Quality Measures

This paper evaluates the impact of a team-based incentive scheme piloted in the public sector agency, Jobcentre Plus. The way the scheme has been designed raises many questions for which theory makes predictions. We test these predictions against our data. We find that team size affects the impact of the incentive scheme upon performance. Moreover, while the measure of quantity increased in incentivised areas, no improvement was found for the two quality measures. This may reflect concerns related to multi-tasking issues, or may reflect the small sample size available for the quality analysis. Finally, the data suggests that employees participating in the incentive scheme aim to exert a level of effort to ensure the target is achieved, but as additional effort is not rewarded they aim not to exceed this limit.

Résumé: Many networked applications use end-to-end congestion control protocols to avoid the occurrence of congestion collapse phenomena. However, such transport protocols may suffer from link underutilization when there are wireless links along the path: the inability to distinguish wireless losses from congestion losses often results in unnecessary throughput decreases. Since networks are becoming increasingly heterogeneous, consisting of a mix of wired and wireless links, it is important to have some means of correctly identifying the ...

All recent available, high quality measurements of the strong diffuse bands 5780 A and 5797 A have been collected. This includes those measurement derived from the authors's recent observations (February, May, and November 1993, taken with a echelle spectrograph) as well as those from a coude spectrograph and from literature. Equivalent widths of the diffuse interstellar bands (DIB's) at 5780

Newspaper critics" movie reviews are often used by potential movie viewers as signals of expert quality assessment. In this paper, we assess if there is any racial bias in these critics" reviews, and if so, what impact these biases have on viewer demand. To do this, we develop a dataset that tracks ratings from 68 popular movie critics for 566 movies released in the U.S. between 2003 and 2007. The data also include measures of movie production costs, marketing expenditures, type of movie (i.e. genre, MPAA rating, etc.), actor and director quality measures, audience tastes and critics" gender, experience and race. Despite inclusion of all these controls for movie quality and other drivers of critic ratings, we find that ratings for movies with a black lead actor and all white supporting cast are approximately 6% lower than for other racial compositions. These results appear consistent with implicit discrimination. Using estimates of the impact of critics" ratings on movie revenues, we find that lower critic ratings for black lead-white support movies translate into lost revenues of up to 4% or about $2.57 million on average. In sum, prejudice concerning race roles (e.g., the race of the leader versus supporters/followers) can have a direct impact on critic quality assessment, and thereby alter market outcomes.

Experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of a prototype lint cleaner named the Multibar Sawless Lint Cleaner (MBSLC). The MBSLC was conceived as a possible replacement for the first stage of lint cleaning in a cotton gin. The MBSLC has similarities to a saw-type lint cleaner, but the saws have been replaced with a spiked-tooth cylinder and a much denser series of grid bars are used. The theory of replacing the first stage was based on inefficiencies seen in a conventional two saw-type lint cleaner operation where the first stage of lint cleaning experiences the heaviest loading of trash and does a majority of the cleaning. The second stage is less efficient since it is both operationally and mechanically redundant to the first stage of lint cleaning. The MBSLC was designed under the premise that more effective and efficient cleaning of the lint would occur if different mechanical principles of operation were used in series rather than the traditional saw-type lint cleaner followed by a saw-type lint cleaner. This initial study was performed on a single variety of upland cotton that was stripper harvested with a field cleaner. The MBSLC was compared to a conventional saw-type lint cleaner by evaluating the fiber quality and lint waste produced by each machine. Results showed the MBSLC produced 73% less lint cleaner waste than the conventional saw-type lint cleaner. The MBSLC had improved fiber properties of length, short fiber content, and trash size. Fiber properties of Rd and leaf grade were better from the saw-type lint cleaner. All other measured fiber properties were the same for both lint cleaners. The results emphasized the potential application of this technology to improve lint cleaning, possibly by use as a stage of "precleaning" before a saw-type lint cleaner, or even as a sole stage of cleaning for lint with low leaf levels. Additional studies are being planned to evaluate other spike designs and operating parameters of the MBSLC.

