Investment Management and Mismanagement : History, Findings, and Analysis
These issues include performance, anomalies, market timing, suitability, and churning, among others. The construct of mismanagement is presented in light of the impact of various costs on investment returns.
Inventory Control
The strategic importance of efficient Supply Chain Management is today fully recognized by top management. The total investment in inventories is enormous, and the control of capital tied up in raw material, work-in-progress, and finished goods offers an important potential for improvement. At the same time, advances in information technology have drastically changed the possibilities to apply improved inventory control techniques. Furthermore, the recent progress in research has resulted in new and more general methods that can reduce the supply chain costs substantially.
Intraoperative Neurophysiological Monitoring
Intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring (IOM) has proven itself a versatile technique that reduces the risks of acquiring intraoperative neurological deficits, shortens operating time, and lowers the costs of medical care and rehabilitation. It can also reduce the risks of medical malpractice suits and serve as a research tool to better understand nervous system disorders and promote improved treatments.
International Trade and Multinational Activity : Heterogeneity of Firms, Incentives for Foreign Direct Investment, and International Business Cycle Dynamics
During the last 25 year, the neoclassical Heckscher-Ohlin trade theory has been extended to the ‘new’ trade theory by including imperfect competition and fixed costs into the analysis of trade relations. Furthermore, these micro-oriented trade models are increasingly used to analyze macro-oriented questions. Chapter 2 of this study investigates the dynamic welfare effects of exposure to trade in a new trade model, which is extended by firm heterogeneity.
Internal fixation of femoral neck fractures : An Atlas
Femoral neck fractures occur primarily in the elderly population, and nowadays arthroplasty is chosen most frequently as a treatment solution. In the era of financial restrictions in health care system non-invasive internal fixation is an attractive choice, because in addition to the lower immediate costs the rehabilitation period might also be shorter. In this illustrated atlas the authors deal with epidemiological aspects, anatomical and biomechanical specialities of the given region, diagnostic and management potentials, satisfactory both for orthopaedic and trauma specialists. By means of presenting minimally invasive technique step-by-step, and their own results, the aim is to persuade the reader that the ratio of complications remarkably can be diminished by urgent surgery, based on selective indication criteria. Aspects of postoperative treatment and rehabilitation are also clarified in details.
Intensive and Critical Care Medicine : Reflections, Recommendations and Perspectives
The volume will provide an update on problems concerning respiration, cardiovascular medicine, monitoring, organizational aspects and quality of care; other important aspects will be discussed, from critical patients' treatment and informed consent to costs managements, research and auditing, severity scores and control of infections in intensive care. Sepsis and organ dysfunction will be dealt with in detail. A brief account of records of the World Federation of Intensive and Critical Care Medicine introduces some of the drawbacks encountered during its thirty-year-old history.
Intelligent Systems for Sustainable Person-Centered Healthcare
This book establishes a dialog among the medical and intelligent system domains for igniting transition toward a sustainable and cost-effective healthcare. The Person-Centered Care (PCC) positions a person in the center of a healthcare system, instead of defining a patient as a set of diagnoses and treatment episodes. The book discusses intelligent systems and their applications for healthcare data analysis, decision making and process design tasks. The measurement systems and efficiency evaluation models analyze ability of intelligent healthcare system to monitor person health and improving quality of life.
Intelligent Distributed Computing, Systems and Applications ; Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on Intelligent Distributed Computing – IDC 2008, Catania, Italy, 2008
Addresses many topics related to intelligent and distributed computing, systems and applications, including: adaptivity and learning; agents and multi-agent systems; argumentation; auctions; case-based reasoning; collaborative systems; data structures; distributed algorithms; formal modeling and verification; genetic and immune algorithms; grid computing; information extraction, annotation and integration; network and security protocols; mobile and ubiquitous computing; ontologies and metadata; P2P computing; planning; recommender systems; rules; semantic Web; services and processes; trust and social computing; virtual organizations; wireless networks; XML technologies.
