How do public administrations actually know what end users want and expect of their public services so as to set about satisfying their needs? An exhaustive European-wide survey of citizens’ real needs regarding services such as e-government, e-health and e-learning, goes a long way towards answering this question.

The IST-sponsored eUSER project behind the survey gathered vital data from 10 European countries on a wide range of topics. This included access technologies, use of Infor

Performance appraisals can actually be counter-productive for employees who are in the greatest need of training and further development. This fact is highlighted by Professor Bård Kuvaas from the BI Norwegian School of Management, based on a new research study.

There is almost not a single organisation, public or private, which does not conduct performance appraisals in one form or another. Performance appraisals are one of the most widely used tools within HR (Human Resources)

From zebra fish to humans, reproductive hormones govern behavioral responses to courtship signals. A new Emory University study conducted in songbirds suggests that hormones may also modulate the way the auditory system processes courtship signals. In other words, hormones may affect how the birds actually listen to courtship songs at certain times of the year when it’s time to reproduce.

Like many animals, songbirds put on their reproductive song and dance routine each spring: Ma

Saint Louis University School of Medicine researchers are studying the effectiveness of a drug for patients with chronic hepatitis B that is currently used to treat HIV.

Hepatitis B patients currently take an antiviral called Hepsera, says Adrian Di Bisceglie, M.D., chief of hepatology at Saint Louis University School of Medicine. The drug under investigation in the study, called Tenofovir, is similar to Hepsera in that it is a “nucleotide analog” that helps stop the virus from

Yale researchers argue that monkeys and humans exhibit similar illogical economic biases

Little attention has been paid to whether systematic economic biases such as risk-aversion are learned behaviors – and thus easily ameliorated through market incentives – or biologically based, arising in novel situations and in spite of experience. In a groundbreaking new study from the Journal of Political Economy, Yale researchers extend this question across species, exploring how a colony

New study identifies human contribution to atmosphere circulation changes

A new study published in this week’s issue of Nature is the first to show that human activity is altering the circulation of the tropical atmosphere and ocean through global warming.

Scientists widely agree that the climate has warmed over the past century and that human activities, such as burning fossil fuels, have significantly contributed to this global warming. This study tapped hi

It often requires many years of growth before a tree is ready to flower — a delay that makes tree breeders impatient. Now, scientists at universities in Sweden and the United States have discovered genes that are responsible for initiation of flowering.

In the annual plant Arabidopsis, the first plant to have its genome sequenced, the genes Constans (CO) and Flowering Locus T (FT) induce flowering in response to day length. It turns out that Populus trees (aspens, cottonwoods, poplars), t

The healthcare services of the future will place heavy demands on medical universities and the education they provide. This is the starting point for a unique training initiative between Karolinska Institutet and Harvard Medical School for people in charge of quality assurance and medical course design in wide variety of countries.

The newly started “International Design Strategies for Medical Curricula Across the Continuum” leadership programme is the first of its kind ever, and is to be

A sophisticated new language learning method that uses technology to implement findings from neuroscience aims to be simplicity itself for adult learners.

Mobility within the European Union offers great prospects for both individuals and companies – but doing business in another country only makes sense if you can speak (or quickly learn) the local language. Unfortunately, recent statistics have shown that 51 per cent of EU citizens cannot speak a European language other than

New research shows shoppers are much less likely to buy an article of clothing if they think another person has already touched it.

“Consumer contact with products is a double-edged sword. Prior research has shown people like to touch products, but now we’ve found that they really don’t like it if someone else has touched them first,” said Dr. Jennifer Argo a professor in the University of Alberta School of Business.

Argo and her colleagues found that not only

A Mayo Clinic study comparing femtosecond (bladeless) and mechanical microkeratome LASIK surgeries has found equal results from both types six months post-surgery, using a variety of vision and eye health measurements. The study’s findings will be presented next week in three abstracts at the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

LASIK (Laser-assisted in situ keratomileusis) involves treating nearsightedness, farsightedness or astigmati

While Earth’s ozone layer is slowly being replenished following an international 1987 agreement banning CFCs, the recovery is occurring in a changing atmosphere and is unlikely to stabilize at pre-1980 levels, says a new University of Colorado at Boulder study.

The recovery is a result of the 1987 Montreal Protocol banning chlorine pollutants from the atmosphere, said Betsy Weatherhead, a researcher with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, a

The European Science Foundation has signed a new extended Memorandum of Understanding with the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). The document was formally signed by Professor Bertil Andersson, Chief Executive of the Foundation, and Professor Motoyuki Ono, President of JSPS.

The Memorandum provides for the close cooperation between both organisations for the organisation of ‘Frontier Science Meeting Series for Young Researchers’, which bring about 80 young researchers fr

In July 2005, the race to find a vaccine that would stem the worldwide rate of 13,000 new cases of HIV infection each day moved from competition among research institutions to a strategy of cooperation.

An international “virtual research center” – the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI) – was awarded up to $300 million over seven years to support efforts to develop an HIV vaccine.

The first of several research studies in this collaboration now is under way and

BabyBot, a robot modelled on the torso of a two year-old child, is helping researchers take the first, tottering steps towards understanding human perception, and could lead to the development of machines that can perceive and interact with their environment.

The researchers used BabyBot to test a model of the human sense of ’presence’, a combination of senses like sight, hearing and touch. The work could have enormous applications in robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) and mac

A new study recently published in Journal of Vision, an online, free access publication of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO), shows that gold beads injected into eye tissue can be used to obtain images of important structures in the orbit that cannot be seen with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) or other imaging methods.

Researchers from the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, Calif., injected tiny gold beads into various areas in the