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The achievement of a project requires tools to monitor and adjust its evolution over time. Rather than to check at mid-term whether the objectives will be achieved or not, and adjust them, it is interesting to develop a control tool in order to effectively conduct the project's objectives. In this paper, we improve the continuous-in-time financial model developed in [Frenod & Chakkour], that describes working of loan and repayment, in order to prepare its capability to be used in control theory approach. The aim is to determine the optimal loan schedule taking into account the objective of the project, the income and the spending. For that, we set out an optimal control method for the strategy elaboration phase to better adjust the project implementation.

The Shannon entropy and the associated Kullback—Leibler divergence measure (relative entropy) between probability measures are fundamental from the applications point of view, and arise naturally from statistical concepts. While restricted to information theory and statistics in the work of Shannon [38] and Kullback—Leibler [31] in the early 1950s, the concept of entropy started to be used in optimization modeling for various problems of engineering and management science. An early work on entropy optimization problems over linear constraints sets (equality or inequality) was studied by Chames and Cooper [16] via convex programming techniques. Many other useful applications in a diversity of problems such as traffic engineering, game theory, information theory, and marketing were developed by Chames et al. (see, e.g., [15,17-19] and the references therein). For further general information and applications, we refer the reader to Frieden [23] and Kay and Marple [30] for engineering problems and to Lev and Theil [32] and more recently to Theil and Feibig [39] for economic and finance models.

The New Zealand Government Department of Statistics Business Directory is a directory of the individual economic units which comprise the New Zealand economy. The Directory was established in the early 1970s as a survey frame for the Department's five-yearly series of economic censuses. It is currently undergoing a redevelopment programme due for completion in 1987. The aim of this programme is to enable the Directory to service a wider range of uses, including all economic unit surveys conducted by the Department and other public agencies. Three different record types are used to hold information about economic units on the Directory. Enterprise records hold information about the legal characteristics of a business, Accounting unit records correspond to sub-divisions of an Enterprise for accounting purposes, and Activity unit records hold data about the physical locations operated by the Enterprise. A variety of standard data items can be held in each record, including names, addresses, industry classification, numbers employed etc. Information on the links between Accounting &'1d Activity units which form Enterprise structures is also maintained, as are data on ownership relationships between Enterprises. Most data are 'timestamped' so that previous values of data items and past ownership relationships can be retrieved if required. The Directory is maintained on the Department's computers, and interrogation and updating of data is carried out online via VDUs.

The aim of this study was to develop indicators of conformance in clinical practice with guidelines for care in schizophrenia. Recommended guidelines rarely apply to all patients and need to allow for social ability, family context, and phase of the disorder. These indicators were therefore devised for tailoring to patient characteristics and allowing for factors that may justify the lack of adherence to clinical guidelines. A team of senior clinicians and methodologists reviewed three clinical guidelines (from the Schizophrenia Patient Outcomes Research Team, McEvoy and colleagues, and the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) and defined criteria for their operationalization into clinical indicators. For each indicator, the team defined criteria for eligibility (requirements to be met to qualify for evaluation), conformance (criteria to be satisfied to comply with each recommendation), and moderators (factors that could justify the lack of application of a given recommendation). These indicators were tested with a random sample of 807 patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorders in outpatient facilities, long-term residential facilities, and hospital units for acute care in the Piedmont region of Italy. A set of 15 indicators was derived, nine concerning pharmacological treatment and six for general care and psychosocial rehabilitation. Moderators such as patient or family refusal of antipsychotic treatment and the patient's level of disability helped to justify a considerable proportion of nonconformant care. The indicators developed are a simple and useful tool to monitor the conformance of care with recommended practices and to identify areas needing improvement.

