Comparing non-fatal health across countries: Is the US medical system better?.

The primary focus of the paper is to assess whether the US, which spends significantly more than any other country in health care, has better health outcomes. It has long been clear that mortality as a whole is not better in the US than in other countries. We focus our analysis on the US performance for the treatment of non-fatal health outcomes and we compare the health of the United States to that of Canada, the United Kingdom and Spain. Our results indicate a discrepancy between high quality of life for some outcomes and low quality of life for others. Such discrepancy is not attributable to measurement issues in determining a person's quality of life, nor is it attributable to differing performance by income. Our results suggest that the discrepancy is due to the fact that the US does better for the treatment of conditions where high-tech medicine is a key to better health and worse in conditions requiring substantial chronic disease management.international comparison; healthcare systems; chronic diseases; technology; health;

Tipping and the Dynamics of Segregation

In a classic paper, Schelling (1971) showed that extreme segregation can arise from social interactions in white preferences: once the minority share in a neighborhood exceeds a critical "tipping point," all the whites leave. We use regression discontinuity methods and Census tract data from 1970 through 2000 to test for discontinuities in the dynamics of neighborhood racial composition. White population flows exhibit tipping-like behavior in most cities, with a distribution of tipping points ranging from 5% to 20% minority share. The estimated discontinuities are robust to controls for a wide variety of neighborhood characteristics, and are as strong in the suburbs as in tracts close to high-minority neighborhoods, ruling out the main alternative explanations for apparent tipping behavior. In contrast to white population flows, there is no systematic evidence that rents or housing prices exhibit non-linearities around the tipping point. Finally, we relate the location of the estimated tipping points in different cities to measures of the racial attitudes of whites, and find that cities with more tolerant whites have higher tipping points.

APLIKASI PEMILIHAN BIDANG MINAT SISWA SMA MENGGUNAKAN METODE ANALYTICAL HIERARCHY PROCESS STUDY KASUS (SMA KR. YBPK-1 SURABAYA)

Seiring dengan perkembangan dunia teknologi dan pendidikan Para siswa SMA kelas X yang akan melanjutkan pendidikannya di tingkat selanjutnya harus memutuskan pilihan jurusan, ini merupakan sesuatu yang cukup sulit diputuskan oleh kebanyakan siswa SMA. Kebanyakan siswa SMA sekarang sulit untuk menentukan minat memilih jurusan pada waktu SMA. maka demikian penyelesaian studi kasus ini menggunakan metode ANALYTICAL HIERARCHY PROCESS dengan menunjukan 3 kriteria (IPA, IPS, BAHASA), membuat nilai bobot, Melakukan perhitungan matrix nilai bobot dan menentukan local priority, Membuat tabel interval tiap mata pelajaran, Mengitung matrix tiap interval untuk mencari nilai total dan nilai local priority di tiap mata pelajaran, Menghitung hasil akhir nilai global priority. Setelah dilakukan uji coba dari Sistem Pemilihan Bidang Minat Pada Jurusan SMA maka dapat diambil kesimpulan, dari hasil penelitian menunjukan bahwa metode AHP dapat digunakan untuk menentukan jurusan dengan rata – rata akurasi 78%, dengan data akurasi IPA = 70%, IPS= 75%, BAHASA = 90%. Pada pembuatan aplikasi ini terdapat saran Untuk pengembangan lebih lanjut aplikasi ini, bisa dikembangkan lagi dengan menambahkan bidang minat ekstakulikuler jadi tidak hanya dari akademik saja, Untuk pengembangan lebih lanjut aplikasi Sistem pemilihan Bidang Minat ini terdapat latihan soal untuk memulai penjurusan akademik. Kata kunci : Perangkat lunak, Bidang Minat SM

Numerical dynamic analysis of reciprocating compressor mechanism. Parametric studies for optimization purposes

© 2016. This version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/A complete numerical dynamic analysis of reciprocating compressor mechanism is presented, coupling the instantaneous pressure in the compression chamber, the electric motor torque and the hydrodynamic reactions, which arise from the piston and crankshaft secondary movements. Additionally, non-constant crankshaft angular velocity and the piston and crankshaft misalignment torques have also been considered. Two sensitivity analyses have been carried out to prove that neither the inertial forces in the directions of the secondary movements, nor the oscillations of the angular velocity produce significant differences in the compressor behaviour. Finally, a set of parametric studies has been developed to evaluate the influence of geometrical parameters in the stability of the secondary movements, the friction power losses and the compressor consumptionPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Resonant Drivings in Global AdS

