What are the Proven Financial Benefits of Health and Wellness Programs?

The implementation and growth of Health & Wellness programs has become a very hot topic for companies seeking to obtain maximum returns on their health investment dollars. According to a 2011 PwC Health and Well-being Touchstone Survey of approximately 1,700 companies, 73% reported offering wellness programs to eligible employees. However, the big question in this platform is not figuring out what to implement, but how to measure what has been implemented. According to a National Business Group on Health and Fidelity Investments survey, “only one-third of employers have measurable goals/targets for their health improvement programs, and 59% of employers don’t know their return on investment (ROI).” In order to ensure an effective design and implementation of health and wellness programs, it is important to establish a practical measuring system that can accurately track its performance and evaluate its results

Measuring Coverage of Prolog Programs Using Mutation Testing

Testing is an important aspect in professional software development, both to avoid and identify bugs as well as to increase maintainability. However, increasing the number of tests beyond a reasonable amount hinders development progress. To decide on the completeness of a test suite, many approaches to assert test coverage have been suggested. Yet, frameworks for logic programs remain scarce. In this paper, we introduce a framework for Prolog programs measuring test coverage using mutations. We elaborate the main ideas of mutation testing and transfer them to logic programs. To do so, we discuss the usefulness of different mutations in the context of Prolog and empirically evaluate them in a new mutation testing framework on different examples.Comment: 16 pages, Accepted for presentation in WFLP 201

User manual and programmer reference manual for the ATS-6 navigation model AOIPS and McIDAS versions, part 2

Development of a navigation system for a given satellite is reported. An algorithm for converting a satellite picture element location to earth location and vice versa was defined as well as a procedure for measuring the set of constants needed by the algorithm. A user manual briefly describing the current version of the navigation model and how to use the computer programs developed for it is presented

Measuring food insecurity

Defining and interpreting food security, and measuring it in reliable, valid and cost-effective ways, have proven to be stubborn problems facing researchers and programs intended to monitor food security risks. This paper briefly reviews the conceptual and methodological literature on food insecurity measurement, describes a particular method for distinguishing and measuring short-term food insecurity at the household level, and discusses ways of generalizing the method. The method developed enumerates the frequency and severity of strategies relied on by urban households when faced with a short-term insufficiency of food. This method goes beyond more commonly-used measures of caloric consumption to incorporate vulnerability elements of food insecurity as well as the deliberate actions of household decisionmakers when faced with food insufficiency.food security ,Research Methodology ,

Measuring and Demonstrating Information Literacy Outcomes in a Review Process

"This chapter focuses on measuring and demonstrating information literacy outcomes in a review process. Doing so requires identifying outcomes, selecting methods to assess the outcomes, implementing a plan for ongoing collection and analysis of evidence, and analyzing the evidence to show student learning as well as a process of programmatic improvement. And, of course, the library must also deliver the programs and services that are designed to support student learning! The emphasis in this chapter will be outcomes for formal instruction programs, such as workshops, online tutorials, course-integrated instruction, and credit courses; however, the strategies can be adapted to more informal instruction situations as well. By measuring and demonstrating information literacy outcomes, you will be able to contribute to persuasive self-study documents as part of institutional review efforts as well as develop long-range plans to support future accreditation and program review needs."Ope

Methods and Tools for Objective Assessment of Psychomotor Skills in Laparoscopic Surgery

Training and assessment paradigms for laparoscopic surgical skills are evolving from traditional mentor–trainee tutorship towards structured, more objective and safer programs. Accreditation of surgeons requires reaching a consensus on metrics and tasks used to assess surgeons’ psychomotor skills. Ongoing development of tracking systems and software solutions has allowed for the expansion of novel training and assessment means in laparoscopy. The current challenge is to adapt and include these systems within training programs, and to exploit their possibilities for evaluation purposes. This paper describes the state of the art in research on measuring and assessing psychomotor laparoscopic skills. It gives an overview on tracking systems as well as on metrics and advanced statistical and machine learning techniques employed for evaluation purposes. The later ones have a potential to be used as an aid in deciding on the surgical competence level, which is an important aspect when accreditation of the surgeons in particular, and patient safety in general, are considered. The prospective of these methods and tools make them complementary means for surgical assessment of motor skills, especially in the early stages of training. Successful examples such as the Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery should help drive a paradigm change to structured curricula based on objective parameters. These may improve the accreditation of new surgeons, as well as optimize their already overloaded training schedules

Inequality and Social Welfare

This paper provides a review of part of the literature on inequality and social welfare, with a special focus on the Gini index. The paper first presents the extended Gini index used for measuring inequality, as well as the source decomposition of the Gini used to analyze how changes in income and consumption sources affect overall inequality. The paper then provides a wide range of policy applications of the source decomposition of the extended Gini index, including techniques for analyzing the impact on inequality of the targeting of programs as opposed to the rules for the allocation of benefits among program participants.Inequality; Social welfare

Efficiency Analytics of NCAA Division I College Football Programs

College athletics are a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States, but how well do university athletic programs employ their resources? The question is germane in light of increasing costs of higher education and scrutiny of university budgets. This study furnishes a template to weigh the tradeoffs inherent in collegiate sports, which is the main contribution of the paper. A dataset of 117 American college football programs from 2011-2015 is analyzed using DEA and AHP methods to assess the efficiency and perception of these programs. The result is the aforementioned framework measuring the programs\u27 success and answers the question of program efficiency