Measuring income related inequality in health and health care: the partial concentration index with direct and indirect standardisation.

The partial concentration index measures income related inequality in health (or health care) after removing the effects of standardising variables which affect health (or health care), are correlated with income but not amenable to policy. When the marginal effects of income are independent of the standardising variables, direct standardisation yields consistent estimates of the partial concentration index. Indirect standardisation underestimates the partial concentration index whenever the standardising variables are correlated with income, irrespective of the signs of the correlation of standardising variables and income with each other and with health. A generalised version of the partial concentration index is proposed for cases where the marginal effect of income depends on the standardising variables. Direct standardisation again yields a consistent estimate but indirect standardisation does not. It is also shown that the direct standardisation procedure can be applied to individual or grouped data and that the conclusions about the merits of direct and indirect standardisation hold for grouped data.Concentration index, inequality, direct standardisation.

On the standardisation of Web service management operations

Given the current interest in TCP/IP network management research towards Web services, it is important to recognise how standardisation can be achieved. This paper mainly focuses on the standardisation of operations and not management information. We state that standardisation should be done by standardising the abstract parts of a WSDL document, i.e. the interfaces and the messages. Operations can vary in granularity and parameter transparency, creating four extreme operation signatures, all of which have advantages and disadvantages

Standardisation and innovation

The paper discusses the relations that exist between standards on the one hand, and innovation and implementation on the other. We will argue that these activities must not be considered separately, especially since standards-based components are going to play an increasingly important role in implementation processes

Identifying and using eHealth phobias to implement communication protocols and change cultural and social behaviours in eHealth

Standardisation of validated communication protocols that aid in the adoption of policies, methods and tools in a secure eHealth setting require a significant cultural shift among clinician

KB-WOT Quality assurance acoustics: overview and protocols 2008 version

The quality of IMARES' acoustic surveys proved quite unstable in recent years despite extra effort in this field to bring this instability down. The amount of involved scientists in acoustics has been small compared to demersal survey work. Therefore scientific standards of acoustic surveys are relatively low compared resulting in poor standardisation and minimal transparency. Highly specialised technical work made it even more difficult to exchange scientists within IMARES and the quality of acoustic surveys proved to be very sensitive to loss or change in personnel. This situation improved drastically in 2008 when more scientists got involved in acoustic projects and more effort was put in standardisation

Best Practice In Company Standardisation

Though the majority of standards are company standards, scientificstandardisation literature pays hardly any attention to them. In thispaper we describe results from a research project on companystandardisation (Oly & Slob, 1999). The researchers investigated sixchemical and petrochemical industries in the Netherlands: Akzo Nobel,Dow Chemical, DSM, Gasunie, NAM and Shell. These companies havenumerous standards for their installations. Best practice fordeveloping such standards was developed by examining the companies andusing insights from relevant literature. This paper describes thescientific approach used and some of the best practice results.benchmarking;standard;standardization;company standardization;process industry

Reinterpreting Compression in Infinitary Rewriting

Departing from a computational interpretation of compression in infinitary rewriting, we view compression as a degenerate case of standardisation. The change in perspective comes about via two observations: (a) no compression property can be recovered for non-left-linear systems and (b) some standardisation procedures, as a ‘side-effect’, yield compressed reductions

Building on a terminology resource – the Irish experience

www.focal.ie is the national database of Irish language terminology. In this paper, we examine: (i) the impact achieved by this resource in the five year period since work commenced; (ii) the possibilities which have arisen from one project over a short time span, to develop sub-projects and related initiatives; and (iii) the advantages and opportunities arising from the creation of one high-quality electronic language resource. The Irish case shows that the development of high-quality resources for a lesser-used language can have interesting and unexpected knock-on effects. We present eight stages and aspects of term planning: preparation/planning; research; standardisation; dissemination; implantation; evaluation; modernisation/maintenance; and training. Fiontar, in its work,has moved from its initial involvement in the dissemination of terminology, to take an active part in other aspects of term planning for Irish: research, standardisation, evaluation, modernisation and training. This has been achieved through editorial and technological development, in partnership with key stakeholders and always from a socioterminological point of view – that is, with an emphasis on terminology as an aspect of language planning and from the point of view of users in particular. Particular projects described include Focal as a term management system and as a user resource; tools for translators; user links to a corpus; the development of a new sports dictionary; and research into subject field headings. Two related projects are the LEX legal terms project for term extraction and standardisation, and the development of terminology for the European Union