US 2007/0067285 A1 METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR AUTOMATIC ENTITY DISAMBIGUATION BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION 0001) 1. Technical Field 0002 The invention relates to the analysis of informa tion. More particularly, the invention relates to a method and apparatus for automatic entity disambiguation. 0003 2. Description of the Prior Art 0004 Spoken and written text consists of characters, words, names, sentences, documents, conversations, and so on, but the world that the text describes consists of distinct objects and events. People now have access to an enormous amount of text, but are generally ultimately interested in actual persons and organizations that interact in the real world. Entity disambiguation, sometimes also referred to as entity tracking, is the process of determining which names, words, or phrases in text correspond to distinct persons, organizations, locations, or other entities. This determina tion is absolutely essential for reasoning, inference, and the examination of Social network structures based on informa tion derived from text.

Assessing the severity and prognosis of patients with craniocerebral damage is a major research area in medicine since it is a prevalent clinical disease. Acute craniocerebral injury, a common traumatic condition, is often caused by traffic accidents, collisions, and falls in daily life. Secondary craniocerebral injury refers to symptoms such as brain edema and intracranial hemorrhage after acute craniocerebral injury, which will aggravate the injury. Secondary craniocerebral injury can be avoided by effective and timely treatment, and real-time detection of brain edema and intracranial hemorrhage by non-invasive medical imaging is a solution. Therefore, non-invasive medical imaging technology has recently emerged as a new area of study. A new imaging technology, namely the brain injury detection technology based on electromagnetic induction, has been discovered after years of research on non-invasive detection of brain injury. Initially, electromagnetic induction technology was widely used in metal nondestructive testing. The human body, as a conductor, also has electromagnetic induction, allowing this technology to be used on the human body. This study reviews the technologies for detecting electromagnetic induction in cases of craniocerebral damage, including induced current electrical impedance tomography, magneto-acoustic tomography, and eddy current damping sensors for detection and imaging.

Text clustering divides a set of texts into clusters such that texts within each cluster are similar in content. It may be used to uncover the structure and content of unknown text sets as well as to give new perspectives on familiar ones. The focus of this paper is to experimentally evaluate the quality of clusters obtained using partitional clustering algorithms that employ different clustering schemes. The optimal clustering scheme that gives clusters of better quality is identified for three standard data sets. Also, the ideal clustering scheme that optimizes the I2 criterion function is experimentally identified.

Common approaches for robot navigation use Bayesian filters like particle filters, Kalman filters and their extended forms. We present an alternative and supplementing approach using constraint techniques based on spatial constraints between object positions. This yields several advantages. The robot can choose from a variety of belief functions, and the computational complexity is decreased by efficient algorithms. The paper investigates constraint propagation techniques under the special requirements of navigation tasks. Sensor data are noisy, but a lot of redundancies can be exploited to improve the quality of the result. We introduce two quality measures: The ambiguity measure for constraint sets defines the precision, while inconsistencies are measured by the inconsistency measure. The measures can be used for evaluating the available data and for computing best fitting hypothesis. A constraint propagation algorithm is presented.

This paper explores how sensor and motion modeling can be improved to better Markov localization by exploiting deviations from expected sensor readings. Proprioception is achieved by monitoring target and actual motions of robot joints. This provides information about whether or not an action was executed as desired, yielding a quality measure of the current odometry. Odometry is usually extremely prone to errors for legged robots, especially in dynamic environments where collisions are often unavoidable, due to the many degrees of freedom of the robot and the numerous possibilities of motion hindrance. A quality measure helps differentiate the periods of unhindered motion from periods where robot motion was impaired for whatever reason. Negative evidence is collected when a robot fails to detect a landmark that it expects to see. Therefore the gaze direction of the camera has to be modeled accordingly. This enables the robot to localize where it could not when only using landmarks. In the general localization task, the probability distribution converges more quickly when negative information is taken into account. 1. We show how negative information can be incorporated into Monte Carlo localization. The sensor model is extended by modeling the probability of non-detection events.

Within the context of the current ISO project to upgrade the set of technical reports on the measurement of the quality of software products (ISO 9126), the ISO working group concerned has come up with proposals for various documents (standards or technical reports) in the new ISO 25000 series to improve the interpretation and use of the quality measures. This paper investigates some of the harmonization issues arising with the addition of new documents like ISO 25021, in particular with respect to previously published measurement standards for software engineering, such as ISO 9126, ISO 15939, ISO 14143-1 and ISO 19761.