Intelligent Computing in Engineering and Architecture ; 13th EG-ICE Workshop 2006, Ascona, Switzerland, June 25-30, 2006, Revised Selected Papers
Providing computer support for tasks in civil engineering and architecture is hard. Projects can be complex, long and costly. Firms that contribute to design, construction and maintenance are often worth less than the value of their projects. Everyone in the field is justifiably risk adverse. Contextual variables have a strong influence making generalization difficult. The product life cycle may exceed one hundred years and functional requirements may evolve during the service life. It is therefore no wonder that practitioners in this area have been so reluctant to adopt advanced computing systems. After decades of research and industrial pilot projects, advanced computing s- tems are now being recognized by many leading practitioners to be strategically - portant for the future profitability of firms involved in engineering and architecture. Engineers and architects with advanced computing knowledge are hired quickly in the market place. Closer collaboration between research and practice is leading to more comprehensive validation processes for new research ideas. This is feeding devel- ment of more useful systems, thus accelerating progress. These are exciting times. th This volume contains papers that were presented at the 13 Workshop of the Eu- pean Group for Intelligent Computing in Engineering. Over five days, 70 participants from around the world listened to 59 paper presentations in a single session format.
Intellectual Property in the Food Technology Industry : Protecting Your Innovation
Considering the effort and funding devoted to a company's success, understanding Intellectual Property rights patents, trade secrets, trademarks, and licensing is essential. Establishing appropriate internal policies from the outset can prevent companies from learning a costly and painful lesson in the courtroom. With Intellectual Property in the Food Technology Industry, currently the only book of its kind focusing specifically on the food industry, one will learn what to consider throughout the various creative phases of a product's lifespan from initial research and development initiatives through post-production.
Integrating lifestyle medicine for prediabetes, type 2 diabetes, and cardiometabolic disease
Provides clinical evidence for and a mechanistic understanding of the six pillars of lifestyle medicine. It guides the reader to identify opportunities for early intervention rather than focus on the diagnosis and treatment of the established disease. Interventions at earlier points have the potential to mitigate progression, prevent complications, reduce costs, and improve a patient’s overall health at all points in their lifetime.
Integral bridges : a fundamental approach to the time–temperature loading problem
In recent years, integral bridges have become increasingly popular in the UK. The Highways Agency standard now requires, where possible, that all new bridges with a length of less than sixty metres should be of integral form. In addition, it has been found that, due especially to the problems and costs associated with failed expansion joints, integral bridges are not only cost effective but also have a longer lifespan. Integral Bridges was commissioned by the Highways Agency to produce guidance for bridge designers by addressing the thermally induced soil/structure interaction problem created by environmental changes of temperature and the associated cyclical displacements imposed on the granular backfill to the bridge abutments. It develops a better theoretical understanding of the cyclic performance, in particular the strain racheting in the backfill soil when in contact with a stiff structure. It also identifies the governing soil parameters and examines their influence in the interaction problem, develops numerical modelling procedures to predict interactive soil behaviour, and identifies and quantifies the controlling features of bridge structures relevant to the interaction problem.
Insurance intermediation : An economic analysis of the information services market
Insurance intermediaries can help consumers to economize on information and transaction costs in insurance markets. However, competing intermediaries provide heterogeneous information services, which are difficult to assess by incompletely informed consumers. Conduct and performance in the market for insurance information services are analyzed by applying search theoretical and industrial organization approaches. Based on a sample of 927 insurance intermediaries, the factors that affect the quality of the information services provided by them are studied empirically. The results obtained support the main hypotheses derived from industrial organization theories as to the poor working of quality competition under incomplete and asymmetric information on the side of consumers.
