This book is about model-based diagnosis of a class of discrete-event systems called active systems. Roughly, model-based diagnosis is the task of finding out the faulty components of a physical system based on the observed behavior and the system model. An active system is the abstraction of a physical artefact that is modeled as a network of com municating automata. For example, the protection apparatus of a power transmission network can be conveniently modeled as an active system, where breakers, protection devices, and lines are naturally described by finite state machines. The asynchronous occurrence of a short circuit on a line or a bus-bar causes the reaction of the protection devices, which aims to isolate the shorted line. This reaction can be faulty and several lines might be eventually isolated, rather than the shorted line only. The diagnostic problem to be solved is uncovering the faulty devices based the visible part of the reaction. Once the diagnosis task has been on accomplished, the produced results are exploited to fix the apparatus (and also to localize the short circuit, in this sample case). Interestingly, the research presented in this book was triggered a decade ago by a project 011 short circuit localization, conducted by ENEL, the Italian electricity board, along with other industrial and academic European partners.

Getting the right diagnosis is a key aspect of health care - it provides an explanation of a patient's health problem and informs subsequent health care decisions. The diagnostic process is a complex, collaborative activity that involves clinical reasoning and information gathering to determine a patient's health problem. According to Improving Diagnosis in Health Care, diagnostic errors-inaccurate or delayed diagnoses-persist throughout all settings of care and continue to harm an unacceptable number of patients. It is likely that most people will experience at least one diagnostic error in their lifetime, sometimes with devastating consequences. Diagnostic errors may cause harm to patients by preventing or delaying appropriate treatment, providing unnecessary or harmful treatment, or resulting in psychological or financial repercussions. The committee concluded that improving the diagnostic process is not only possible, but also represents a moral, professional, and public health imperative. Improving Diagnosis in Health Care, a continuation of the landmark Institute of Medicine reports To Err Is Human (2000) and Crossing the Quality Chasm (2001), finds that diagnosis-and, in particular, the occurrence of diagnostic errorsâ€"has been largely unappreciated in efforts to improve the quality and safety of health care. Without a dedicated focus on improving diagnosis, diagnostic errors will likely worsen as the delivery of health care and the diagnostic process continue to increase in complexity. Just as the diagnostic process is a collaborative activity, improving diagnosis will require collaboration and a widespread commitment to change among health care professionals, health care organizations, patients and their families, researchers, and policy makers. The recommendations of Improving Diagnosis in Health Care contribute to the growing momentum for change in this crucial area of health care quality and safety.

Examining ADHD and its social and medical treatments around the world. Attention deficithyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has been a common psychiatric diagnosis in both children and adults since the 1980s and 1990s in the United States. But the diagnosis was much less common—even unknown—in other parts of the world. By the end of the twentieth century, this was no longer the case, and ADHD diagnosis and treatment became an increasingly widespread global phenomenon. As the diagnosis was adopted around the world, the definition and treatment of ADHD often changed in the context of different psychiatric professions, medical systems, and cultures. Global Perspectives on ADHD is the first book to examine how this expanding public health concern is diagnosed and treated in 16 different countries. In some countries, readers learn, over 10% of school-aged children and adolescents are diagnosed with ADHD; in others, that figure is less than 1%. Some countries focus on medicating children with ADHD; others emphasize parent intervention or child therapy. Showing how a medical diagnosis varies across contexts and time periods, this book explains how those distinctions shape medical interventions and guidelines, filling a much-needed gap by examining ADHD on an international scale. Contributors: Madeleine Akrich, Mari J. Armstrong-Hough, Meredith R. Bergey, Eugenia Bianchi, Christian Bröer, Peter Conrad, Claire Edwards, Silvia A. Faraone, Angela M. Filipe, Alessandra Frigerio, Valéria Portugal Gonçalves, Linda J. Graham, Hiroyuki Ito, Fabian Karsch, Victor Kraak, Claudia Malacrida, Lorenzo Montali, Yasuo Murayama, Sebastián Rojas Navarro, Órla O'Donovan, Francisco Ortega, Mónica Peña Ochoa, Brenton J. Prosser, Vololona Rabeharisoa, Patricio Rojas, Tiffani Semach, Ilina Singh, Rachel Spronk, Junko Teruyama, Masatsugu Tsujii, Fan-Tzu Tseng, Manuel Vallée, Rafaela Zorzanelli

This pioneering text explains how to synthesize digital diagnostic sequences for wire interconnects using boundary-scan, and how to assess the quality of those sequences. It takes a new approach, carefully modelling circuit and interconnect faults, and applying graph techniques to solve problems.