Objective-To assess the level of agreement when selecting quality measures for inclusion in a composite index of neonatal intensive care quality (Baby-MONITOR) between two panels: one comprised of academic researchers (Delphi) and another comprised of academic and clinical neonatologists (Clinician). Design/Methods-In a modified Delphi process, a panel rated twenty eight quality measures. We assessed clinician agreement with the Delphi panel by surveying a sample of forty eight neonatal intensive care practitioners. We asked the clinician group to indicate their level of agreement with the Delphi panel for each measure using a five-point scale (much too high, slightly too high, reasonable, slightly too low, and much too low). In addition, we asked clinicians to select measures for inclusion in the Baby-MONITOR based on a yes or no vote and a prespecified two-thirds majority for inclusion. Results-Twenty three (47.9%) of the clinicians responded to the survey. We found high levels of agreement between the Delphi and clinician panels, particularly across measures selected for the Baby-MONITOR. Clinicians selected the same nine measures for inclusion in the composite as the Delphi panel. For these nine measures, 74% of clinicians indicated that the Delphi panel rating was 'reasonable'.

Many modern multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) store the points discovered during optimization in an external archive, separate from the main population, as a source of innovation and/or for presentation at the end of a run. Maintaining a bound on the size of the archive may be desirable or necessary for several reasons, but choosing which points to discard and which to keep in the archive, as they are discovered, is not trivial. In this paper we briefly review the state-of-the-art in bounded archiving, and present a new method based on locally maximizing the hypervolume dominated by the archive. The new archiver is shown to outperform existing methods, on several problem instances, with respect to the quality of the archive obtained when judged using three distinct quality measures.

Traditionally, the common cost functions, the number of functional units, registers and selector inputs, are used in high level synthesis as quality measures. However, these traditional design quality measures may not reflect the real physical design. To establish quality measures based on the physical designs, we propose layout estimation models for two commonly used data path and control layout architectures. The results show that quality measures deriving from our models give an accurate prediction of the final layout. The results also show that traditional cost functions are not good indicators for optimization in high level synthesis.

We propose a transformation-based scheduling algorithm for the problemgiven a loop construct, a target initiation interval and a set of resource constraints, schedule the loop in a pipelined fashion such that the iteration time of executing an iteration of the loop is minimized. The iteration time is an important quality measure of a data path design because it affects both storage and control costs. Our algorithm first performs an As Soon As Possible Pipelined (ASAPp) scheduling regardless the resource constraint. It then resolves resource constraint violations by rescheduling some operations. The software system implementing the proposed algorithm, called Theda.Fold, can deal with behavioral loop descriptions that contain chained, multicycle and/or structural pipelined operations as well as those having data dependencies across iteration boundaries. Experiment on a number of benchmarks is reported.

Saffron is composed of four active major ingredients name Crocin-I, Crocin-II Picrocrocin and Safranal. Crocin's are related to produce golden red color whereas picrocrocin and safranal are responsible for the taste and aroma. Spectrophotometric analysis of saffron is available but methodology of HPLC analysis is not readily available for quality checking of saffron. In this study each component of saffron was identified and analyzed by HPLC for better quality assessment. Methods: 200 ppm of saffron sample was prepared in 50% methanol and filtrated through 0.22 µm syringe filter. Crocin I and II were determined at 440 nm where methanol:0.1% phosphoric acid (55:45) was used as mobile phase. Picrocrocin was determined at 257 nm and mixture of acetonitrile:water (13:87) was used as mobile phase. Determination of safranal was done at 330 nm where gradient mixture of acetonitrile, phosphoric acid and water was used as mobile phase. Separations were done by using C18 250×4.6, 5 µm HPLC columns and injection volume was 20 uL. Column temperature was set at 25°C. Result: According to ISO 3632 protocols crocin concentration of saffron samples was found 246.00 picrocrocin was found 98.48 and safranal was found 41.965 which belongs to grade I, whereas in HPLC analysis crocin I was found 24.256 mg/g, crocin II was found 9.825 mg/g, picrocrocin was found 32.295 mg/g and safranal was found 0.512 mg/g. Conclusion: HPLC is the most suitable analytical techniques used for qualitative and quantitative determination of different chemical constituents, mixtures of organic components and biological extracts etc. HPLC will be the most suitable and alternative analytical technique for qualitative and quantitative estimation of saffron constituents.

