11,469 research outputs found

    Arizona: Round 1 - State-Level Field Network Study of the Implementation of the Affordable Care Act

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    This report is part of a series of 21 state and regional studies examining the rollout of the ACA. The national network -- with 36 states and 61 researchers -- is led by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the public policy research arm of the State University of New York, the Brookings Institution, and the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania.A number of decisions helped set the stage for Arizona's implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). These decisions and the dynamics that led to them reflect a complex mix of intergovernmental political calculation and pragmatic public policy, past and present, which frame the state's capacity for implementing ACA in Arizona

    Oral History Interview: John R. Hall

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    This interview is one of a series conducted concerning the Marshall University Society of Yeager Scholars. At the time of the interview, John Hall was president of Ashland Oil, Incorporated. He discusses: his family and personal history; his education; his employment history; working at Ashland Oil; a brief section on his participation in sports; Marshall\u27s Society of Yeager Scholars and his support of it; individuals such as Bob McCalen, Bob Bell, Thomas Lacey, Dan Lacey, Harry Wiley, Martha Lane Collins, Judy Thomas, and Dr. Dale Nitzschke; Chuck Yeager (whom he met); and other topics.https://mds.marshall.edu/oral_history/1326/thumbnail.jp

    Infographics and Annual Reports for Nonprofit Organizations

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    In recent years, the readership of annual reports has been steadily declining. Nonprofit organizations are investigating new solutions to refresh their reports and make them more appealing. The purpose of this study was to test whether or not infographics is a more effective way for nonprofit organizations to present their annual reports than traditional means. The study investigated possible causes for the diminishing readership of annual reports and how to best address those causes. Shortening attention spans and people’s desire for briefer engagements points to the advantages of infographics. Over a hundred surveys were conducted where people were shown a traditional annual report alongside an infographic annual report. The respondents were asked questions regarding the level of comprehension between the traditional and infographic annual report gauging their preference between the two. The results of the survey indicated that a higher percent of the younger generation favored the infographic annual report while the older generation favored the traditional annual report in almost every instance. Therefore nonprofit organizations should not switch their annual reports to infographics since the older generation makes up the largest percent of their support. During this time nonprofits can create both a traditional and an infographic annual report to most effectively reach their audiences

    Blessing Or Curse? Community Banks’ Use Of Federal Home Loan Bank Advances

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    Banks enjoyed record profitability during the nineties, as the economy grew and loan demand followed. Deposit growth did not keep pace so many banks sought alternative funding, including Federal Home Loan Bank advances which have potential risk-increasing incentives. The results show that advance-using banks operate with much higher levels of loans to assets, much lower levels of capital, and extend commitments for future lending at a greater rate than banks that do not use advances. A logistic regression finds high loans, and low deposits and equity (all as a percent of assets) are key predictors of FHLB advance use. Also, for the banks examined, there is a concentration of advance users among the banks with the lowest capital and highest levels of non-performing loans. These results offer insight for future research as well as focus for supervisory scrutiny of FHLB advance-using banks

    Acoustic, psychophysical, and neuroimaging measurements of the effectiveness of active cancellation during auditory functional magnetic resonance imaging

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    Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is one of the principal neuroimaging techniques for studying human audition, but it generates an intense background sound which hinders listening performance and confounds measures of the auditory response. This paper reports the perceptual effects of an active noise control (ANC) system that operates in the electromagnetically hostile and physically compact neuroimaging environment to provide significant noise reduction, without interfering with image quality. Cancellation was first evaluated at 600 Hz, corresponding to the dominant peak in the power spectrum of the background sound and at which cancellation is maximally effective. Microphone measurements at the ear demonstrated 35 dB of acoustic attenuation [from 93 to 58 dB sound pressure level (SPL)], while masked detection thresholds improved by 20 dB (from 74 to 54 dB SPL). Considerable perceptual benefits were also obtained across other frequencies, including those corresponding to dips in the spectrum of the background sound. Cancellation also improved the statistical detection of sound-related cortical activation, especially for sounds presented at low intensities. These results confirm that ANC offers substantial benefits for fMRI research

