Achieving the Potential of Health Care Performance Measures: Timely Analysis of Immediate Health Policy issues

The United States is on the cusp of a new era, with greater demand for performance information, greater data availability, and a greater willingness to integrate performance information into public policy. This era has immense promise to deliver a learning health care system that encourages collaborative improvements in systems-based care, improves accountability, helps consumers make important choices, and improves quality at an acceptable cost. However, to curtail the possibility of unintended adverse consequences, it is important that we invest in developing sound measures, understand quality measures' strengths and limitations, study the science of quality measurement, and reduce inaccurate inferences about provider performance

Achieving Better Quality of Care for Low-Income Populations: The Roles of Health Insurance and the Medical Home in Reducing Health Inequities

Outlines the importance of having both insurance and a medical home in reducing health and healthcare disparities for low-income adults, including access to care, preventive screenings, and satisfaction with quality of care. Makes policy recommendations

Motion Planning as Online Learning: A Multi-Armed Bandit Approach to Kinodynamic Sampling-Based Planning

Kinodynamic motion planners allow robots to perform complex manipulation tasks under dynamics constraints or with black-box models. However, they struggle to find high-quality solutions, especially when a steering function is unavailable. This letter presents a novel approach that adaptively biases the sampling distribution to improve the planner's performance. The key contribution is to formulate the sampling bias problem as a non-stationary multi-armed bandit problem, where the arms of the bandit correspond to sets of possible transitions. High-reward regions are identified by clustering transitions from sequential runs of kinodynamic RRT and a bandit algorithm decides what region to sample at each timestep. The letter demonstrates the approach on several simulated examples as well as a 7-degree-of-freedom manipulation task with dynamics uncertainty, suggesting that the approach finds better solutions faster and leads to a higher success rate in execution

Age, Gender, and Socioeconomic Status Differences in Explicit and Implicit Beliefs About Effortlessly Perfect Self-Presentation

Feeling pressure to project an image of effortless perfection -- always appearing to perform with self-confidence and ease --- has been portrayed in the media as an increasingly common mental health vulnerability with potentially serious implications for college women. Despite this, almost no empirical research exists on effortlessly perfect self–presentation (EPSP) or demographic differences in it. • Some recent research suggests that perfectionism is on the rise among young people (Curran & Hill, 2017), and that it is more associated with mental health problems among students with high rather than low socioeconomic status (Lyman & Luthar, 2014). However, these studies did not focus specifically on EPSP, which differs from more typical perfectionism in that it prohibits apparent effort or anxiety while striving for perfection. Of the two published studies on EPSP, one did not examine demographic differences (Flett et al., 2016) and the other found higher endorsement of EPSP among men than among women (Travers et al., 2016). • Anonymous interviews we conducted about EPSP in 40 college students (Glazer et al., in prep) yielded very complex, self-contradictory responses suggesting that beliefs about EPSP may be characterized by stigma and ambivalence. For this reason we decided to focus the current study on indirect and implicit measures of EPSP. • In this study, participants completed three new scales about EPSP, along with the two existing measures of this phenomenon, several mental health measures, and demographics questions. They also rated the perceived social status and self-esteem of two target individuals in a within-person experimental design

Promoting Greater Cooperation Between Russia and OECD Donors

Russia is unique amongst the BRICS group for being a ‘re-emerging’ donor. The USSR was one of the largest donor countries in the world. After a relatively brief period as a net aid recipient during the 1990s, Russia has once again become a significant provider of development assistance. A number of new opportunities now exist to promote greater cooperation in this field between Russia and traditional donors. It is unlikely that any future global development cooperation agenda can be defined without strong Russian participation. It is therefore crucial for established donor countries to develop a clear understanding of Russian priorities such as health and education, as well as identify areas for further collaboration.UK Department for International Developmen

The Russian Federation’s International Development Assistance Programme: A State of the Debate Report

Russia is unique among emerging donors for being a ‘re-emerging’ donor: the Soviet Union was one of the largest donor countries in the world, and Russia’s period as an aid recipient was relatively brief. Russian development cooperation is driven by key security and economic priorities, as well as resulting from commitments made to multilateral organisations. Russian official development assistance, according to official government sources, increased fivefold in the period 2004–11. Given a series of Russian presidencies in major international institutions, starting with the G20 in 2013, Russia is both interested in and well positioned to take new international initiatives through which it can promote its national priorities in the global agenda. This report discusses Russia’s growing role as a ‘re-emerging’ development cooperation partner, its increasing leadership in multilateral initiatives and the changing domestic policy landscape in Russia. It is unlikely that the global development cooperation agenda can be defined without strong participation by Russia, both as an individual actor and as a member of the G8, G20 and BRICS. It is therefore crucial for established donor countries to develop a clear understanding of Russian priorities.UK Department for International Developmen

Attributions for Rejection and Acceptance in Young Adults with Borderline and Avoidant Personality Features

Individuals with borderline and avoidant personality disorders show interpersonal dysfunction that includes maladaptive responses to rejection and reduced emotional benefits from acceptance. To identify the attributional styles that may underlie these difficulties, we examined causal attributions for rejection and acceptance among undergraduates high in features of each disorder and a healthy comparison group. In Study 1, participants rated how likely they were to attribute hypothetical rejection and acceptance experiences to positive and negative qualities of the self and others, as well as external circumstances. In Study 2, we examined these same attributions in daily diary assessments of real rejection and acceptance experiences. Although the two studies showed some differences in results, they both linked borderline personality features with suspicious, selfbolstering responses and avoidant personality features with perceived inferiority. Distinct attributional styles may contribute to the distinct interpersonal problems characteristic of these conditions

Analysis and Observations from the First Amazon Picking Challenge

This paper presents a overview of the inaugural Amazon Picking Challenge along with a summary of a survey conducted among the 26 participating teams. The challenge goal was to design an autonomous robot to pick items from a warehouse shelf. This task is currently performed by human workers, and there is hope that robots can someday help increase efficiency and throughput while lowering cost. We report on a 28-question survey posed to the teams to learn about each team's background, mechanism design, perception apparatus, planning and control approach. We identify trends in this data, correlate it with each team's success in the competition, and discuss observations and lessons learned based on survey results and the authors' personal experiences during the challenge