Reinsurance in State Health Reform

Based on the experiences of three states, formal modeling, quantitative estimates, and qualitative assessments, explores the impact of and issues involved in publicly funding reinsurance for insurers as a way to expand or maintain private coverage

An Introduction to Programming for Bioscientists: A Python-based Primer

Computing has revolutionized the biological sciences over the past several decades, such that virtually all contemporary research in the biosciences utilizes computer programs. The computational advances have come on many fronts, spurred by fundamental developments in hardware, software, and algorithms. These advances have influenced, and even engendered, a phenomenal array of bioscience fields, including molecular evolution and bioinformatics; genome-, proteome-, transcriptome- and metabolome-wide experimental studies; structural genomics; and atomistic simulations of cellular-scale molecular assemblies as large as ribosomes and intact viruses. In short, much of post-genomic biology is increasingly becoming a form of computational biology. The ability to design and write computer programs is among the most indispensable skills that a modern researcher can cultivate. Python has become a popular programming language in the biosciences, largely because (i) its straightforward semantics and clean syntax make it a readily accessible first language; (ii) it is expressive and well-suited to object-oriented programming, as well as other modern paradigms; and (iii) the many available libraries and third-party toolkits extend the functionality of the core language into virtually every biological domain (sequence and structure analyses, phylogenomics, workflow management systems, etc.). This primer offers a basic introduction to coding, via Python, and it includes concrete examples and exercises to illustrate the language's usage and capabilities; the main text culminates with a final project in structural bioinformatics. A suite of Supplemental Chapters is also provided. Starting with basic concepts, such as that of a 'variable', the Chapters methodically advance the reader to the point of writing a graphical user interface to compute the Hamming distance between two DNA sequences.Comment: 65 pages total, including 45 pages text, 3 figures, 4 tables, numerous exercises, and 19 pages of Supporting Information; currently in press at PLOS Computational Biolog

Improving the allocation and management of public spending

If a country's planning and budgeting system is dilapidated, an important first step is to rehabilitate basic budgetary and accounting functions and to generate public expenditure data that can provide a starting point for rational planning. This paper makes the point that many of the necessary reforms to the planning and budgetary systems are very simple (which is not to say that they are easily accomplished). Chapter II provides an overview of planning and budgeting processes and Chapter III discusses recurring budgeting issues. The financial woes of a country increase the value of external aid and the leverage exercised by aid agencies. In Chapter IV, the effects of these factors are discussed and ideas for effective aid management and coordination are suggested.Business in Development,Business Environment,National Governance,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,ICT Policy and Strategies

Concurrency Platforms for Real-Time and Cyber-Physical Systems

Parallel processing is an important way to satisfy the increasingly demanding computational needs of modern real-time and cyber-physical systems, but existing parallel computing technologies primarily emphasize high-throughput and average-case performance metrics, which are largely unsuitable for direct application to real-time, safety-critical contexts. This work contrasts two concurrency platforms designed to achieve predictable worst case parallel performance for soft real-time workloads with millisecond periods and higher. One of these is then the basis for the CyberMech platform, which enables parallel real-time computing for a novel yet representative application called Real-Time Hybrid Simulation (RTHS). RTHS combines demanding parallel real-time computation with real-time simulation and control in an earthquake engineering laboratory environment, and results concerning RTHS characterize a reasonably comprehensive survey of parallel real-time computing in the static context, where the size, shape, timing constraints, and computational requirements of workloads are fixed prior to system runtime. Collectively, these contributions constitute the first published implementations and evaluations of general-purpose concurrency platforms for real-time and cyber-physical systems, explore two fundamentally different design spaces for such systems, and successfully demonstrate the utility and tradeoffs of parallel computing for statically determined real-time and cyber-physical systems

Review of practice-led research in art, design & architecture

This review report sets out the outcomes of a 10 month investigation to describe the landscape of practice-led research in Art, Design and Architecture (ADA) in the UK and beyond. We were asked for a qualitative review but of course it has been important to gather some numbers to check and illustrate our observations. We have consulted widely, both face to face and in the virtual world, with experts and novices in the UK and around the world. We have tried to strike a balance between the natural desire of our colleagues to debate the more contentious aspects of this territory (they were never going to forgo that opportunity) and the equally strong wish of the AHRC that we should provide a clear description of what is happening. We have collected some diverse examples of research and subjected them to various examinations. We have also examined a selection of research projects funded by AHRC and other projects by creative practitioners, funded by a non-research organisation. From all this we have been able to describe the landscape in a straightforward sense: We have measures of the proportions of ADA academics involved in practice-led research. We have clarified differences in the ways that the different ADA disciplines engage with practice-led research and identified some problems that indicate possible future support strategies. We have discussed some problems with general definitions of research and identified issues that should be addressed to ensure that the AHRC definition can be applied to the full range of practice-led research. We have picked out some specific case examples that illustrate the range of contexts, methods and contributions made by practice-led researchers, and more are described in detail in Appendix F. We have also sought to assess how this research relates to the wider international picture in which the UK appears to have a strong position in both volume and development of research. We have also set out some issues that affect this community of researchers: What strengths and weaknesses have we observed and where is there a need to support development? Do the AHRC definition of research and guidance on practice-led research provide an effective framework? We have illustrated the state of development of research in ADA, and some reasons why it is less robust than might be expected from such long established disciplines. We recommend that the career path of researchers in ADA needs some attention and make some suggestions about how that could be achieved. We have also indicated some areas of inquiry that might be supported to advance the theory and methods of practice-led research. In particular we have come to the conclusion that conventional ideas of contribution to knowledge or understanding may not be serving us well. This is significant to fine artists but we believe that it relevant across ADA and a shared effort to develop appropriate new models would be a constructive development. The full set of recommendations can be found in chapter 5

Social Protection and Vulnerability to Climate Shocks: a Panel Data Evidence from Rural Ethiopia

It is widely predicted that climate change will have an adverse impact on Ethiopian agriculture and exacerbate the problem of food insecurity. In this context, social protection schemes can potentially contribute to households’ autonomous adaptation by reducing vulnerability to climatic shocks. This paper examines the role of the Productive Safety Net Program in reducing vulnerability to climate related shocks and its impacts on autonomous adaptation strategies by taking the case of household income diversification into non-farm activities. The paper assesses vulnerability using index-based approach and the impact of the program using two non-experimental approaches namely; Difference-in-Differences combined with Propensity Score Matching for a panel of 1,306 rural households from the two recent rounds of the Ethiopian Rural Household surveys for the years 2004 and 2009. Taking advantage of the extensive data available on climate-induced shocks and a range of activities and incomes, the paper makes a conceptual distinction between non-farm and off-farm income, and uses the recent Adaptive Social Protection framework to examine the impact of the program. The results from the vulnerability assessment indicate that exposure and lack of adaptive capacity to climate-induced shocks explain the vulnerability of rural households and PSNP helps to decrease the vulnerability of households to climateinduced shocks. The results from the non-experimental estimations also indicate that receiving transfers from the PSNP, on average increases income from nonfarm activities. These results partly confirm the hypothesis that social protection can promote positive adaptation strategies and may serve as an effective means of reducing the vulnerability of smallholders to climate change-induced shocks.Keywords: climate change, difference-in-differences, diversification, Ethiopia, social protection, vulnerabilit