What Do Americans Think About the Role of Quality of Care Information When Making Decisions About Their Health Care?

Highlights findings from an April 2006 survey on how Americans view quality-of-care information, including the importance of ratings in making healthcare-related decisions. Analyzes which indicators influence choices of doctors and practices

Study of document clustering using the k-means algorithm

One of the most commonly used data mining techniques is document clustering or unsupervised document classification which deals with the grouping of documents based on some document similarity function; This thesis deals with research issues associated with categorizing documents using the k-means clustering algorithm which groups objects into K number of groups based on document representations and similarities; The proposed hypothesis of this thesis is to prove that unsupervised clustering of a set of documents produces similar results to that of their supervised categorization

Operator Algebras of Functions

We present some general theorems about operator algebras that are algebras of functions on sets, including theories of local algebras, residually finite dimensional operator algebras and algebras that can be represented as the scalar multipliers of a vector-valued reproducing kernel Hilbert space. We use these to further develop a quantized function theory for various domains that extends and unifies Agler's theory of commuting contractions and the Arveson-Drury-Popescu theory of commuting row contractions. We obtain analogous factorization theorems, prove that the algebras that we obtain are dual operator algebras and show that for many domains, supremums over all commuting tuples of operators satisfying certain inequalities are obtained over all commuting tuples of matrices.Comment: 33 page

Facilitating Telecommuting as a Means of Congestion Reduction, MTI Report 09-14

Walls, Safirova and Jiang (2007) note the paucity of studies that examine telecommuting among individuals across organizations and studies that compare telecommuters with non-telecommuters. This study responds to this call by gaining a deeper understanding of telecommuting patterns and adoption behavior through an examination of perceived obstacles and facilitators of telecommuting. The study involved data collection using survey methodology, focus groups, and archival data collection. Respondents include telecommuters and non-telecommuters as well as supervisors from a wide variety of organizations. The study also included collecting benchmarking data regarding telecommuting policies and practices of companies in Silicon Valley in an attempt to understand factors that impact telecommuting

Assessing Canada's Ability to Compete for Foreign Direct Investment

The main purpose of this report is to assess Canada’s performance in attracting foreign direct investment inflows. The study reviews the literature on the benefits of FDI, analyses global and Canadian trends in FDI, identifies various factors affecting the inflow of FDI, and details how Canada ranks relative to other major OECD countries on the most influential factors. Canada’s share of world FDI has fallen markedly since 1980. The report finds that this development reflects the opening of other countries to FDI rather than a hostile climate for FDI in this country. Indeed, there is no one factor that can be identified as seriously impeding the flow of FDI to Canada. The report identifies a number of areas where Canada can potentially improve its attractiveness to FDI, including possible changes to FDI regulation, a more competitive tax regime, better infrastructure, and certain improvements in the human capital area.Foreign Direct Investment, Business climate, taxation, infrastructure, human capital