existing benchmark studies. Results Regarding popularity, data is collected into an online open database ("GSARefDB") which allows browsing bibliographic and method-descriptive information from 503 GSA paper references; regarding performance, we introduce a repository of jupyter workflows and shiny apps for automated benchmarking of GSA methods (“GSA-BenchmarKING”). After comparing popularity versus performance, results show discrepancies between the most popular and the best performing GSA methods. Conclusions The above-mentioned results call our attention towards the nature of the tool selection procedures followed by researchers and raise doubts regarding the quality of the functional interpretation of biological datasets in current biomedical studies. Suggestions for the future of the functional interpretation field are made, including strategies for education and discussion of GSA tools, better validation and benchmarking practices, reproducibility, and functional re-analysis of previously reported data.


Author(s):  
C. W. le Roux ◽  
S. R. Bloom

In this issue, Prinsloo and Gray report the results of a 137-laboratory audit on clinical authorization using the guidelines and standards from the Royal College of Pathologists. Only 33% of laboratories were found to be compliant with the standards, although many showed evidence of good practice. Clinical authorization is resource-hungry and the question raised by this study is whether adhering to the letter of the standards set by the Royal College of Pathologists is actually in the best interest of the patient and provides overall value for money, when the latter is key to optimizing the quality of service.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-36
Author(s):  
Apandi Apandi

E-literacy and education are important components in improving the quality of human resources needed in an organization. The purpose of this study is to reveal the importance of e-literacy and public policy education. The State Civil Apparatus (ASN) requires e-literacy and education to improve performance results so that public services can be maximized. This becomes interesting research in the development of science-based on the real events that occur in Indonesia. Where so far, e-literacy and education is only intended for the public, especially millennial generation. The research method used is the study of literature where data is obtained through various secondary sources that are relevant to theoretically strengthen research results. The findings explain that e-literacy and education are effective and efficient strategies in overcoming budget constraints and low levels of ASN competence. With e-literacy and public policy education, it is hoped that the professionalism of the ASN bureaucracy will increase and the quality of public services will be better.


Author(s):  
Engelina Du Plessis ◽  
Melville Saayman ◽  
Annari Van der Merwe

Background: Tourism is an evolving and changing industry, and keeping up with these changes requires an understanding of the forces and changes that shape this industry’s outcomes. Tourism managers struggle daily to stay ahead in the competition to attract more tourists to destinations. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the past could shed light on the advantages of the future.Aim: The aim of this study was to do a temporal analysis of the competitiveness of South Africa as a tourism destination.Setting: This research investigated the competitive position of South Africa as a tourism destination just after the 1994 elections and compared those results to the results of a similar study in 2014.Methods: In this article, a frequency analysis revealed South Africa’s strengths and weaknesses, after which t-tests indicated the relationship between the strengths and weaknesses of the destination and the factors that contribute to South Africa’s competitiveness.Results: South Africa’s strengths include the quality of the food and experience, scenery, variety of accommodation climate and geographical features. It is clear that respondents identified different attributes that contributed to the strengths of the destination in comparison with 2002, where the strengths were wildlife, scenery, cultural diversity, climate, value for money, variety of attractions and specific icons.Conclusion: This research is valuable for South Africa because it informs tourism role players about what respondents perceive to be South Africa’s strengths. Role players can then form strategies that incorporate the strengths to create competitive advantage. This article also indicates the areas in which the country has grown in the past decade as well as indicating which weaknesses remain a problem.


Author(s):  
Susan Cleary

Abstract Health systems strengthening (HSS) is firmly on the global health and development agenda. While a growing evidence base seeks to understand the effectiveness of HSS, there is limited evidence regarding cost and cost-effectiveness. Without such evidence, it is hard to argue that HSS represents value for money and the level of investment needed cannot be quantified. This paper seeks to review the literature regarding the economic evaluation of HSS from low- and middle-income country (LMIC) settings, and to contribute towards the development of methods for the economic evaluation of HSS. A systematic search for literature was conducted in PubMed, Scopus and the Health Systems Evidence database. MeSH terms related to economic evaluation were combined with key words related to the concept of HSS. Of the 204 records retrieved, 52 were retained for full text review and 33 were included. Of these, 67% were published between January 2015 and June 2019. While many HSS interventions have system wide impacts, most studies (71%) investigated these impacts using a disease-specific lens (e.g. the impact of quality of care improvements on uptake of facility deliveries). HSS investments were categorized, with the majority being investments in platform efficiency (e.g. quality of care), followed by simultaneous investment in platform efficiency and platform capacity (e.g. quality of care and task shifting). This review identified a growing body of work seeking to undertake and/or conceptualize the economic evaluation of HSS in low- and middle-income countries. The majority assess HSS interventions using a disease-specific or programmatic lens, treating HSS in a similar manner to the economic evaluation of medicines and diagnostics. While this approach misses potential economies of scope from HSS investments, it allows for a preliminary understanding of relative value for money. Future research is needed to complement the emerging evidence base.


Author(s):  
Zelia Breda ◽  
Rui Costa ◽  
Gorete Dinis ◽  
Amandine Angie Martins

Online comments are increasingly mentioned as an important source of information, simplifying consumers' buying decisions. Online user-generated content has become one of the main sources of information for tourists, who themselves become creators of their own online content. This chapter focuses on sentiment analysis of comments made on TripAdvisor regarding one resort located in the Algarve region, in Portugal. The resort has good reviews, which means that the eWOM is positive. The highest scores relate to the resort's cleanliness, location and quality of sleep, and those that were less relevant were the value for money, the rooms and the service. The most dominant emotion is joy, followed by an analytical response. Negative emotions, such as sadness and anger, were not found very often in the online reviews. These results could be explained by the quality of the service, the kindness of the staff, the facilities for children, the entertainment, and the location, attributes that were often highlighted in the comments.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (24) ◽  
pp. 7326
Author(s):  
Alper Kaan Sarica ◽  
Pelin Angin

The significant advances in wireless networks in the past decade have made a variety of Internet of Things (IoT) use cases possible, greatly facilitating many operations in our daily lives. IoT is only expected to grow with 5G and beyond networks, which will primarily rely on software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization for achieving the promised quality of service. The prevalence of IoT and the large attack surface that it has created calls for SDN-based intelligent security solutions that achieve real-time, automated intrusion detection and mitigation. In this paper, we propose a real-time intrusion detection and mitigation solution for SDN, which aims to provide autonomous security in the high-traffic IoT networks of the 5G and beyond era, while achieving a high degree of interpretability by human experts. The proposed approach is built upon automated flow feature extraction and classification of flows while using random forest classifiers at the SDN application layer. We present an SDN-specific dataset that we generated for IoT and provide results on the accuracy of intrusion detection in addition to performance results in the presence and absence of our proposed security mechanism. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed security approach is promising for achieving real-time, highly accurate detection and mitigation of attacks in SDN-managed IoT networks.


Subject Russian consumer trends. Significance The current economic downturn is taking its toll on the Russian population and is affecting consumers. Ruble devaluation, depressed real wages, rising inflation and increasing unemployment are reducing domestic demand. Although government officials predict a bottoming-out of the economic contraction in 2015, with Western sanctions looking set to remain in place and low oil prices plaguing the economy, Russia's economic difficulties are far from over. Impacts International relations will continue to help deflect public attention from domestic economic problems for now. The value-for-money approach Russian consumers are adopting now is likely to remain after the crisis is over. The quality of commonly traded goods will deteriorate as consumers move towards the lower end of product ranges.


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