Taxes and capital structure: Understanding firms’ savings

People

Proponents of specialisation and subspecialisation in medicine believe that specialists provide better quality of care to their patients than generalists because they have a better knowledge base of the conditions being treated. The ‘jack of all trades and master of none’ reasoning is often applied to generalism. I argue that subspecialisation will not improve the practice of Australasian emergency medicine (EM), and our specialty – as with the wider health system – must shift to a greater focus on generalist care to meet the patient and service demand being driven by changing disease patterns and demography, as well as the public's increasing expectations for availability and quality of services. Generalist medical practitioners (generalists) are defined in many different ways. Based on the former Health Workforce Australia's (HWA) definition, generalists are general practitioners, rural generalists and general specialists such as general surgeons and physicians who retain a broad scope of practice.1 Generalists have played a crucial role in delivering healthcare in Australia and New Zealand for many decades and are particularly important for the rural and regional communities that rely on them for essential emergency and procedural services. The medical workforce has become increasingly specialised in recent decades, driven by changes in knowledge, technology, health service delivery and healthcare financing.2 This is not necessarily a positive development. There is strong evidence in the literature that subspecialised care is not always in the best interests of the patient or cost-effective for the health system.3 The overuse of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures in some specialties can lead to increased costs with no benefit to patients. Emergency medicine is a generalist specialty. EM departments and other triage settings receive a broad range of acutely unwell patients presenting with undifferentiated conditions. EM physicians deliver the clinical assessments and arrange the appropriate next steps for the full spectrum of conditions that present to us. Similar to generalist physicians, hospital-based EM physicians work and communicate with teams of other health professionals to coordinate inpatient care in hospitals. Changing population health trends mean that more generalists will be needed to meet the healthcare needs of both rural and metropolitan communities. These include rising rates of obesity and an ageing population, with the associated rates of chronic and complex disease. It is my recollection as an intern in the early 1990s that it was uncommon to have elderly patients with complex needs presenting at EM departments. However, currently frail and aged patients account for a large number of all ED presentations.4 Emergency medicine departments therefore need to rely on generalists who have the scope of practice to diagnose and treat patients with varied comorbidities. Generalist practice enables patients to be treated holistically. Conversely, subspecialisation with narrower skill sets focused on one particular area with limited experience in emergency work can result in the fragmentation of expertise and patient care.5 Hospitals will need more EM physicians with generalist skills rather than more narrowly skilled acute care physicians to manage the surge of acute care patients presenting with multiple illnesses. Subspecialisation does, despite this, have a limited place in modern EM. Some subspecialties may have a role in specific settings to meet the healthcare needs of particular groups in the community. These include toxicology, trauma management, paediatric and geriatric EM. Hospital in the home is an emerging model for caring for acute care patients with specific conditions where an evolving subspecialty is emerging. Some geographical areas need services provided by subspecialists, such as retrieval services, although reducing regional and rural towns to retrieval points without the necessary local services would be a retrograde step for many patients. The attraction of subspecialisation for some doctors is understandable. Subspecialists may require a narrower skill base and less expansive CME requirements. It is also understandable that some doctors would want to become accomplished in certain areas of practice. The prospect of greater financial rewards, less shift work and better opportunities for work-life balance that some EM subspecialties offer are undeniably attractive for some. Recent evaluations of the medical workforce are instructive on the future demand for generalists. In its final report before it was abolished, HWA recommended that Australia should focus on improving the distribution of the medical workforce and encouraging future medical graduates to train in the specialties where they are needed to meet future community demands for healthcare.6 That same report also highlighted the imbalances between generalists, specialists and subspecialists. It is clear that more generalists will be needed in the future. More research and planning are required to define generalist career requirements and ensure proper distribution of generalists to where they are needed. ACEM must endeavour to provide the generalist EM physicians needed to meet the patient demand for emergency services. There is a risk, otherwise, that political or ideological solutions will be imposed, such as task substitution, practice extension and suboptimal funding and training models. One could envisage, for example, an independent role for rural ambulance paramedics without reference to EM physicians as the central providers of emergency care. This requires better access to generalist training models, starting with greater exposure to generalist practice during undergraduate medical training. Vocational trainees must be encouraged to have generalist training rotations before they commit to subspecialisation. Doctors in training should follow this debate closely and be aware of how the evolving emergency medical workforce could affect their future careers. There will be a greater demand for generalist services as the number of people with multiple diseases increases and the population ages. EM jobs of the future may not necessarily be in metropolitan areas or settings that lend themselves to narrow subspecialist care, and therefore EM should remain a generalist profession. None declared.

The original goal of the INTERNIST-1 project, as formulated in the early 1970s, was to develop an expert consultant program for diagnosis in general internal medicine. By the early 1980s, it was recognized that the most valuable product of the project was its medical knowledge base (KB). The INTERNIST-1/QMR KB comprehensively summarizes information contained in the medical literature regarding diagnosis of disorders seen in internal medicine. The QMR program was developed to enable its users to exploit the contents of the INTERNIST-1/QMR KB in educationally, clinically, and computationally useful ways. Utilizing commonly available microcomputers, the program operates at three levels--as an electronic textbook, as an intermediate level spreadsheet for the combination and exploration of simple diagnostic concepts, and as an expert consultant program. The electronic textbook contains an average of 85 findings and 8 associated disorders relevant to the diagnosis of approximately 600 disorders in internal medicine. Inverting the disease profiles creates extensive differential diagnosis lists for the over 4250 patient findings known to the system. Unlike a standard printed medical textbook, the QMR knowledge base can be manipulated "on the fly" to format displays that match the information needs of users. Preliminary use of the program for education of medical students and medical house officers at several sites has met with an enthusiastic response.