QUATROMONI, PAULA A., MICHAEL PENCINA, MARK R. COBAIN, PAUL F. JACQUES, AND RALPH B. D’AGOSTINO. Dietary quality predicts adult weight gain: findings from the Framingham Offspring Study. Obesity. 2006;14:1383–1391. Objective: We tested the hypothesis that dietary quality, measured by adherence to the Dietary Guidelines, was related to weight change in adults. Research Methods and Procedures: Dietary intake was assessed among 2245 adult men and women (average age, 49 to 56 years) in the Framingham Offspring cohort. Threeday dietary records were collected in 1984 to 1988 and again in 1991 to 1996. Weight change was measured over 8 years after each assessment. A five-point diet quality index (DQI) was computed based on mean nutrient intake levels from each set of diet records. One DQI point was contributed for each of five nutrients if intake met Dietary Guidelines for total and saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, and carbohydrate. Gender-specific generalized estimating equations poole...

It is known that the Percentage of Identification Accuracy (PIA) of Automatic Speaker Recognition (ASR) systems is increasingly vulnerable, such as noise and channel degradation in real-time. This study presents a novel class SVM and i-vector based speaker specific feature extractor (SVM-IVSSFE) algorithms based ASR system. I introduce SVM based approach at two stages within state-of-the-art ASR system: i-vector extraction estimation and at the Probabilistic Linear Discriminant (PLDA). SVM based approaches have classified more challenging subsets on the basis of training using a proper difficulty criterion. After this, the proposed training algorithm is initialized with a subset that reaches a clean set and then moves into subsets which more are challenging for training because the algorithms move forward. Based on the SVM-IVSSFE approach on noisy background I evaluated the PIA of ASR on critically degraded datasets with NIST 2010 database with standard i-vector extractor. The multi...

According to data from INCA4, breast cancer ranks second among neoplasms in terms of incidence and third in terms of mortality, while cervical cancer ranks third in terms of incidence and fourth in terms of mortality. However, cervical cancer has high cure rates in early cases and is one of the few cancers that has the technology for prevention, early detection and treatment. Breast cancer, on the other hand, is the main killer of women and, in recent years, its incidence has increased, making it the cancer that most affects the female population. The project's methodology basically consists of 3 stages: 1) Analysis of medical records; 2) Creation of a Women's Card; 3) Creation of software. The results of the research were aberrant, since 43% of the women studied had never even had a preventive examination (Pap smear) and 45.5% of them had never had a mammogram. We therefore conclude that there is a need to implement actions that increase women's adherence to preventive services. Through the actions proposed in this project, in addition to carrying out this preventive task, we will also provide greater organization of the UBS.

This paper presented a new prediction model for Pressure-Volume-Temperature (PVT) properties based on the recently introduced learning algorithm called Sensitivity Based Linear Learning Method (SBLLM) for two-layer feedforward neural networks. PVT properties are very important in the reservoir engineering computations. The accurate determination of these properties such as bubble-point pressure and oil formation volume factor is important in the primary and subsequent development of an oil field. In this work, we develop Sensitivity Based Linear Learning method prediction model for PVT properties using two distinct databases, while comparing forecasting performance, using several kinds of evaluation criteria and quality measures, with neural network and the three common empirical correlations. Empirical results from simulation show that the newly developed SBLLM based model produced promising results and outperforms others, particularly in terms of stability and consistency of prediction.

Particular return to McCall’s et al. seminal work has been done in recent international standards ISO/IEC 25022:2016 and ISO/IEC 25023:2016. 122 lower level measures (metrics in McCall’s et al. terminology) were introduced. Authors of standards themselves classify quality measures as Highly Recommended, Recommended, Used at user’s Discretion and Generic, Specific. In this paper, quality measures are additionally classified also from the point of view of objectivity of measurement and of usage in industry.