    The Economic Impact of the Green Industry in the United States

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    This study estimates the economic impacts of the U.S. environmental horticulture industry (also known as the Green Industry) to be 147.8billioninoutput,1,964,339jobs,147.8 billion in output, 1,964,339 jobs, 95.1 billion in value added, 64.3billioninlaborincome,and64.3 billion in labor income, and 6.9 billion in indirect business taxes, with these values expressed in 2004 dollars.Environmental Economics and Policy,

    Destructive physical analysis results of Ni/H2 cells cycled in LEO regime

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    Six 48-Ah individual pressure vessel (IPV) Ni/H2 cells containing 26 and 31 percent KOH electrolyte were life cycle tested in low Earth orbit. All three cells containing 31 percent KOH failed (3729, 4165, and 11,355 cycles), while those with 26 percent KOH were cycled over 14,000 times in the continuing test. Destructive physical analysis (DPA) of the failed cells included visual inspections, measurements of electrode thickness, scanning electron microscopy, chemical analysis, and measurements of nickel electrode capacity in an electrolyte flooded cell. The cycling failure was due to a decrease of nickel electrode capacity. As possible causes of the capacity decrease, researchers observed electrode expansion, rupture, and corrosion of the nickel electrode substrate, active material redistribution, and accumulation of electrochemically undischargeable active material with cycling

    Do jumbo-CD holders care about anything?

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    Uninsured deposits represent a theoretically appealing but relatively untested alternative to subordinated debt for incorporating market discipline into banking supervision. To make the deposit market a useful supervisory tool, it is necessary to know what types of risk are priced by depositors and in what proportions. Using a clustering technique to select from among a large set of potential regressors, as well as a carefully chosen set of control variables, we attempt to determine the types of risk that cause uninsured depositors to react in both the price and quantity dimensions. As a benchmark for economic significance, we estimate similar regressions on supervisory ratings. We find that, in contrast to government supervisors, depositors have not priced most types of risk since 1997. Indeed, the only risk variables that consistently come up as statistically significant are those that measure capital adequacy. Our interpretation of these results is that, because aggregate banking conditions are good, it is not worth depositors' effort to investigate individual bank quality very carefully. We conclude that, in the current economic and regulatory environment, the market is content to delegate most of its monitoring and discipline to the government. To the extent that it does monitor, it only monitors capital. The jumbo-CD market is thus not likely to be of much supervisory use, particularly given that examiners already have good information about capital levels. The depositor emphasis on capital also supports the conjecture that market discipline was responsible for much of the recent capital build-up.Bank deposits ; Bank supervision

    Infection rates following initial cerebrospinal fluid shunt placement across pediatric hospitals in the United States

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    Journal ArticleObject. Reported rates of CSF shunt infection vary widely across studies. The study objective was to determine the CSF shunt infection rates after initial shunt placement at multiple US pediatric hospitals. The authors hypothesized that infection rates between hospitals would vary widely even after adjustment for patient, hospital, and surgeon factors. Methods. This retrospective cohort study included children 0-18 years of age with uncomplicated initial CSF shunt placement performed between January 1, 2001, and December 31, 2005, and recorded in the Pediatric Health Information System (PHIS) longitudinal administrative database from 41 children's hospitals. For each child with 24 months of follow-up, subsequent CSF shunt infections and procedures were determined. Results. The PHIS database included 7071 children with uncomplicated initial CSF shunt placement during this time period. During the 24 months of follow-up, these patients had a total of 825 shunt infections and 4434 subsequent shunt procedures. Overall unadjusted 24-month CSF shunt infection rates were 11.7% per patient and 7.2% per procedure. Unadjusted 24-month cumulative incidence rates for each hospital ranged from 4.1 to 20.5% per patient and 2.5-12.3% per procedure. Factors significantly associated with infection (p 11% of children who underwent uncomplicated initial CSF shunt placements within 24 months. Patient, hospital, and surgeon factors contributed somewhat to the wide variation in CSF shunt infection rates across hospitals. Additional factors may contribute to variation in CSF shunt infection rates between centers, but further study is needed. Benchmarking and future prospective multicenter studies of CSF shunt infection will need to incorporate these and other patient, hospital, and surgeon factors
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