The Empowered Patient

The Empowered Patient
Author: Elizabeth S. Cohen
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2010-08-10
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0345523113

The facts are alarming: Medical errors kill more people each year than AIDS, breast cancer, or car accidents. A doctor’s relationship with pharmaceutical companies may influence his choice of drugs for you. The wrong key word on an insurance claim can deny you coverage. Through real life stories, including her own, and shrewd advice, CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen shows you how to become your own advocate and navigate the minefield of today’s health-care system. But there’s good news. Discover how to • find a doctor who “gets” you and listens to you • ask the right questions for the best treatment • make the most out of a short office visit • cut out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs • harness the power of the Internet for medical issues • fight back when claims are denied Combining the personal stories of patients across America with crucial advice on receiving the best possible health care, this guide will enable you to confront an often confusing and perilous system—and come out ahead.

Measuring Empowerment

Measuring Empowerment
Author: Deepa Narayan-Parker
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 500
Release: 2005-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0821360574

Large-scale poverty reduction depends on the effective empowerment of poor people themselves. This publication sets out a conceptual framework that can be used to monitor and evaluate empowerment programmes, based on papers written by practitioners and researchers in a wide variety of fields, including economics and political science, sociology and psychology, anthropology and demography. These papers draw on research and practical experience at different levels, from households to communities to nations and in various regions of the world.

Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems

Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems
Author: Michael Fisher
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2009-08-02
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 3642027342

Multi-Agent Systems are communities of problem-solving entities that can exhibit varying degrees of intelligence. They can perceive and react to their environment, they can have individual or joint goals, for which they can plan and execute actions. Work on such systems integrates many technologies and concepts in artificial intelligence and other areas of computing as well as other disciplines. The agent paradigm has become very popular and widely used in recent years, due to its applicability to a large range of domains, from search engines to educational aids, to electronic commerce and trade, e-procurement, recommendation systems, and ambient intelligence, to cite only some. Computational logic provides a well-defined, general, and rigorous framework for studying syntax, semantics and procedures for various capabilities and functionalities of individual agents, as well as interaction amongst agents in multi-agent systems. It also provides a well-defined and rigorous framework for implementations, envir- ments, tools, and standards, and for linking together specification and verification of properties of individual agents and multi-agent systems.

Technologies of InSecurity

Technologies of InSecurity
Author: Katja Franko Aas
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2008-08-21
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1134040369

Technologies of Insecurity examines how general social and political concerns about terrorism, crime, migration and globalization are translated into concrete practices of securitisation of everyday life. Who are we afraid of in a globalizing world? How are issues of safety and security constructed and addressed by various local actors and embodied in a variety of surveillance systems? Examining how various forms of contemporary insecurity are translated into, and reduced to, issues of surveillance and social control, this book explores a variety of practical and cultural aspects of technological control, as well as the discourses about safety and security surrounding them. (In)security is a politically and socially constructed phenomenon, with a variety of meanings and modalities. And, exploring the inherent duality and dialectics between our striving for security and the simultaneous production of insecurity, Technologies of Insecurity considers how mundane objects and activities are becoming bearers of risks which need to be neutralised. As ordinary arenas - such as the workplace, the city centre, the football stadium, the airport, and the internet - are imbued with various notions of risk and danger and subject to changing public attitudes and sensibilities, the critical deconstruction of the nexus between everyday surveillance and (in)security pursued here provides important new insights about how broader political issues are translated into concrete and local practices of social control and exclusion.

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering XI

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering XI
Author: Danny Weyns
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2011-10-09
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3642226361

Since the mid 1980s, software agents and multi-agent systems have grown into a very active area of research and also commercial development activity. One of the limiting factors in industry take-up of agent-technology, however, is the lack of adequate software engineering support. The Agent-Oriented Software Engineering Workshop, AOSE, focuses on the synergies and cross fertilization between software engineering and agent research. This volume presents both thoroughly revised selected papers from the AOSE 2010 workshop held at AAMAS 2010 in Toronto, Canada in May 2010 as well as invited articles by leading researchers in the field. The papers cover a broad range of topics related to software engineering and agent-based systems, with particular attention to the integration of concepts and techniques from multi-agent systems with conventional engineering approaches on the one hand, and to the integration of agent-oriented software engineering and methodologies with conventional engineering processes on the other hand.

Guided Self-Organization: Inception

Guided Self-Organization: Inception
Author: Mikhail Prokopenko
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 488
Release: 2013-12-19
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 3642537340

Is it possible to guide the process of self-organisation towards specific patterns and outcomes? Wouldn’t this be self-contradictory? After all, a self-organising process assumes a transition into a more organised form, or towards a more structured functionality, in the absence of centralised control. Then how can we place the guiding elements so that they do not override rich choices potentially discoverable by an uncontrolled process? This book presents different approaches to resolving this paradox. In doing so, the presented studies address a broad range of phenomena, ranging from autopoietic systems to morphological computation, and from small-world networks to information cascades in swarms. A large variety of methods is employed, from spontaneous symmetry breaking to information dynamics to evolutionary algorithms, creating a rich spectrum reflecting this emerging field. Demonstrating several foundational theories and frameworks, as well as innovative practical implementations, Guided Self-Organisation: Inception, will be an invaluable tool for advanced students and researchers in a multiplicity of fields across computer science, physics and biology, including information theory, robotics, dynamical systems, graph theory, artificial life, multi-agent systems, theory of computation and machine learning.

Critical Political Economy

Critical Political Economy
Author: Christian Arnsperger
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 431
Release: 2007-12-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1134064578

This book asks how a more liberating economics could be constructed and taught. It suggests that if economists today are serious about emancipation and empowerment, they will have to radically change their conception about what it means for a citizen to act rationally in a complex society.Arnsperger emphasises that current economics neglects an imp

The Vulnerable Subject

The Vulnerable Subject
Author: A. Beattie
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2012-11-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137292148

This book develops a concept of vulnerability in International Relations that allows for a profound rethinking of a core concept of international politics: means-ends rationality. It explores traditions that proffer a more complex and relational account of vulnerability.