To assess the effect of a letter-based intervention program, targeted at prescribers and pharmacists, on adherence to national guidelines and healthcare utilization in the Connecticut asthma Medicaid population. METHODS: A retrospective DUR was conducted from April to June 2001. Patients with asthma in the Connecticut Medicaid Program submitting >1 claim per month (over a 6-month period) for short-acting b 2agonists were identified (intervention group; n = 135). Patient specific intervention packets explaining the problem, the patient's medication profile, an asthma education leaflet, response form and return envelope were mailed to the patients' prescribers and pharmacists. A control group of asthma patients, who were not HDB users at baseline and drawn from the same Medicaid program, were also identified (n = 510). Utilization of long-term asthma control agents and spacers and healthcare utilization were compared between the intervention and control patients 6 months after the mailing. RESULTS: At baseline, the intervention group had lower utilization of long-term control agents compared to the control group (58% vs. 96%, respectively; p < 0.001) but there was no difference after the intervention program (65% vs. 71%, p = 0.169). A greater number of claims were submitted for spacers in the intervention group compared to control after the mailing (7% vs. 2%, p = 0.007). Before the mailing, the intervention group incurred more prescriber office visits than the control group (mean ± SD; 0.46 ± 0.82 vs. 0.25 ± 0.66, p < 0.001) but this difference was not evident after the intervention program (0.24 ± 0.63 vs. 0.18 ± 0.60, p = 0.283). CONCLUSION: This intervention program had a modest impact on improving the use of long-term control agents and reducing prescriber office visits.

Voice over IP (VoIP) has the potential to be integrated with other Internet applications to provide interactive multimedia communication services that are impossible (or at least very difficult) to deploy over the traditional circuit-switched wired and wireless networks. To fully exploit the benefit of service integration, it is necessary that VoIP services can be seamlessly provided with a good Quality-of-Service over several different network technologies. Due to their wide availability and significant user interest in mobile voice communications, particularly wireless network technologies will be crucial for the success of VoIP (and vice versa). However, the legacy Internet architecture is based on the "best effort" principle which does not guarantee a minimum amount of packet loss and a minimum delay of packet transmission required for voice communication. Considering a wireless access network to the Internet, QoS assurance is even more difficult. This is due to the inherently shared nature of the medium as well as its high medium error rate which add to the effect of congestion at routers known from wireline networks. In this paper we first analyze the concealment performance of the G.729 decoder as one prominent example of the CELP coder family which are typically employed for VoIP. Using this result, we then develop QoS support schemes which selectively mark packets to a higher (DiffServ) network priority at the sender dependent on the properties of the speech signal and the expected concealment performance. On the wireless access link the priorities are then mapped to a simple ARQ scheme. This layered approach is in full conformance with existing standards. Objective quality measures (ITU-T P.861A and EMBSD) show that almost the same speech quality as if all packets of the data stream would have been marked as eligible for retransmission can be achieved while significantly reducing the number of actual retransmissions.

Recently we have seen research efforts on how to protect a real-time speech signal when transmitting over an unreliable packet-switched network like the Internet by open-loop error control. Research has covered the type of Foward Error Correction (generic or voice-specific), the protocol support needed and adaptivity to the current network congestion state. However, the sender does not take into account that some segments of the signal are essential to the speech quality, while others can be extrapolated at the receiver from data received earlier in the event of a packet loss. This is especially true for modern frame-based codecs like the G.729 and G.723.1 which contain an internal loss concealment algorithm. Thus, the sender consumes additional bandwidth and aggravates the congestion in the Internet by sending unnecessary redundancy. In this paper we first analyze the concealment performance of the G.729 decoder. We find that the loss of unvoiced frames can be concealed well. Also, the loss of voiced frames is concealed well once the decoder has obtained sufficient information on them. However the decoder fails to conceal the loss of voiced frames at an unvoiced/voiced transition because it extrapolates internal state (filter coefficients and excitation) for an unvoiced sound. Moreover, once the encoder has failed to build the appropriate linear prediction synthesis filter, it takes a long time for the decoder to resynchronize with the encoder. Using this result, we then develop a new FEC scheme to support frame-based codecs, which adjusts the amount of added redundancy adaptively to the properties of the speech signal. Objective quality measures (ITU P.861A and EMBSD) show that our speech property-based FEC (SPB-FEC) scheme achieves almost the same speech quality as current FEC schemes while approximately halving the amount of necessary redundant data to adequately protect the voice flow.

This study examines the relation among large shareholders, board independence and firm performance that can be found in most emerging markets, where ownership concentration is high, voting power is leveraged through business group affiliation, and there is a bias from the one-vote-one-...

