This paper discusses the adoption of e-government in three Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. The study first presents a conceptual framework to examine the development and services of e-government, which is applied to assess its adoption in these leading Latin American economies. Study findings can shed some light on each nation as a model for successful development as well as the implementation of e-government in a non-industrialized, developing nation. The analysis also seeks to fill a void in the study of e-government in less developed nations, most of which are trying to catch up with their developed counterparts in this crucial aspect of digital governmental development.

Distributed transaction-processing systems must manage such functions as concurrency, recovery, and replication. One way to improve their efficiency and reliability is to increase software modularity, which means the separate components should execute in separate address spaces to permit hardware-enforced separation. This structure offers advantages but demands efficient interprocess communication (IPC) services. In our research at Purdue University, we are investigating mechanisms and paradigms for efficient communication support in conventional architectures, such as virtual-memory, single-processor machines with no special IPC hardware support. (Some mainframes have hardware assistance where more than one address space can be accessed at the same time.) We are studying communication designs in the context of the Raid system, a robust and adaptable distributed database system for transaction processing.' Raid has been developed at Purdue on Sun workstations under the Unix operating Communication svstem in a local area network. software is critical in distributed computing systems. This research identifies efficient mechanisms and paradigms for distributed transaction processing in a replicated database environment. In Raid, each major logical component is implemented as a server, which is a process in a separate address space. Servers interact with other processes through a high-level communication subsystem. Currently, Raid has six servers for transaction management: the user interface (UI). the action driver (AD), the access manager (AM), the atomicity controller (AC), the concurrency controller (CC), and the replication controller (RC). High-level name service is provided by a separate server, the oracle.

Bronchial asthma is now widely recognized as a heterogeneous clinical syndrome consisting of various disease phenotypes. Each asthma phenotype may have distinct observable molecular, cellular, morphological, functional, and clinical features , all of which can be possibly integrated into specifc biological mechanisms, called as endotypes . Although differentiating asthma into various phenotypes/endotypes remains speculative so far, these concepts of separation may be useful in characterizing and predicting disease severity, progression, and response to general and specifc therapies including biologic medications . This is particularly important for severe asthma patients who are refractory to current standard therapies including inhaled and systemic corticosteroids (CS) and bronchodilators. Because these patients account for a signifcant proportion of health-care expenditure of asthma , recognizing the heterogeneous nature of asthma, especially severe asthma, may enable us to develop safe and effective phenotype-targeted biological therapies.