All too often, strategic planning neglects an essential step -- diagnosing the organization's current state at the beginning and end of an improvement cycle. What's required is a systematic review of the critical factors in organizational learning and growth. These are determinants that require the monitoring, measurement, and management of resources to ensure that your company competes successfully. This executive workbook provides a step-by-step methodology for diagnosing an organization's strategic health and measuring its overall competitiveness against world class standards. The Corporate Diagnosis handbook is used to verify policy or measure the results of corporate strategy and vision (the "business renewal" stage ). Detailed diagnostic questions in each key areas act as guidelines for developing your own self-assessment survey. To support the diagnostic process, three primary aids are provided: a check sheet to record observations and score each area under diagnosis; a radar chart to plot and track your company's position visually; and extensive progress tables that allow you to see your standing in each diagnostic area. Over 50 specific categories of company health are meticulously graded and charted to help you see where your company stands in its quest for world class status. Corporate Diagnosis is an excellent companion and aid for meeting the Deming, Shingo, or Baldrige Award criteria.

This book constitutes the refereed post-proceedings of the Third European Workshop on Software Architecture, EWSA 2006, held in France in September 2006. The 13 revised full research papers and five revised position papers presented together with one invited talk were carefully reviewed and selected. All current aspects of software architectures are addressed ranging from foundational and methodological issues to application issues of practical relevance.

Research results from industry-academic collaborative projects in service-oriented computing describe practical, achievable solutions. Service-Oriented Applications and Architectures (SOAs) have captured the interest of industry as a way to support business-to-business interaction, and the SOA market grew by $4.9 billion in 2005. SOAs and in particular service-oriented computing (SOC) represent a promising approach in the development of adaptive distributed systems. With SOC, applications can open themselves to services offered by third parties and accessed through standard, well-defined interfaces. The binding between the applications and the services can be, in this context, extremely loose--enabling the ad hoc creation of new services when the need arises. This book offers an overview of some current research in the field, presenting the results of eighteen research projects funded by the European Community's Information Society Technologies Program (IST). The projects, collaborations between industry and academia, have produced practical, achievable results that point the way to real-world applications and future research. The chapters address such issues as requirement analysis, design, governance, interoperability, and the dependability of systems made up of components owned by third parties. The results are presented in the context of two roadmaps for research, one developed by European industry involved in software development and the other by researchers working in the service area. The contributors report first on the "Infrastructure Layer," then (in the bulk of the book) on the "Service Integration Layer," the "Semantic Layer," and finally on the issues that cut across the different layers. The book concludes by looking at ongoing research on both roadmaps.

This handbook provides a comprehensive historical account of the field of Quality of Life. It brings together theoretical insights and empirical findings and presents the main items of global quality of life and wellbeing research. Worldwide in its scope of topics, the handbook examines discussions of demographic and health development, the spread of democracy, global economic accounting, multi-item measurement of perceived satisfaction and expert-assessed quality of life and the well-being of children, women and poor people. It looks at well-being in specific regions, including North and Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, South America and Eastern and Western Europe. In addition to contributions by leading and younger authors, the handbook includes contributions from International Organizations about their own work with respect to social reporting.

The modern development of medicine has been characterized by the grow ing use of new technologies in health care delivery and research. As an empirical science, medicine is based on many types and quantities of information to recognize alterations, explore causes and apply cor rective action. Dealing with biological objects, signals have to be collected, processed and interpreted to recognize the state of this object. It is therefore understandable that data processing technology and informatics have been employed to a growing extent in medicine. The increasing economic repercussions of modern medicine lead also to the demand of ways and means to assess the system as such and to develop means for evaluation and regulation. However, the application of data processing to the medical field has very often grown in parallel to and remote from the development of in formatics and data processing in general. Furthermore, difficulties have occurred resulting from the differing concepts of reasoning, deci sion making and methodology. We therefore decided to start a series of seminars with the attempt to bring scientists from both medicine and informatics together to discuss basic principles of informatics and medicine and to attempt a synthesis between the problems in medicine and health care delivery and methods in informatics to approach a solu tion of these problems. This volume contains the lecture notes of the first seminar of this type.