We have developed a novel technique for making high quality measurements of the millimeter-wave properties of superconducting thin-film microstrip transmission lines. Our experimental technique currently covers the 75-130 GHz frequency range. The method is based on standing wave resonances in an open ended transmission line. We obtain information on the characteristic impedance, phase velocity, and loss of the microstrip. Our data for Nb/SiO/Nb lines, taken at 4.2 K and 1.6 K, can be explained by a single set of physical parameters, with a temperature-independent loss tangent of tan δ SiO = 1.2±0.3×10 -3 for our latest samples. The amplitude 1/e attenuation length is 30 cm to 40 cm.

Telecommunication systems are large and complex, consisting of multiple intelligent modules in shelves, multiple shelves in frames, and multiple frames to compose a single network element. In the availability and performability analysis of such a complex system, combinatorial models are computationally efficient but have limited expressive power. State-based models are expressive but computationally complex. Furthermore, this complexity grows exponentially with the size of the model. This state-space explosion problem must be solved in order to model complex-systems using state-based models. The solution, in this paper, is to partition complex models into a hierarchy of submodels, to transform lower-level -state, -transition Markov reward models and stochastic reward nets into equivalent (with respect to their steady-state behavior) 2-state, 2-transition models, and then to back-substitute the equivalent submodels into the higher-level models. This paper also proposes a canonical form for the equivalent submodels. This technique is defined for availability models, where the state of the system is either up or down, and for performability models, where the state of the system may be up, down, or partially-up/partially-down. This paper also shows how this technique can be used to obtain common availability measures for telecommunication systems, and when to apply it to availability models and when to use it in performability models. For future work, it would be interesting to more tightly integrate this technique with modeling tools, perhaps coupled with a graphic front-end to facilitate the navigation of the model hierarchy.

The Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnostic, and Treatment (EPSDT) program is a vital component of the United States' healthcare system, playing a critical role in ensuring the health and well-being of children and adolescents. As a mandatory component of Medicaid, EPSDT guarantees access to comprehensive healthcare services for eligible individuals under the age of 21. By providing early detection, diagnosis, and treatment of health conditions, EPSDT aims to prevent long-term health issues, promote healthy development, and reduce healthcare disparities. Despite its significance, the EPSDT program faces numerous challenges in its implementation, including lack of awareness, administrative complexities, limited provider participation, state-level variations, and inadequate funding. Addressing these challenges requires a multifaceted approach involving collaboration among policymakers, healthcare providers, community organizations, and advocacy groups. By raising awareness, simplifying enrollment, enhancing provider participation, promoting best practices, securing adequate funding, and addressing cultural and linguistic barriers, it is possible to improve the effectiveness of EPSDT and ensure that all children have access to the care they need.

The proposed work uses fixed lag smoothing on the interactive multiple model-integrated probabilistic data association algorithm (IMM-IPDA) to enhance its performance. This approach makes use of the advantages of the fixed lag smoothing algorithm to track the motion of a maneuvering target while it is surrounded by clutter. The suggested method provides a new mathematical foundation in terms of smoothing for mode probabilities in addition to the target trajectory state and target existence state by including the smoothing advantages. The suggested fixed lag smoothing IMM-IPDA (FLs IMM-IPDA) method’s root mean square error (RMSE), true track rate (TTR), and mode probabilities are compared to those of other recent algorithms in the literature in this study. The results clearly show that the proposed algorithm outperformed the already-known methods in the literature in terms of these above parameters of interest.

One of the most significant outcomes of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment has been the high quality oceanographic data that have been collected and assembled over the 1990&#x27;s. It is these oceanographic data that will drive the basin-scale research for the next ...

