Clinical review: Scoring systems in the critically ill

General illness severity scores are widely used in the ICU to predict outcome, characterize disease severity and degree of organ dysfunction, and assess resource use. In this article we review the most commonly used scoring systems in each of these three groups. We examine the history of the development of the initial major systems in each group, discuss the construction of subsequent versions, and, when available, provide recent comparative data regarding their performance. Importantly, the different types of scores should be seen as complementary, rather than competitive and mutually exclusive. It is possible that their combined use could provide a more accurate indication of disease severity and prognosis. All these scoring systems will need to be updated with time as ICU populations change and new diagnostic, therapeutic and prognostic techniques become available

A strategy for a sustainable tourism development of the Greek Island of Chios

Despite several advances to comprehend tourism impacts and its relationship with sustainable development challenges, there is still a lack of worldwide examples of strategies for sustainable tourism development of destinations. Particularly in less developed European regions, tourism development strategies are still poorly implemented, emphasising the need to support them towards more balanced policies and actions that can effectively promote a sustainable tourism destination. The Island of Chios in Greece faces several challenges in order to develop such a strategy. Besides being a region particularly affected by the financial and refugee crisis of the last years, the Island does not have a Land Use Plan approved so far or any Strategy or Plan for Tourism. As such, the main goal of this paper is to propose a planning framework for sustainable tourism development of the Island of Chios considering the United Nations Agenda 2030 and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals. To accomplish such goal, the research involved a serious of different steps through an action-research approach based on a three-month internship at the local municipality. The qualitative and quantitative methodology was developed with the input of local key stakeholders and it enabled to identify the critical need for developing a sustainable tourism strategy for the territory. Results show that Chios is a destination with potential growth and increased competitiveness and attractiveness for visitors but major steps would have to be taken for the establishment of a participatory sustainable tourism strategic plan that could involve all the stakeholders and promote a sustainable growth and a more balanced development of the region

Mechanisms for AAA and QoS Interaction

Proceedings of Third IEEE Workshop on Applications and Services in Wireless Networks, ASWN 2003. Bern, Switzerland, July 2-4, 2003.The interaction between Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA) systems and the Quality of Service (QoS) infrastructure is to become a must in the near future. This interaction will allow rich control and management of both users and networks. DIAMETER and DiffServ are likely to turn into the future standards in AAA and QoS systems, but they are not designed to interact with each other. To face this, we propose a new Diameter-Diffserv interaction model and describe the Application Specific Module (ASM) implemented to allow this interaction. The ASM has been implemented and tested in a complete AAA-QoS IPv6 scenario

Blocking efficacy of Small Coalitions in Myopic Economies

We consider a continuum economy with infinitely many commodities and show that, for any positive var epsilon, the core of the economy coincides with the set of allocations which are not blocked by any coalition with measure less than var epsilon. Actually, our main result is an extension of Grodal's (1972, Econometrica40, 581–583) result and, therefore, Schmeidler's (1972, Econometrica40, 579–580) result to economies whose commodity space is ℓ∞, for myopic preferences.1 Supported by Research Grant PB95-0729-C02 from the Dirección General de Investigación Científica y Técnica (DGICYT), Spanish Ministry of Education. 2 Support from the Spanish Ministry of Education through a post doctoral fellowship in 1997 and from a Training and Mobility of Researchers (E.C.) fellowship in 1998 while visiting Universidade Nova de Lisboa, is acknowledged. 3 Support from the Portuguese Ministry of Science and Technology (project Praxis PCSHC- CEG9-96), is acknowledged.Publicad