Healthy Steps at 15: The Past and Future of an Innovative Preventive Care Model for Young Children

Evaluates a model for preventive pediatric care for children up to age 3 that relies on mid-level specialists, including the program's spread, operating costs, funding, challenges, and potential effects of healthcare reform. Includes site profiles

The regulation and structure of nonlife insurance in the United States

The insurance industry is underdeveloped in most developing countries because of low levels of income and wealth and because restrictive regulations inhibit the supply of insurance services. But several countries have begun to reform their insurance industries. To help those countries, the authors offer an overview of insurance regulation in the United States - and discuss the economics and market structure of nonlife insurance in entry and exit barriers, economies of scale, and conduct and performance studies. They conclude that the U.S. nonlife insurance industry exhibits low concentration at both national and state market levels. Concentration is low even on a line-by-line basis. The primary concern of regulators has been to protect policyholders from insolvency, but regulation has also often been used to protect the market position of local insurance companies against the entry of out-of-state competitors. Regulation has worked best when based on solvency monitoring, with limited restrictions on entry. It has been more harmful when it involved controls on premiums and products and on the industry's level of profitability. Over the years the industry has shown a remarkable degree of innovation, although it has also faced many serious and persistent problems. The problems include the widespread crisis in liability (including product liability and medical malpractice), the crisis in automobile insurance, the volatility of investment income, the effects of market-driven pricing and underwriting cycles, and the difficulty of measuring insurance solvency. The long-tailed lines of insurance - those that entail long delays in final settlements - are exposed to the vagaries of inflation and rising costs. Two mandatory lines - third party automobile insurance and workers'compensation (for work accidents) - account for nearly 55 percent of premiums. These two lines - plus medical malpractice, other liability, and aircraft insurance - had combined ratios well over 125 percent in 1989. The industry has some ability to collude and to set prices, but seems to be competitive and to earn profits below similarly situated financial firms. Insurance profitability is not consistently above or below normal returns, although earnings for mandatory and strictly regulated lines of automobile insurance and workers'compensation appear to be below-adequate for long-term viability.Insurance&Risk Mitigation,Non Bank Financial Institutions,Insurance Law,Environmental Economics&Policies,Financial Intermediation

Development of a deep submicron fabrication process for tunneling field effect transistors

The requirements placed upon next-generation devices include high on-state current, low power supply voltages, and low subthreshold swing. Tunneling Field Effect Transistors (TFETs) have been of recent interest because they have the potential to fulfill these requirements. The TFET is a gated tunnel junction. The TFET operates by modulating the probability of band-to-band tunneling between the source and the channel of the device. When the tunnel transistor is off, there is a potential barrier between the source and the channel. The width of this potential barrier is large enough to prevent electrons tunneling from the valence to conduction bands, the result of which is a lower leakage current and improved power efficiency. The potential barrier narrows as bias is applied to the gate. When the applied gate voltage exceeds the threshold voltage this potential barrier becomes thin enough to allow for tunneling from the valence band to the conduction band. The tunneling mechanism allows the device to have a high on-state current and low subthreshold swing at low power supplies. To date the majority of the work involving TFETs has been simulation-based. Unfortunately the models used in these simulations are deficient. The models require physical data for proper calibration [1]. The few experimental demonstrations of TFETs have not yielded a body of empirical data sufficient for calibration. This work intends to help provide that body of experimental data on gated and non-gated tunneling junctions in InGaAs. This work focuses on the development of a process to gate p-i-n junctions and extract the contribution of the gate on junction performance

The Workers' Compensation System of British Columbia: Still in Transition

This inventory addresses eight core issues in the British Columbia workers' compensation system:* How is the system administered?* How do claims flow through the system?* What dispute resolution procedures are used, and to what effect?* What benefits are paid?* How are vocational rehabilitation services provided?* How is the system financed?* What are the actual costs of administration, benefits, claims processing, and appeal?* What aspects of the system deserve further attention

Washington Pension System Review

The purpose of this study is to analyze the incidence of Total Permanent Disability (TPD)pensions in Washington State's workers' compensation program. Concerns exist at both thelegislature and in the Department of Labor and Industries as there appears to have been a sharp upturn in the number of pensions awarded since late in the 1990s. This report examines the factors that may be causally related to any upsurge in such awards. Our task is to evaluate pension incidence for both the state fund and the self-insured populations, with a view towards identifying causes of the trend in both sectors, although we concentrate more on the state fund Cclaims due to data limitations

Development of a Planarization Process for the Fabrication of III-V on Silicon Esaki diodes

Esaki diodes are tunnel diodes with a very abrupt and degenerately doped PN junction. This abrupt junction causes the conduction bands to overlap, thus allowing for tunneling when a small bias is applied. 111-V on silicon Esaki tunnel diodes offer higher performance at lower power supplies compared to silicon. A vertical mesa etch is used to isolate the Esaki devices from each other. The etch results in a significant undercut below the gold contact which can cause issues with electrical testing. When probed the gold contact can short to the substrate. The solution to this is the addition of a dielectric layer around the tunnel diode. The dielectric layer will reduce the topography variation caused by the mesa etch and prevent the metal contact from shorting to the surface. Bisbenzocyclobutene (BCB) is a spin on polyimide with a low dielectric constant (k = 2.5) and a high degree of planarization. The development of BCB planarization process allows for better electrical testing of the Esaki diodes. Further, this BCB planarization process can be incorporated into e-beam lithography process and utilized in the fabrication of Tunneling Field Effect Transistors (TFET) and Heterojunction Bipolar Transistors

Optimization as an analysis tool for human complex decision making

We present a problem class of mixed-integer nonlinear programs (MINLPs) with nonconvex continuous relaxations which stem from economic test scenarios that are used in the analysis of human complex problem solving. In a round-based scenario participants hold an executive function. A posteriori a performance indicator is calculated and correlated to personal measures such as intelligence, working memory, or emotion regulation. Altogether, we investigate 2088 optimization problems that differ in size and initial conditions, based on real-world experimental data from 12 rounds of 174 participants. The goals are twofold. First, from the optimal solutions we gain additional insight into a complex system, which facilitates the analysis of a participant’s performance in the test. Second, we propose a methodology to automatize this process by providing a new criterion based on the solution of a series of optimization problems. By providing a mathematical optimization model and this methodology, we disprove the assumption that the “fruit fly of complex problem solving,” the Tailorshop scenario that has been used for dozens of published studies, is not mathematically accessible—although it turns out to be extremely challenging even for advanced state-of-the-art global optimization algorithms and we were not able to solve all instances to global optimality in reasonable time in this study. The publicly available computational tool Tobago [TOBAGO web site https://sourceforge.net/projects/tobago] can be used to automatically generate problem instances of various complexity, contains interfaces to AMPL and GAMS, and is hence ideally suited as a testbed for different kinds of algorithms and solvers. Computational practice is reported with respect to the influence of integer variables, problem dimension, and local versus global optimization with different optimization codes