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Numerous studies in the United States have examined the association between quality and spending at the regional level. In this paper we evaluate this relationship at the level of individual hospitals, which are a more natural unit of analysis for reporting on and improving accountability. For all of the quality indicators studied, the association with spending is either nil or negative. The absence of positive correlations suggests that some institutions achieve exemplary performance on quality measures in settings that feature lower intensity of care. This finding highlights the need for reporting information on both quality and spending. Wide variations in both spending and quality of care have been documented throughout the U.S. health care system. Many studies have found no positive correlation between spending and quality; others have noted a negative relationship at the level of states and Hospital Referral Regions (HRRs).1 In these studies, higher spending is associated with care of higher intensity, involving greater use of the hospital and intensive care unit (ICU) and more specialists, tests, and minor procedures, but lower quality as measured by performance on process-of-care measures, which record the percentage of patients that receive appropriate care for specific conditions.2 Some have attributed this negative association to the specialistoriented patterns of practice present in different regions.3 Previous analyses at the regional level provide an informative picture of variation in spending and quality across the country; however, efforts to improve the quality of inpatient care or reduce unnecessary spending are unlikely to be designed at the level of regions because hospitals and physicians in them are not formally linked. We examined correlations between spending intensity and quality at the level of hospitals, which, unlike states or HRRs, provide the organizational context within which Medicare patients receive most of their care.4 We used measures of process-of-care quality from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Compare database. We compared performance on these measures to hospital-level end-of-life spending based on spending for chronically ill patients from the Medicare over-sixty-five population. We examined whether the observed relationship between quality and spending at the hospital level is mediated by the influence of geography: is the lack of association between spending and quality explained by geography, or does it also occur within narrowly defined geographic regions?

In this paper, we have considered a problem of uneven background extraction and segmentation of good, normal and bad quality fingerprint images, though we propose an algorithm based on morphological transformations. Our result shows that the proposed algorithm can successfully extract the background of good, normal and bad quality images of fingerprint and well segment the foreground area. The algorithm has been tested and executed on FVC2002 database and the performance of proposed algorithm is evaluated through subjective and objective quality measures. This algorithm gives good and promising result and found suitable to remove superfluous information without affecting the structure of fingerprint image as well as reduces the storage space for the resultant image upto 77%. Our results will be useful for precise feature extraction in automatic fingerprint recognition system.

Use of multiple paths between node pairs can enable an overlay network to bypass Internet link failures. Selecting high quality primary and backup paths is challenging, however. To maximize communication reliability, an overlay multipath routing protocol must account for both the failure probability of a single path and link sharing among multiple paths. We propose a practical solution that exploits physical topology information and end-to-end path quality measurement results to select high quality path pairs. Simulation results show the proposed approach is effective in achieving higher multipath reliability in overlay networks at reasonable communication cost.

Use of multiple paths between node pairs can enable an overlay network to bypass Internet link failures. Selecting high quality primary and backup paths is challenging, however. To maximize communication reliability, an overlay multipath routing protocol must account for both the failure probability of a single path and link sharing among multiple paths. We propose a practical solution that exploits physical topology information and end-to-end path quality measurement results to select high quality path pairs. Simulation results show the proposed approach is effective in achieving higher multipath reliability in overlay networks at reasonable communication cost.

The performances of the Super-ACO storage ring free electron laser at 800 MeV have been recently improved : extension of the spectral range to the ultraviolet, enhancement of the laser output power, laser duration of 10 hours for the same injection of positrons in the storage ring, a good laser stability, a laser micropulse of 40 ps RMS, etc Consequently, it was decided not only to develop the laser quality but also to try a first experiment using a UV storage ring FEL. A time-resolved fluorescence experiment to biology by the photon counting method was chosen, in order to take mainly advantage of the temporal structure of the FEL. It has been possible to perform a high quality measurement on NADH (an enzymatic cofactor) comparable to those required for the study of the proteins in solution . The interactive work between the users and the FEL group led to clarify the stability requirements . The improvement of the laser stability led us to develop a longitudinal feedback on the laser, still under test . Perspectives concerning the Super-ACO FEL facility will be given.

As distributed technologies become more widely used , the need for assessing the quality of distributed applications correspondingly increases. Despite the rich body of research and practice in developing quality measures for centralised applications, there has be en little emphasis on measures for distributed softwar e. The need to understand the complex structure and behavi our of distributed applications suggests

Disambiguating concepts and entities in a context sensitive way is a fundamental problem in natural language processing. The comprehensiveness of Wikipedia has made the online encyclopedia an increasingly popular target for disambiguation. Disambiguation to Wikipedia is similar to a traditional Word Sense Disambiguation task, but distinct in that the Wikipedia link structure provides additional information about which disambiguations are compatible. In this work we analyze approaches that utilize this information to arrive at ...

