Technologies for rapid prototyping (RP) - basic concepts, quality issues and modern trends

The paper describes the basics of the 3D printing technologies for rapid prototyping (RP). It shows the benefits of their utilization in product design and manufacturing of conventional parts and items with medical and other application. The most mature RP principles are presented and compared.Some trends in developing new 3D printers and corresponding materials for micro/nano and biological applications are described.  Some modern budget platforms are suggested for technology users.The paper also provides a summary of the main quality issues in the layering technologies as well as methodologies for studying the process capabilities, accuracy and maturity

Assessing access to healthcare in Bulgaria

Assessing access to healthcare in a given country remains a challenging endeavor. Despite the frequent use of access as a dimension of the health system performance assessment frameworks, there is no agreed-upon set of indicators to evaluate it. This study aims to assess the access to healthcare in Bulgaria. The assessment is based on a set of the most commonly used indicators with publicly available data. Results show that timeliness and physical availability are not substantial barriers for obtaining health services in Bulgaria, as the values for most of the considered indicators are better than the EU average. The most significant barrier to access to healthcare in Bulgaria is the financial affordability. Data shows insufficient financial protection alongside other factors resulting in higher than the EU average level of unmet needs due to financial reasons. Policy measures focused on decreasing the share of private health expenditures ought to be exerted to reduce inequalities in access to healthcare services

Partner Projects of “Ivan Vazov” Public Library – Plovdiv on Digitization of Cultural and Historical Heritage

Digitization offers excellent opportunities for the preservation and safe-keeping of valuable library collections. The article recounts the first coordinated attempts of “Ivan Vazov” Public Library – Plovdiv at digitizing some of its treasured collections such as manuscripts, early printed books and archives through partner projects and revealing them to the world community.A project financed by the Research Fund of the Ministry of Education and Science /MES/, together with three other regional public libraries – Veliko Turnovo

Estimation of the population mean using two extremes in order statistics

For most non-parametric statistical inference, the sampling theory of order statistics has been playing a fundamental role because of that properties of the range and the average of the smallest and largest order statistics are useful for estimate the population parameters of both large and small samples; The applications of the method using order statistics in a given sample to estimate the parametric values appear quite often in the literature. For a certain data set, such as stock market data, the method we are considering may have an advantage in estimating the mean due to the fact that the stock data have a fairly large amount of observations during a given period, even a day; In addition to estimating the mean, it is of interest to compute (1-alpha) 100% confidence limits as well. Using the two extremes, X(1) and X(n), we wish to construct a confidence interval for the population mean mu