Workers' Compensation Insurance In North America: Lessons for Victoria?

Among the issues we will consider here are the following. Who carries the underwriting(insurance) risk for workers' compensation benefits? How is workers' compensation insuranceprices, and by whom? What fundamental principles guide the insurance pricing system? Whomonitors benefits for compliance with statutory requirements? Are the availability of coverageand the payment of insurers' claims obligations guaranteed? Is self-insurance allowed and, if so, for whom? How are incentives for prevention of accidents, and resulting workers' compensation claims, maintained? What is the performance of the overall system? In summary, how are these questions answered and what so the answers reveal about how these responsibilities are allocated among government agencies, other public entities and private firms

IMPACTS OF GLOBAL WARMING ON CROPPING PRACTICES IN ALBERTA

A Target MOTAD farm-level model was developed to assess the expected impacts from global warming on representative grain and oilseed farms in Alberta. It was found that a warmer climate would increase crop yields and length of the cropping season. Net returns and shadow values of land would increase substantially. Price risk generally was more important than yield risk under simulated warmer climates.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Principal-Agent Relationships in Agricultural Cooperatives: An Empirical Analysis from Rural Alberta

Cooperatives throughout North America are consolidating at an increasing rate and for a variety of reasons. While many cooperatives merge with others or are acquired to achieve greater economies of scale, several fail due to changes in the external economy, which make them redundant. Often, such redundancy is reflected in a heightened sense of member dissatisfaction. Many argue that such dissatisfaction is likely to arise in cooperatives as a result of principal-agent problems. In order to determine whether or not cooperative managers maintain the same goals as their owners, this study uses data from a member-survey to compare Alberta cooperative members' objectives with those they believe to be held by their cooperatives' managers. An econometric model of the difference between members' expectations and perceptions shows how various socioeconomic variables affect the extent to which these objectives are aligned. The results of this analysis can help cooperative boards design managerial incentive programs to better align their goals with those of the cooperative membership.Agribusiness,

The Third Way: Prevention and Compensation of Work Injury in Victoria, Australia

This study originated because the leadership of the VWA and the responsible Minister wanted an assessment of the performance of the Victorian scheme within a larger perspective. They commissioned the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, an endowed, not-forprofit research foundation in the United States, to assemble an appropriate team of workers' compensation experts to conduct such a study. The assignment was to carry out a thorough, independent review of the Victorian system of prevention and compensation for work injuries and to provide a set of informed judgments about the system and its performance

New Doppler echocardiographic applications for the study of diastolic function

AbstractDoppler echocardiography is one of the most useful clinical tools for the assessment of left ventricular (LV) diastolic function. Doppler indices of LV filling and pulmonary venous (PV) flow are used not only for diagnostic purposes but also for establishing prognosis and evaluating the effect of therapeutic interventions. The utility of these indices is limited, however, by the confounding effects of different physiologic variables such as LV relaxation, compliance and filling pressure. Since alterations in these variables result in changes in Doppler indices of opposite direction, it is often difficult to determine the status of a given variable when a specific Doppler filling pattern is observed. Recently, color M-mode and tissue Doppler have provided useful insights in the study of diastolic function. These new Doppler applications have been shown to provide an accurate estimate of LV relaxation and appear to be relatively insensitive to the effects of preload compensation. This review will focus on the complementary role of color M-mode and tissue Doppler echocardiography and traditional Doppler indices of LV filling and PV flow in the assessment of diastolic function

The Role of Cases in Learning

The notion of cases arises in various guises in a number of areas of research within Cognitive Science. Recent theories of situated cognition, for example, have argued that learning occurs most felicitously in circumstances that most closely resemble those of eventual use (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Norman, 1993). Furthermore, research in analogical problem-solving has shown that transfer is improved when the similarity between training problems and target problems is increased (Gick & Holyoak, 1980). Both positions, therefore, support the argument that instruction based on cases is more likely to be usefully applied in practice than instruction based strictly on abstracted principles. Others have gone further to argue that learning through exposure to real cases is not only beneficial, but essential for attaining expertise. For example, Dreyfus has asserted (Dreyfus & Dreyfus 1986) that advanced stages of expertise can only be achieved through practice with a large number of cases. Moreover, advocates of Case-Based Reasoning (Kolodner, 1994) have argued that the process of acquiring expertise is really one of accumulating experience with a succession of real cases and properly indexing these experiences for later retrieved. The purpose of this symposium will be to determine to what degree these views are compatible and to what degree they diverge. The presenters will endeavor to address the following questions from their own disciplinary perspectives: What is a case? How is it represented in memory? How are appropriate cases retrieved for later use? Does expertise consist (strictly) in the acquisition of a collection of past solved problems? What role should the study of cases play in the acquisition of expertise? Should they precede or follow the study of abstracted principles

A practical guide to assessment of ventricular diastolic function using doppler echocardiography

AbstractDoppler assessment of diastolic function has become a standard part of routine echocardiographic examination and imparts information relevant to a patient's functional class, management and prognosis. This review describes the Doppler patterns of diastolic function relative to physical signs and physiology. A continuum of Doppler patterns of diastolic function exists, including normal diastolic function, impaired relaxation, pseudonormal filling, restriction, constriction and tamponade. These patterns evolve from one to another in a single individual, with changes in disease evolution, treatment and loading conditions. New applications of continuous wave Doppler, color Doppler M-mode and Doppler tissue imaging are refining our understanding of diastolic function