Scientific and technological interactions between Russia and Ukraine: Forecasting opportunities and mechanisms for their implementation

The paper presents the research results of an investigation into the state of scientific, technological, trade and economic interactions between Russia and Ukraine in terms of their potential, prospects, and problems impeding their cooperation. It is shown that there is a considerable scientific and technological potential both in Russia and Ukraine. Opportunities and conditions for the modernization of both countries’ economies are shown to depend on the coordinated use of their potentials.     

Are we operating effectively? A lean analysis of operating theatre changeovers

Hospital operating theatres are a critical but costly resource in healthcare processes. Their efficiency and utilisation impact upon hospital finances, clinical effectiveness and patient outcomes. Operations management techniques have now been applied widely to optimise flow. An important challenge is to balance the needs of process flexibility, efficiency and work standardisation with clinical requirements. This paper applies operations management methods to analyse elective orthopaedic surgery at five international hospitals to describe the issues that affect operating theatre productivity. It utilises an innovative method of video analysis to observe patient changeovers over 29 days of surgery and data is analysed to understand the causes of variability and waste. The findings suggest that processes which are standardised via operations management methodologies can improve productivity in a process that exhibits wide variation in practice. There are apparent trade-offs associated with efficiency and clinical concerns such infection control, that lead to different standard process archetypes being utilised. Recommendations for standardising patient changeovers are provided.     

Tourism's contribution to the demand for London's lively arts

How much of the attendance at London's lively arts comes from tourism? This question steers the inquiry, which involves model that distinguishes resident demand from tourist demand. Data for the empirical work are time series on individual arts companies, and accordingly the estimation method allows for autocorrelation and heteroscedasticity. Estimation indicates that, consonant with time-allocation logic, tourist demand depends importantly upon income whereas resident demand does not. It is shown that tourists, whose arts participation rate averages only 8%, account for 65% of attendance and that the elasticity measuring the attendance response to tourism equals 0.645.

It must be concluded that if it were not for overseas visitors to London, it is doubtful whether West End theatres could remain open throughout the summer.

Society of West End Theatre (1982, pp. 6–7)     

Increasing the Informational Content of Reach and Frequency Estimates

This article discusses the limitations of present methods of analyzing the coverage of advertising schedules and presents a technique for obtaining additional information from traditional measures of schedule coverage. This technique models entire patters of audience exposure to commercials by means of a compound Bernoulli distribution that can be estimated from reach and frequency data. Knowledge of the complete pattern of audience exposure to advertising schedules assists the media analyst in selecting optimally effective advertising schedules and consequently enhances the probability of conducting a successful advertising campaign.     

Ethnic factors and the use of public outdoor recreation areas: The case of Mexican Americans

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of subculture, marginality, and perceived discrimination on use of selected public outdoor recreation areas. The assimilation perspective from the sociology literature provided theoretical guidance for the study. These concepts were treated as different types of social distance (cultural distance, socioeconomic distance, and intergroup distance). Each was hypothesized to affect the use of outdoor recreation areas. Data for this analysis came from telephone interviews conducted with 1057 households in Maricopa and Gila counties in Arizona. The analysis was conducted using a subsample of respondents of Mexican ancestry. The results support the socioeconomic, or marginality, hypothesis. There was less support for the subcultural, or ethnicity, hypothesis. There was no support for the perceived discrimination hypothesis. Research implications and recommendations are discussed.     

Integrated energy systems: Challenges,trends, philosophy

The creation of an energy metasystem that combines electrical, heat, cooling, and gas supply systems on an intellectual framework is a manifestation of a new energy paradigm. Integrated intelligent power supply systems combine complexity, intelligence, efficiency, reliability, controllability, flexibility of energy conversion, transmission, storage technologies and assume an active consumer.