Purchase of Service Contracting Versus Government Service Delivery: The Views of State Human Service Administrators

Purchase of service contracting (POSC) as a mode of human service delivery is based largely on untested normative grounds. This article presents the results of a national study comparing the views of state human service administrators on the relative merits of POSC versus government service delivery in four issue areas: (1) service costs, (2) service quality, (3) bureaucracy and red tape, and (4) effect on government employees. The study results provide some support for POSC in three of the four issues areas. The study finds that geography plays no role in the views of state human service administrators, but that program/service type does

Purchase of Service Contracting In the 1990s: Have Expectations Been Met?

Privatization and purchase of service contracting (POSC) are generally considered to be two of the most important factors that have helped shape the human service system during the 1970s and 1980s (Gilbert, 1983, 1986; Kammerman, 1983; Demone and Gibelman, 1984, 1989; Weddell, 1986; Kettner and Martin, 1985; Termell, 1987; Rein, 1989). Therefore, as we enter the decade of the 1990s, it would seem both appropriate and worthwhile to reflect on the original expectations for privatization and POSC and to assess the extent to which these expectations have been realized

Factors Affecting Competition in State Contracting for Human Services

Competition has long been recognized as a necessary ingredient of our economic system. Competition, it is argued, is needed to combat the negative effects of monopoly

Snap Rounding of Bézier Curves

We present an extension of snap roundingfrom straight-line segments (see Guibas and Marimont, 1998)to Bézier curves of arbitrary degree, and thus the first method for geometric roundingof curvilinear arrangements.Our algorithm takes a set of intersecting Bézier curvesand directly computes a geometric rounding of their true arrangement, without the need of representing the true arrangement exactly.The algorithm's output is a deformation of the true arrangementthat has all Bézier control points at integer pointsand comes with the same geometric guarantees as instraight-line snap rounding: during rounding, objects do not movefurther than the radius of a pixel, and features of thearrangement may collapse but do not invert

The effect of motion on the perception of material appearance

We analyze the effect of motion in the perception of material appearance. First, we create a set of stimuli containing 72 realistic materials, rendered with varying degrees of linear motion blur. Then we launch a large-scale study on Mechanical Turk to rate a given set of perceptual attributes, such as brightness, roughness, or the perceived strength of reflections. Our statistical analysis shows that certain attributes undergo a significant change, varying appearance perception under motion. In addition, we further investigate the perception of brightness, for the particular cases of rubber and plastic materials. We create new stimuli, with ten different luminance levels and seven motion degrees. We launch a new user study to retrieve their perceived brightness. From the users'' judgements, we build two-dimensional maps showing how perceived brightness varies as a function of the luminance and motion of the material

Simultaneous Projectile-Target Excitation in Heavy Ion Collisions

We calculate the lowest-order contribution to the cross section for simultaneous excitation of projectile and target nuclei in relativistic heavy ion collisions. This process is, to leading order, non-classical and adds incoherently to the well-studied semi-classical Weizs\"acker-Williams cross section. While the leading contribution to the cross section is down by only $1/Z_P$ from the semiclassical process, and consequently of potential importance for understanding data from light projectiles, we find that phase space considerations render the cross section utterly negligible.Comment: 9 pages, LA-UR-94-247

Fast, inexpensive, and reliable HPLC method to determine monomer fractions in poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyvalerate)

The determination of the monomer fractions in polyhydroxyalkanoates is of great importance for research on microbial-produced plastic material. The development of new process designs, the validation of mathematical models, and intelligent control strategies for production depend enormously on the correctness of the analyzed monomer fractions. Most of the available detection methods focus on the determination of the monomer fractions of the homopolymer poly(3-hydroxybutyrate). Only a few can analyze the monomer content in copolymers such as poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyvalerate), which usually require expensive measuring devices, a high preparation time or the use of environmentally harmful halogenated solvents such as chloroform or dichloromethane. This work presents a fast, simple, and inexpensive method for the analysis of poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyvalerate) with high-performance liquid chromatography. Samples from a bioreactor experiment for the production of poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyvalerate) with Cupriavidus necator H16 were examined regarding their monomer content using the new method and gas chromatography analysis, one of the most frequently used methods in literature. The results from our new method were validated using gas chromatography measurements and show excellent agreement. Key points ∙ The presented HPLC method is an inexpensive, fast and environmentally friendly alternative to existing methods for quantification of monomeric composition of PHBV. ∙ Validation with state of the art GC measurement exhibits excellent agreement over a broad range of PHBV monomer fractions

The Mystery of the Asymptotic Quasinormal Modes of Gauss-Bonnet Black Holes

We analyze the quasinormal modes of $D$-dimensional Schwarzschild black holes with the Gauss-Bonnet correction in the large damping limit and show that standard analytic techniques cannot be applied in a straightforward manner to the case of infinite damping. However, by using a combination of analytic and numeric techniques we are able to calculate the quasinormal mode frequencies in a range where the damping is large but finite. We show that for this damping region the famous $\ln(3)$ appears in the real part of the quasinormal mode frequency. In our calculations, the Gauss-Bonnet coupling, $\alpha$, is taken to be much smaller than the parameter $\mu$, which is related to the black hole mass.Comment: 12 pages and 5 figure