How Managed Care Affects Medicaid Utilization: A Synthetic Difference-in-Difference Zero-Inflated Count Model

We develop a synthetic difference-in-differences statistical design to apply to experimental data for adult women living in Hennepin County, Minnesota, to estimate the impact of Medicaid managed care on various modes of medical care use.Because the outcomes of interest are utilization counts with many persons using none of a particular mode of care we use count regression models that are adjusted for excessive zeros.We find no reductions in physician visits or hospital inpatient and emergency department care use, but reductions in hospital outpatient care.Simulations designed to judge the economic significance of our results suggest a program effect that is a savings of about ten percent.health;statistical methods

Energy radiation of moving cracks

The energy radiated by moving cracks in a discrete background is analyzed. The energy flow through a given surface is expressed in terms of a generalized Poynting vector. The velocity of the crack is determined by the radiation by the crack tip. The radiation becomes more isotropic as the crack velocity approaches the instability threshold.Comment: 7 pages, embedded figure

Globally-Linked Vortex Clusters in Trapped Wave Fields

We put forward the existence of a rich variety of fully stationary vortex structures, termed H-clusters, made of an increasing number of vortices nested in paraxial wave fields confined by trapping potentials. However, we show that the constituent vortices are globally linked, rather than products of independent vortices. Also, they always feature a monopolar global wave front and exist in nonlinear systems, such as Bose-Einstein condensates. Clusters with multipolar global wave fronts are non-stationary or at best flipping.Comment: 4 pages, 5 PostScript figure

Online, Real-Time Tracking Using a Category-to-Individual Detector

A method for online, real-time tracking of objects is presented. Tracking is treated as a repeated detection problem where potential target objects are identified with a pre-trained category detector and object identity across frames is established by individual-specific detectors. The individual detectors are (re-)trained online from a single positive example whenever there is a coincident category detection. This ensures that the tracker is robust to drift. Real-time operation is possible since an individual-object detector is obtained through elementary manipulations of the thresholds of the category detector and therefore only minimal additional computations are required. Our tracking algorithm is benchmarked against nine state-of-the-art trackers on two large, publicly available and challenging video datasets. We find that our algorithm is 10% more accurate and nearly as fast as the fastest of the competing algorithms, and it is as accurate but 20 times faster than the most accurate of the competing algorithms

Reliability of fluctuation-induced transport in a Maxwell-demon-type engine

We study the transport properties of an overdamped Brownian particle which is simultaneously in contact with two thermal baths. The first bath is modeled by an additive thermal noise at temperature $T_A$. The second bath is associated with a multiplicative thermal noise at temperature $T_B$. The analytical expressions for the particle velocity and diffusion constant are derived for this system, and the reliability or coherence of transport is analyzed by means of their ratio in terms of a dimensionless P\'{e}clet number. We find that the transport is not very coherent, though one can get significantly higher currents.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure

Eureka and beyond: mining's impact on African urbanisation

This collection brings separate literatures on mining and urbanisation together at a time when both artisanal and large-scale mining are expanding in many African economies. While much has been written about contestation over land and mineral rights, the impact of mining on settlement, notably its catalytic and fluctuating effects on migration and urban growth, has been largely ignored. African nation-states’ urbanisation trends have shown considerable variation over the past half century. The current surge in ‘new’ mining countries and the slow-down in ‘old’ mining countries are generating some remarkable settlement patterns and welfare outcomes. Presently, the African continent is a laboratory of national mining experiences. This special issue on African mining and urbanisation encompasses a wide cross-section of country case studies: beginning with the historical experiences of mining in Southern Africa (South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe), followed by more recent mineralizing trends in comparatively new mineral-producing countries (Tanzania) and an established West African gold producer (Ghana), before turning to the influence of conflict minerals (Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone)

Supercoherent States, Super K\"ahler Geometry and Geometric Quantization

Generalized coherent states provide a means of connecting square integrable representations of a semi-simple Lie group with the symplectic geometry of some of its homogeneous spaces. In the first part of the present work this point of view is extended to the supersymmetric context, through the study of the OSp(2/2) coherent states. These are explicitly constructed starting from the known abstract typical and atypical representations of osp(2/2). Their underlying geometries turn out to be those of supersymplectic OSp(2/2) homogeneous spaces. Moment maps identifying the latter with coadjoint orbits of OSp(2/2) are exhibited via Berezin's symbols. When considered within Rothstein's general paradigm, these results lead to a natural general definition of a super K\"ahler supermanifold, the supergeometry of which is determined in terms of the usual geometry of holomorphic Hermitian vector bundles over K\"ahler manifolds. In particular, the supergeometry of the above orbits is interpreted in terms of the geometry of Einstein-Hermitian vector bundles. In the second part, an extension of the full geometric quantization procedure is applied to the same coadjoint orbits. Thanks to the super K\"ahler character of the latter, this procedure leads to explicit super unitary irreducible representations of OSp(2/2) in super Hilbert spaces of $L^2$ superholomorphic sections of prequantum bundles of the Kostant type. This work lays the foundations of a program aimed at classifying Lie supergroups' coadjoint orbits and their associated irreducible representations, ultimately leading to harmonic superanalysis. For this purpose a set of consistent conventions is exhibited.Comment: 53 pages, AMS-LaTeX (or LaTeX+AMSfonts

The Refederalization of American Health Care

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/69090/2/10.1177_107755878704400103.pd