Key Findings From HSC's 2010 Site Visits: Health Care Markets Weather Economic Downturn, Brace for Health Reform

Presents findings about hospital payment rate increases, hospital-physician alignment, and insurance premiums, funding for safety-net providers, and their implications from HSC's site visits to twelve nationally representative metropolitan communities

Developing an Integrated Pest Management Program for Tomatoes in the Red River Delta of Vietnam: a Mini Review

Ecologically based approaches to pest management in crop production have been embraced in recent decades due to their validity and effectiveness. Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is not a new concept. It has been adopted in various regions in Vietnam, particularly in tomato production, an economically important vegetable crop in the Red River Delta (RRD). Given the occurrence and development of tomato pests are influenced by many factors such as soil types, crop varieties and growth habits, production practices, local climatic conditions, and growing seasons, this paper therefore developed an IPM program for tomatoes in the RRD based on the defined major pests in the region. Detailed factsheets for six major pests were developed and different components of the IPM were explored and employed for the ease of identification and management. Practical suggestions for tomato growers were also presented

Kolmogorov-Smirnov method for the determination of signal time-shifts

A new method for the determination of electric signal time-shifts is introduced. As the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, it is based on the comparison of the cumulative distribution functions of the reference signal with the test signal. This method is very fast and thus well suited for on-line applications. It is robust to noise and its performances in terms of precision are excellent for time-shifts ranging from a fraction to several sample durations. PACS. 29.40.Gx (Tracking and position-sensitive detectors), 29.30.Kv (X- and -ray spectroscopy), 07.50.Qx (Signal processing electronics)Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure

Fast analytical methods for the correction of signal random time-shifts and application to segmented HPGe detectors

Detection systems rely more and more on on-line or off-line comparison of detected signals with basis signals in order to determine the characteristics of the impinging particles. Unfortunately, these comparisons are very sensitive to the random time shifts that may alter the signal delivered by the detectors. We present two fast algebraic methods to determine the value of the time shift and to enhance the reliability of the comparison to the basis signals.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figure

Quantifying changes in biomass and soil organic carbon after abandonment of croplands in Saskatchewan

Non-Peer Reviewe

Healthcare Price Transparency: Policy Approaches and Estimated Impacts on Spending

Healthcare price transparency discussions typically focus on increasing patients' access to information about their out-of-pocket costs, but that focus is too narrow and should include other audiences -- physicians, employers, health plans and policymakers -- each with distinct needs and uses for healthcare price information. Greater price transparency can reduce U.S. healthcare spending.For example, an estimated $100 billion could be saved over the next 10 years if three select interventions were undertaken. However, most of the projected savings come from making price information available to employers and physicians, according to an analysis by researchers at the former Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC). Based on the current availability and modest impact of plan-based transparency tools, requiring all private plans to provide personalized out-of-pocket price data to enrollees would reduce total health spending by an estimated$18 billion over the next decade. While $18 billion is a substantial dollar amount, it is less than a tenth of a percent of the$40 trillionin total projected health spending over the same period. In contrast, using state all-payer claims databases to gather and report hospital-specific prices might reduce spending by an estimated $61 billion over 10 years.The effects of price transparency depend critically on the intended audience, the decision-making context and how prices are presented. And the impact of price transparency can be greatly amplified if target audiences are able and motivated to act on the information. Simply providing prices is insufficient to control spending without other shifts in healthcare financing, including changes in benefit design to make patients more sensitive to price differences among providers and alternative treatments. Other reforms that can amplify the impact of price transparency include shifting from fee-for-service payments that reward providers for volume to payment methods that put providers at risk for spending for episodes of care or defined patient populations. While price transparency alone seems unlikely to transform the healthcare system, it can play a needed role in enabling effective reforms in value-based benefit design and provider payment

Ultrahigh energy neutrino scattering: an update

We update our estimates of charged and neutral current neutrino total cross sections on isoscalar nucleons at ultrahigh energies using a global (x, Q^2) fit, motivated by the Froissart bound, to the F_2 (electron-proton) structure function utilizing the most recent analysis of the complete ZEUS and H1 data sets from HERA I. Using the large Q^2, small Bjorken-x limits of the "wee" parton model, we connect the ultrahigh energy neutrino cross sections directly to the large Q^2, small-x extrapolation of our new fit, which we assume saturates the Froissart bound. We compare both to our previous work, which utilized only the smaller ZEUS data set, as well as to recent results of a calculation using the ZEUS-S based global perturbative QCD parton distributions using the combined HERA I results as input. Our new results substantiate our previous conclusions, again predicting significantly smaller cross sections than those predicted by extrapolating pQCD calculations to neutrino energies above 10^9 GeV.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, 3 table