Reactivity controlled compression ignition (RCCI) is an advanced low temperature combustion strategy introduced to achieve near-zero NOx and soot emissions while maintaining diesel-like efficiencies. Precise control of RCCI combustion phasing is necessary in realizing high fuel conversion efficiency as well as meeting stringent emission standards. Model-based control of combustion phasing provides a powerful tool for real-time control during transient operation of the RCCI engine, which requires a computationally efficient combustion model that encompasses factors such as, injection timings, fuel blend composition and reactivity. In this work, physics-based models are developed to predict the combustion phasing of a 1.9-liter RCCI engine. A mean value control-oriented model (COM) of RCCI is developed by combining the auto-ignition model, the burn duration model, and a Wiebe function to predict combustion phasing. Development of a model-based controller requires a dynamic model which can predict engine operation, i.e., estimation of combustion phasing, on a cycle-to-cycle basis. Hence, the mean-value model is extended to encompass the full-cycle engine operation by including the expansion and exhaust strokes. In addition, the dynamics stemming from the thermal coupling between cycles are accounted for, that results in a dynamic RCCI control-oriented model capable of predicting the transient operation of the engine. This model is then simplified and linearized in order to develop a linear observer-based feedback controller to control the combustion phasing using the premixed ratio (the ratio of the port injected gasoline fuel to the total gasoline/diesel fuel injected). The designed controller depicts an accurate tracking performance of the desired combustion phasing and successfully rejects external disturbances in engine operating conditions.

Advances in drug discovery and biochemical studies

Can governments still use trade to reward and punish partner countries? While World Trade Organization (WTO) rules and the pressures of globalization restrict states’ capacity to manipulate trade policies, politicization of trade is likely to occur where governments intervene in markets. We examine state ownership of firms as one tool of government control. Taking China and India as examples, we use new data on bilateral trade disaggregated by firm ownership type as well as measures of political relations based on bilateral events and United Nations voting data to estimate the effect of political relations on import flows since the early 1990s. Our results support the hypothesis that imports controlled by state-owned enterprises are more responsive to political relations than imports controlled by private enterprises. This finding suggests that politicized import decisions will increase as countries with partially state-controlled economies gain strength in the global economy. Extending our analysis to exports for comparison, we find a similar pattern for Indian but not for Chinese exports and offer potential explanations for these differential findings.

This article critically examines the relationships between power, knowledge, and space through an analysis of Israeli geographic education, illuminating how dominant national narratives survive superficial multicultural reforms. Despite official policy changes toward multiculturalism since the early 2000s, geography textbooks continue to function as tools of epistemic control through national literacies, reinforcing ethno-national spatial consciousness while systematically excluding Palestinian collective memory. The study focuses on the persistent silencing of the Nakba, a foundational element of Palestinian identity and a direct counter-narrative to Zionism, revealing how power operates by neutralizing difference rather than overtly rejecting it. This strategy ensures that the foundational territorial narrative remains uncontested while maintaining a rhetorical commitment to multicultural principles. Employing a mixed-methods approach, the research combines critical content analysis of state-approved textbooks with survey data from Jewish students (n=90) and geography teachers (n=16). The findings demonstrate that multicultural discourse has failed to meaningfully disrupt dominant narratives or expand the boundaries of cultural recognition. Geographic education continues to symbolically delineate “us” and “them,” reinforcing national-Zionist spatial representations despite official multicultural rhetoric. Through comparative analysis, including Turkey, India, Hungary, France, the United States, and Canada, the study situates the Israeli case within a broader pattern of how nation-states manage cultural diversity while maintaining control over knowledge and memory.

Surveys of the use of micros that were made a few years ago suggested that use was concentrated in a few business functions. Calcs and financial reporting packages were expanding in use so rapidly that other types of applications seemed to be unnoticed. However, micros were being introduced in many laboratories and production facilities. A recent survey of departments of companies that use micros reported 98 separate applications that could be grouped under the following organizational areas: accounting, planning, treasurer, purchasing, administration, personnel, operations or production, marketing and otherMost of the applications were financial in nature although operations or production uses were significant. Financial modeling and calc packages were used not only in financial applications, but they were also used develop a master scheduling job for manufacturing and for administrative and planning applications. Word processing packages were also used to handle many different jobs such as promotion, scheduling, tracking of assignments and automatic editing of information accessed from data bases. Packages are used quite often with micros as generalized development tools. This results in interesting support problems.Applications of micros can also be considered in terms of the data communication involved. Most uses of micros have been on a stand alone basis, but an increasing number of applications involve communication with another micro or a host computer. The micro may be an intelligent terminal controlled by the host or it may be directing the other computing system. The micro may also transfer control back and forth to the other system in an integrated application.

A Comparison of Assertive Community Treatment and Intensive Case Management for Patients in Rural Areas

The question is posed as to whether personal medical computing can help significantly and efficiently in the development of ‘new’ instruments. The scientific and economic criteria for considering an instrument as ‘new’ are given; certain conditions are set out which, when confirmed, could lead to ‘new’ instrumentation being developed from the personal computer, with better results than those produced by the microprocessor alone. In the early 1980s, appropriate conditions appear to apply in the area of electrocardiography. The ‘new’ instrument proposed, called an ‘electrocardiomultigraphimeter’, contains specific characteristics and performance which represent an advance on automatic diagnostic facilities, as well as the latest microprocessor-based electrocardiographs. Its field of application appears to be clinical research; its overall performance could be further extended to meet certain criteria of great significance for all medical departments geared to the care of many patients. The electrocardiomultigraphimeter hardware still presents certain snags - an example being the resolution of the unsatisfactory graphics capabilities. However, this is common to most current personal computers.