The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation: Activity on Many Fronts

Provides an overview of the Innovation Center's organization, differences from CMS's traditional demonstration authority, payment and delivery reform initiatives, and first-year efforts to solicit and promote new ideas and collaborate with other payers

The Future of the Western World: The OECD and the Interfutures Project

In 1975, the OECD created a research committee entitled ‘Interfutures. Research project into the development of the advanced industrial societies in harmony with the developing world’. The purpose of Interfutures was to examine how the new tools of futures research could be put to use in order to shape strategies for dealing with a new phenomenon of ‘interdependence’, and to set out a ‘long-term vision’ of the Western world. This article argues that Interfutures was appointed in order to draft an alternative image of the future to two radical visions of the early 1970s. The first was the so-called New International Economic Order. The second was the 1972 Club of Rome report, The limits to growth. As a response to these two visions, Interfutures presented a vision of globalization as a process oriented around an expanding world market, piloted by Western interests and continued resource extraction

Smallpox and Bioterrorism: Why the Plan to Protect the Nation Is Stalled and What to Do

The Iraq war is over, no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) have yet been found, and the president's smallpox plan, though sound, is running out of steam. Instead of being well on the way to protecting the nation's civilian population by vaccinating up to 10 million health, emergency, and public safety workers, we are stalled at 37,971 vaccinated civilians while the military has successfully and safely vaccinated more than 450,000 people. Moreover, whether or not WMD are found in Iraq, it is only one of a number of nations on the list of suspects. Of all biological weapons, smallpox has the greatest potential for doing widespread harm. Given that the risk of death or serious harm to anyone from any form of terrorism is very low, we should live our daily lives normally, not in fear. However, to do that we need to be sure that our government is taking effective steps to reduce the chances of terrorism and, when it occurs, to minimize its consequences. Even though there is enough vaccine for everyone, we are ill prepared to rapidly contain smallpox after a bioterrorist release. Although Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines have recently improved, they continue to overstate the risk of side effects of the vaccine and erroneously suggest that, after an attack, the techniques used decades ago to eradicate smallpox will work well today. Medicine and public health are very risk-averse professions in our risk-averse culture. We have not yet realized the complexity and difficulty of vaccinating millions of Americans rapidly after an attack. Nor have we come to grips with the need to make rapid, possibly draconian, post-attack decisions based on limited data of uncertain quality. That type of decisionmaking runs counter to the culture of public health. The Bush administration needs to revitalize our preparations for a smallpox bioterrorist event

Critical thinking and systems thinking: towards a critical literacy for systems thinking in practice

About the book: In reflective problem solving and thoughtful decision making using critical thinking one considers evidence, the context of judgment, the relevant criteria for making the judgment well, the applicable methods or techniques for forming the judgment, and the applicable theoretical constructs for understanding the problem and the question at hand. In this book, the authors present topical research in the study of critical thinking. Topics discussed include developing critical thinking through probability models; the promotion of critical thinking skills through argument mapping; an instructional model for teacher training in critical thinking; advanced academic literacy and critical thinking and critical thinking and higher education

Computable Rationality, NUTS, and the Nuclear Leviathan

This paper explores how the Leviathan that projects power through nuclear arms exercises a unique nuclearized sovereignty. In the case of nuclear superpowers, this sovereignty extends to wielding the power to destroy human civilization as we know it across the globe. Nuclearized sovereignty depends on a hybrid form of power encompassing human decision-makers in a hierarchical chain of command, and all of the technical and computerized functions necessary to maintain command and control at every moment of the sovereign's existence: this sovereign power cannot sleep. This article analyzes how the form of rationality that informs this hybrid exercise of power historically developed to be computable. By definition, computable rationality must be able to function without any intelligible grasp of the context or the comprehensive significance of decision-making outcomes. Thus, maintaining nuclearized sovereignty necessarily must be able to execute momentous life and death decisions without the type of sentience we usually associate with ethical individual and collective decisions

Series connected photovoltaic cells-modelling and analysis

As solar energy costs continue to drop, the number of large-scale deployment projects increases, and the need for different analysis models for photovoltaic (PV) modules in both academia and industry rises. This paper proposes a modified equivalent-circuit model for PV modules. A PV module comprises several series-connected PV cells, to generate more electrical power, where each PV cell has an internal shunt resistance. Our proposed model simplifies the standard one-diode equivalent-circuit (SEC) model by removing the shunt resistance and including its effect on the diode part of the circuit, while retaining the original model accuracy. Our proposed equivalent circuit, called here a modified SEC (MSEC), has less number of circuit elements. All of the PV cells are assumed operating under the same ambient conditions where they share the same electric voltage and current values. To ensure the simplification did not come at a reduction in the accuracy of the SEC model, we validate our MSEC model by simulating both under the same conditions, calculate, and compare their current/voltage (I/V) characteristics. Our results validate the accuracy of our model with the difference between the two models falling below 1%. Therefore, the proposed model can be adopted as an alternative representation of the equivalent circuit for PV cells and modules

Technology and management of large-scale programs Semiannual progress report

Technology and management of large scale program

Advanced Decision-Oriented Software for the Management of Hazardous Substances: Part II: A Demonstration Prototype System

This report describes the implementation of a first demonstration prototype of an integrated, interactive, computer-based decision support and information system for the management of hazardous substances. Recognizing the potentially enormous development effort required and the open-ended nature of such a project, we have opted for a strategy that takes advantage of the large volume of scientific software already available. A modular design philosophy enables us to develop individual building blocks, which are valuable products in their own right, in the various phases of the project. This also makes it possible to interface and integrate the modules in a framework which, above all, has to be flexible and easily modifiable with growing experience of use. The demonstration prototype can be constructed at relatively low cost and only incremental effort, by using an open architecture concept for this framework, with a functional and problem-oriented, rather than a structural and methodological design. The system design combines several methods of applied systems analysis and operations research, planning and policy sciences, and artificial intelligence into one fully integrated software system. The basic objective is to provide a broad group of users direct and easy access to these largely formal and complex methods

UD Enters Field of Forecasting

News release announces that the University of Dayton has formally entered the field of the forecasting of technological and social change