OK-ABAYASHI, PPPL -Resistive-wall-mode (RWM) modeling helps not only to identify the RWM mode, but also to optimize model-based control. Based on modeled sensor signals, a static matched filter is constructed to identify the RWM mode. Using a "picture frame" wall model, a dynamic Kalman filter has been developed to discriminate edge localized modes (ELMs) from RWMs. From this ELM-filtered RWM mode identification, an enhanced RWM feedback controller has been implemented for DIII-D plasmas. Recent experiments showed the effectiveness of the Kalman filter scheme; the feedback coils were rarely excited during ELMs, while responding to RWMs. To investigate proper RWM responses, an optimized Kalman filter parameter set has been found and evaluated. Meanwhile, using a thin wall treatment, an eigenmode approach has been adopted to represent the vessel more accurately.

Understanding the quality of the day care environment is useful for practitioners and policymakers in the evaluation and improvement of day care provisions. Regulated features, interactive dimensions and global indices of quality have been examined in relation to child developmental outcomes. This study investigated the effects of variations in the day care environment on linguistic and social-emotional development of preschool children in Singapore in order to answer the following questions: (1) Are there environmental differences in day care centers in Singapore? (2) How are differences in characteristics of the day care environment related to children's linguistic and social-emotional development? (3) What are the effects of day care quality on children's development after taking home background into account? The subjects were 122 children, ages 49 to 72 months, enrolled in full-day care and randomly selected from 16 centers. Subjects completed pre-and posttests consisting of academic, linguistic, and social-emotional assessments. The results indicated that center quality and specific subscales as measured by the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS) predict some linguistic and social-emotional outcomes of children. (MOK)

Environmental datasets are subject to ontological differences in the way that information is recorded and reported. One of the implications is that environmental monitoring and the identification of loci of change is difficult. This generic problem is explored with reference to land cover mapping in the UK. The decennial land cover projects (LCMGB and LCM2000) are introduced and their differences described. Their different scientific, policy and commission contexts contribute to the overall change in methodology. Increased user participation in the specification of the 2000 dataset is the result of structural changes in the way policy is conducted. The Broad Habitat classification system was determined by many factors and not solely the responsibility of the scientists producing the data. The drive to integrate data that have fundamentally different characteristics and properties is examined and the botanical background to one dataset being used to provide quality measures for another is described. The value of combining two fundamentally different approaches and presenting them as an integrated product may be misleading. Each survey offers a different approach in terms of the spatial detail, extent and data primitives that are recorded.

Timetabling is a typical application of constraint programming whose task is to allocate activities to slots in available resources respecting various constraints like precedence and capacity. In this paper we present a basic concept, a constraint model, and a solution algorithm for interactive timetabling. Interactive timetabling combines automated timetabling (the computer allocates the activities) with user interaction (the user can interfere with the process of timetabling). Because the user can see how the timetabling proceeds and he or she can intervene this process, we believe that such approach is more convenient than full automated timetabling, which behaves like a black-box. We also present some results achieved when applying our techniques to solving a real-life timetabling problem at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University.

This paper presents an efficient method for approximation of temporal video data using linear Bezier fitting. For a given sequence of frames, the proposed method estimates the intensity variations of each pixel in temporal dimension using linear Bezier fitting in Euclidean space. Fitting of each segment ensures upper bound of specified mean squared error. Break and fit criteria is employed to minimize the number of segments required to fit the data. The proposed method is well suitable for lossy compression of temporal video data and automates the fitting process of each pixel. Experimental results show that the proposed method yields good results both in terms of objective and subjective quality measurement parameters without causing any blocking artifacts.

Globalisation has meant an increased demand from students, employers, and academics for indicators of the international academic standing of universities. In this paper we examine the broad methodological issues involved in measuring international academic standing and apply our conclusions to data for 38 Australian universities. Determinants of the international academic standing of universities are grouped into six broad categories: standing of academic staff, quality of undergraduate intake, quality of undergraduate programs, quality of graduate programs, resources, and peer opinion. The relative importance of each of these attributes is ascertained though a worldwide survey of university presidents, rectors and vice-chancellors plus Australian deans, thus reducing the need for subjective weighting by the researchers. The empirical findings are used to weight quantitative performance data for Australian universities and the results compared with two other recent worldwide rankings of universities.