Innovative Tools and methods using BIM for an efficient renovation in buildings
This book describes a BIM-based toolkit that has been developed according to the latest research activities on building information modelling and semantic interoperability to optimize the building process. It highlights the impacts of using such new tools to fast renovation activities starting from the decision-making and design stages to the construction site management with the possibility to monitor occupants' and owners’ feedback during the realization process. In this process, a framework has been developed and implemented to allow stakeholders involved in a renovation project to efficiently compile, maintain, and add data about (i) building elements, (ii) building services systems, (iii) tenants, operators, and owners of the building, and (iv) current and predicted performance of the building from the various data sources available. The framework applies and specializes the existing practices in the Semantic Web, Linked Data, and ontology domain to the management of renovation projects. It has been designed to be open so that any system which implements the required functions and uses the specified conventions will be able to achieve semantic interoperability with other framework-compliant systems in the renovation domain. Finally, this book represents the validation process of the toolkit that has been held in three demo sites: a social housing building in Italy and two private residential buildings in Poland and Finland. The outcome shows that the toolkit facilitates the renovation process with relevant reductions of time, costs, and energy consumption and that the inhabitants can take advantage of the increase in building performances, quality, and comfort.
Informatics in Control Automation and Robotics : Selected Papers from the International Conference on Informatics in Control Automation and Robotics 2006
The present book includes a set of selected papers from the 3rd “International Conference on Informatics in Control Automation and Robotics” (ICINCO 2006), held in Setúbal, Portugal, 1-5 August 2006.
Industrial competitiveness : Cost reduction
The objectives of industrial management are: - Implementation of the policy adopted by the owners or the board of directors - Optimum return on investment - Efficient utilization of Men, Machine and Money. In other words, industry must make profit. Manufacturing represents only one aspect of the activities of industrial management. Present-day manufacturing methodology does not consider making profit as their primary objective. The manufacturing process requires the knowledge of many disciplines, such as design, process planning, costing, marketing, sales, customer relations, costing, purchasing, bookkeeping, inventory control, material handling, shipping, and so on.
Inclusive radio communications for 5G and beyond
Based on the COST IRACON project that consists of 500 researchers from academia and industry, with 120 institutions from Europe, US and the Far East involved. The book presents state-of-the-art design and analysis methods for 5G (and beyond) radio communication networks, along with key challenges and issues related to the development of 5G networks.
Improving operating leverage using hyperautomation : Unlock strategic advantages across banking and non-banking financial institutions
Delving in depth into enterprise non-interest operating cost management and operating leverage. operating Leverage is about managing a bank's capabilities and its capacity to deliver its products and services efficiently. it is not limited to managing operational costs but includes the operational support for the growth of business and for improving profitability. the reader can learn to improve risk adjusted operational effectiveness by implementing a nuanced approach to managing performance, risk, control, and cost simultaneously, at the process level. the book explains why hyperautomation, a technology that intelligently automates business processes is a more advanced and comprehensive way to manage these factors in a holistic and integrated way.
Improving Healthcare : A Dose of Competition
Improving Healthcare: A Dose of Competition systematically examines the American health care system from a competition-oriented perspective. The volume surveys the performance of each major sector of the health care system, and identifies impediments to more effective competition. Improving Healthcare examines such issues as competition v. regulation, public and private sector approaches to health care financing, cross-subsidies, licensure, provider market concentration, financial and clinical integration, payment for performance, quality, pharmacy benefit managers, direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals, certificates of need, mandates, unionization, the significance of organizational status (nonprofit v. for-profit), and the role of antitrust and consumer protection in health care. It offers concrete recommendations to improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of the American health care marketplace.
Implementing Environmental Management Accounting : Status and Challenges
The focus of the conference and the papers presented was on implementation of Environmental Management Accounting. That is to say what challenges there are in getting EMAto work in companies, how governments are promoting EMAand how EMA can be supported by for instance IT. From the papers in this volume it can be seen that EMAis becoming more established as a ?eld of practice as well as an a- demic endeavour. EMA is no longer the sole interest of large multinational c- panies but is being adopted by SMEs as well as being promoted by various gove- ment agencies.



















