Disaster management and mitigation: the telecommunications infrastructure.

Among the most typical consequences of disasters is the near or complete collapse of terrestrial telecommunications infrastructures (especially the distribution network--the 'last mile') and their concomitant unavailability to the rescuers and the higher echelons of mitigation teams. Even when such damage does not take place, the communications overload/congestion resulting from significantly elevated traffic generated by affected residents can be highly disturbing. The paper proposes innovative remedies to the telecommunications difficulties in disaster struck regions.

'All hazards approach' to disaster management: the role of information and knowledge management, Boyd's OODA Loop, and network-centricity.

The ever-increasing complexity of disasters demands utilisation of knowledge that exists outside domains traditionally drawn upon in disaster management. To be operationally useful, such knowledge must he extracted, combined with information generated by the disaster itself, and transformed into actionable knowledge. The process, though, is hampered by existing, business-oriented approaches to knowledge management, by technical issues related to access to relevant, multi-domain information/knowledge, and by executive decision-making processes based predominantly on historical knowledge.

Networkcentric healthcare: applying the tools, techniques and strategies of knowledge management to create superior healthcare operations.

The proliferation of Information Computer and Communication Technologies (IC2T) throughout the business environment has led to exponentially increasing amounts of data and information. Although these technologies were implemented to enhance and facilitate superior decision-making, the reality is information overload. Knowledge Management (KM) is a recent management technique designed to make sense of this information chaos.

Healthcare and technology: the doctrine of networkcentric healthcare.

Worldwide costs and the disparity between healthcare in the Western world and the developing countries increase exponentially. Increased involvement of ICT allows, in similarity to the military, a transition from platformcentric to more cohesive and collaborative networkcentric operations. In the information-intensive environment of healthcare, the networkcentric approach allows free and rapid sharing of information and effective knowledge building required for the development of coherent objectives and their rapid attainment.

Bioterrorism: development of large-scale medical readiness using multipoint distance-based simulation training.

Accordingly to HIRSA, 35,000 health professionals need to be trained in recognition and acute field treatment of victims of bioterrorism within year 2004 alone The Department of Defense anticipates even larger numbers. Training of very large number of healthcare workers is particularly daunting in the context of "just-in-time" education. The paper presents utilization of simulation-based distance training as a particularly useful tool in rapid development of readiness in a large population of widely distributed medical and lay personnel facing imminent threat of a chem/bioterrorism incident.

Transatlantic medical education: preliminary data on distance-based high-fidelity human patient simulation training.

Advanced training using Human Patient Simulators (HPS) is, for the large part, unavailable for the majority of healthcare providers in rural, remote, and less developed regions of the world--either due to their separation from the major medical education centers or significant fiscal austerity. Remote access to HPS based on the Applications Software Provider principles may provide the solution to this problem. The medical ASP (MED-ASP) concept proposed and developed by MedSMART has been subjected to an extensive qualitative and quantitative international test conducted among France, Italy, and USA.

Species Differences in Ligand Affinity at Central A-Adenosine Receptors.

[Table: see text] Binding affinities of purine derivatives at A adenosine receptors in different species were compared. Binding was carried out using the novel high affinity agonist ligand [I]AB-MECA (3-iodo-4-aminobenzyladenosine-5'-N-methyluronamide) in the presence of 1.0 μM XAC (8-[4-[[[[(2-aminoethyl)amino]carbonyl]methyl]oxy]phenyl]-1,3-dipropylxanthine), an A- and A-adenosine antagonist.