Special needs dentistry within the dental curriculum

Abstract no. 1682published_or_final_versio

Chemistry by Mobile Phone (or how to justify more time at the bar)

By combining automatic environment monitoring with Java smartphones a system has been produced for the real-time monitoring of experiments whilst away from the lab. Changes in the laboratory environment are encapsulated as simple XML messages, which are published using an MQTT compliant broker. Clients subscribe to the MQTT stream, and produce a user display. An MQTT client written for the Java MIDP platform, can be run on a smartphone with a GPRS Internet connection, freeing us from the constraints of the lab. We present an overview of the technologies used, and how these are helping chemists make the best use of their time

PENGARUH LINGKUNGAN KERJA, DISIPLIN KERJA DAN KEPEMIMPINAN KERJA TERHADAP KINERJA KARYAWAN DI PT TIGA PUTRA PLASINDO BENGKULU

Tujuan penelitian untuk mengetahui pengaruh lingkungan kerja disiplin serta kepemimpinan pada kinerja karyawan PT Tiga putra Plasindo Bengkulu. Populasi penelitian terdiri dari 36 karyawan Besar sampel penelitian adalah 36 pekerja. Strategi pengambilan sampel digunakan dalam penelitian yaitu pengambilan sampel lengkap Pendekatan analisis penelitian ini kuantitatif, dengan alat analisis regresi linier berganda korelasi berganda determinasi uji t serta uji F memanfaatkan software IBM SPSS 21 temuan studi (1) lingkungan kerja tidak berpengaruh terhadap kinerja,(2 ) disiplin berpengaruh terhadap kinerja serta, (3) kepemimpinan kerja tidak berpengaruh terhadap kinerja , (4) lingkungan kerja yang sama disiplin kerja dan kepemimpinan semuanya berdampak pada kinerja staf PT Tiga putra Plasindo Bengkul

Evaluation of problem-solving skills: what we really do

Abstract no. 1394published_or_final_versio

Macroeconomic impacts of Universal Health Coverage : Synthetic control evidence from Thailand

We study the impact of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) on various macroeconomic outcomes in Thailand using synthetic control methods. Thailand is compared to a weighted average of control countries in terms of aggregate health and economic performance over the period 1995 to 2012. Our results suggest that financial protection in Thailand has improved relative to its synthetic counterfactual. While out-of-pocket payments as a percentage of overall health expenditures decreased by 16.9 percentage points, annual government per capita health spending increased by $78. However, we detect no impact on total health spending per capita nor the share of the government budget allocated to health. We find positive health impacts as captured by reductions in infant and child mortality. The introduction of UHC has had no discernible impact on GDP per capita. Our results complement micro evidence based on within country variation. The counterfactual design implemented here may be used to inform other countries on the causal repercussions and benefits of UHC at the macroeconomic level

Universal health coverage at the macro level: Synthetic control evidence from Thailand

As more and more countries are moving towards Universal Health Coverage (UHC), it is important to understand the macro level or aggregate impacts of such a policy. We use synthetic control methods to study the impact of UHC, introduced in Thailand in 2001, on various macroeconomic and health outcomes. Thailand is compared to a weighted average of control countries in terms of aggregate health financing indicators, aggregate health outcomes and economic performance, over the period 1995 to 2012. Our results suggest that UHC helps alleviate the financial consequences of illnesses. The estimated treatment effect of UHC on out-of-pocket payments as a percentage of overall health expenditures is negative 13 percentage points and its effect on annual government per capita health spending is US$79. We detect a smaller effect of US$ 60.8 on total health spending per capita which appears with a lag. We document positive health effects as captured by reductions in infant and child mortality. We do not find any effect on GDP and the share of the government budget devoted to health. Overall, our results complement micro evidence based on within country variation. The counterfactual design implemented here may be used to inform other countries on the macro level repercussions of UHC

Nearly Consistent Finite Particle Estimates in Streaming Importance Sampling

In Bayesian inference, we seek to compute information about random variables such as moments or quantiles on the basis of {available data} and prior information. When the distribution of random variables is {intractable}, Monte Carlo (MC) sampling is usually required. {Importance sampling is a standard MC tool that approximates this unavailable distribution with a set of weighted samples.} This procedure is asymptotically consistent as the number of MC samples (particles) go to infinity. However, retaining infinitely many particles is intractable. Thus, we propose a way to only keep a \emph{finite representative subset} of particles and their augmented importance weights that is \emph{nearly consistent}. To do so in {an online manner}, we (1) embed the posterior density estimate in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) through its kernel mean embedding; and (2) sequentially project this RKHS element onto a lower-dimensional subspace in RKHS using the maximum mean discrepancy, an integral probability metric. Theoretically, we establish that this scheme results in a bias determined by a compression parameter, which yields a tunable tradeoff between consistency and memory. In experiments, we observe the compressed estimates achieve comparable performance to the dense ones with substantial reductions in representational complexity