We revisit the case of a real scalar field in global AdS$_4$ subject to a periodic driving. We address the issue of adiabatic preparation and deformation of a time-periodic solution dual to a Floquet condensate. Then we carefully study the case of driving close to the normal mode resonant frequencies. We examine different slow protocols that adiabatically change the amplitude and/or the frequency of the driving. Traversing a normal mode frequency has very different results depending upon the sense of the frequency modulation. Generally, in the growing sense, the geometry reaches a periodically-modulated state, whereas in the opposite one, it collapses into a black hole. We study the suppression points. These are periodic solutions that are dual to a scalar field with vanishing $v.e.v., \langle \phi\rangle = 0$, instead of vanishing source. We also investigate quasi-periodic solutions that are prepared by driving with a combination of two normal resonant frequencies. We observe that, while the driving is on, the non-linear cascading towards higher frequencies is strongly suppressed. However, once the driving is switched off, the cascading takes over again, and in some cases, it eventually brings the solution to a collapse. Finally, we study the driving by a non-coherent thermal ensemble of resonant drivings that model stochastic noise. Our numerical results suggest the existence of stable regular solutions at sufficiently low temperature and a transition to collapse above some threshold.Comment: 27 pages + 1 appendix, 18 figure

Long-Run Impacts of Unions on Firms: New Evidence from Financial Markets, 1961-1999

We estimate the effect of new unionization on firms' equity value over the 1961-1999 period using a newly assembled sample of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) representation elections matched to stock market data. Event-study estimates show an average union effect on the equity value of the firm equivalent to a cost of at least $40,500 per unionized worker. At the same time, point estimates from a regression-discontinuity design -- comparing the stock market impact of close union election wins to close losses -- are considerably smaller and close to zero. We find a negative relationship between the cumulative abnormal returns and the vote share in support of the union, allowing us to reconcile these seemingly contradictory findings. Using the magnitudes from the analysis, we calibrate a structural "median voter" model of endogenous union determination in order to conduct counterfactual policy simulations of policies that would marginally increase the ease of unionization.

Dynamic contour tonometry vs. non-contact tonometry and their relation with corneal thickness

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the concordance between intraocular pressure (IOP) values obtained with a dynamic contour tonometer (DCT) and a non-contact tonometer (NCT) in healthy patients and to investigate the effect of central corneal thickness (CCT) on IOP readings for each of the two measuring systems. The mean IOP yielded by DCT, NCT and corrected non-contact tonometer (CNCT) was 17.1 mmHg, 15.5 mmHg and 12.2 mmHg, respectively. The average CCT was 563.6 μm and the ocular pulse amplitude (OPA) was 2.8 mmHg. There was a moderate correlation between CCT and CNCT (r = 0.34, p = 0.001), a weak correlation between CCT and DCT (r = 0.03, p = 0.788) and a weak-to-moderate correlation between CCT and NCT (r = 0.27, p = 0.11). The intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) was 0.59 for the DCT-vs.-NCT comparison and 0.56 for DCT-vs.-CNCT. The mean difference between the two instruments (DCT/NCT) ranged from 1.62 to 4.47 mmHg. We have shown that non-contact tonometer is significantly more affected by the central corneal thickness than the dynamic contour tonometer and therefore these methods are not interchangeable

The use of social media as a two-way mirror for narcissistic adolescents from Austria, Belgium, South-Korea, and Spain

The use of social networking sites (SNS or social media) often comes with strong self-centered behaviors to promote self-appearance. The relationship between narcissism and social media use has intensively occupied scholars in the last decade, yet not much research has focused on, first, how the intensity of social media use (SNS use) is associated with narcissism through a self-centered appearance focused use of these SNS; and second, whether these associations are moderated or not by cultural differences of the country of origin in such a critical age of personality formation and (global) culturalization as the transition from pre-adolescence to adolescence. We performed a correlation and mediation analysis on a cross-sectional survey among Austrian, Belgian, Spanish, and South Korean adolescents (n = 1,983; M 14.41, 50.3% boys) examining the adolescents' daily usage of social media, their self-centered appearance focused behavior, and the reported narcissism. Findings show that a self-centered appearance focused use of SNS (SCA) moderates the association between SNS use and narcissism, especially for males from the three European countries. We have also particularly found that the years of use, number of friends and time spent in FB are associated with narcissism. Since SCA is defined in the study as narcissistic behavior in SNS, we argue that social media are part of the socialization process as both reinforcers and catalyzers of narcissism

Evaluation of a Simple and Affordable Image-Based Procedure to Measure Particle Size Distribution

The classical measurement method of particle size for sands and gravels is sieving, but in recent years, imaging methods have been shown to be more reliable. However, imaging procedures require specialized devices (such as Camsizer), proprietary software (such as Optgran-CS), dedicated illumination, or other issues. Furthermore, image resolution in digital cameras improves constantly over time, including in cameras in cellular phones, which leads to the idea that using a standard commercial device and a simple procedure could give results that could be accurate enough. In this work, we first define a simple way of finding the particle size distribution without using any special device, only with a commercial camera and a well-known free image-processing software. Once defined, we analyze the error magnitude and dispersion of the method with different samples and light intensities. To make the procedure even more accessible, the use of a smartphone camera is also studied. The results show that the method can be used taking into account a correction factor within a narrow interval, which makes this simple method also robust