Aggregation and Insurance Mortality Estimation

One goal of government health insurance programs is to improve health, yet little is known empirically about how important such government interventions can be in explaining health transitions. We analyze the child mortality effects of a major health insurance expansion in Costa Rica. In contrast to previous work in this area that has used aggregated ecological designs, we exploit census data to estimate individual-level models. Theoretical and empirical econometric results indicate that aggregation can introduce substantial upward biases in the insurance effects. Overall we find a statistically significant but quite small effect of health insurance on child mortality in Costa Rica.

POSSIBILITIES FOR CONTROLLING THE CONNECTION BETWEEN WASTEWATER TREATMENT PLANTS AND RECEIVING WATER BODIES

With increasing water supply and canalization the quality of the water playing the role of receiver often deteriorates. Among other problems, the not sufficient removal of plant nutrients by the traditional purification technology causes difficulties. Considering that the removal of fertilizers results in a significant increase in the costs of wastewater treatment, it is expedient to keep the extent of removal just at the yet acceptable level of the pollutant. This paper deals with the removal of phosphorus as fertilizer on a transport theoretical basis. As a result, a qualitative connection is established between water quality and water management on the one hand and the operation of the wastewater treatment plant on the other hand

Multilayer silica-methacrylate hybrid coatings prepared by sol–gel on stainless steel 316L: Electrochemical evaluation

AISI 316L stainless steel is a biocompatible alloy used in prosthetic devices for many years. However this alloy tends to suffer localized corrosion and needs external fixation to hard tissues. This work describes the development of a coating system of two layers with complementary properties. The inner layer is prepared using TEOS and MTES that has already shown good anticorrosion properties. The top layer is a new hybrid organic–inorganic coating prepared with TEOS, 3-methacryloxypropyl trimethoxysilane (MPS), and 2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate (HEMA). The properties of this sol let to produce a thick and porous coating formed by two interpenetrating (organic and inorganic) networks. This coating could be an excellent container for the later aggregate of bioactive particles as the following step in a future work based on its high thickness, plasticity and open structure to allow the electrolyte access to induce the formation of hydroxyapatite. The coating is electrochemically characterised in simulated body fluid at 37 °C after 1, 10 and 30 days of immersion by means of assays as electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and polarization curves. The dual coating seems to join the best properties of the individual ones in time: their thickness restrict the passage of potentially toxic ions to the body fluid, the breakdown potential (Eb) remains high and far from the corrosion potential (Ecorr) and the film presents the open structure of the outer layer that allows the entrance of the electrolyte to react with the particles when added to the sol meanwhile the inner layer maintain its corrosion protective features.Peer reviewe

Deep neural network for load forecasting centred on architecture evolution

Nowadays, electricity demand forecasting is critical for electric utility companies. Accurate residential load forecasting plays an essential role as an individual component for integrated areas such as neighborhood load consumption. Short-term load forecasting can help electric utility companies reduce waste because electric power is expensive to store. This paper proposes a novel method to evolve deep neural networks for time series forecasting applied to residential load forecasting. The approach centres its efforts on the neural network architecture during the evolution. Then, the model weights are adjusted using an evolutionary optimization technique to tune the model performance automatically. Experimental results on a large dataset containing hourly load consumption of a residence in London, Ontario shows that the performance of unadjusted weights architecture is comparable to other state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, when the architecture weights are adjusted the model accuracy surpassed the state-of-the-art method called LSTM one shot by 3.0%

Transfer Learning by Similarity Centred Architecture Evolution for Multiple Residential Load Forecasting

The development from traditional low voltage grids to smart systems has become extensive and adopted worldwide. Expanding the demand response program to cover the residential sector raises a wide range of challenges. Short term load forecasting for residential consumers in a neighbourhood could lead to a better understanding of low voltage consumption behaviour. Nevertheless, users with similar characteristics can present diversity in consumption patterns. Consequently, transfer learning methods have become a useful tool to tackle differences among residential time series. This paper proposes a method combining evolutionary algorithms for neural architecture search with transfer learning to perform short term load forecasting in a neighbourhood with multiple household load consumption. The approach centres its efforts on neural architecture search using evolutionary algorithms. The neural architecture evolution process retains the patterns of the centre-most house, and later the architecture weights are adjusted for each house in a multihouse set from a neighbourhood. In addition, a sensitivity analysis was conducted to ensure model performance. Experimental results on a large dataset containing hourly load consumption for ten houses in London, Ontario showed that the performance of the proposed approach performs better than the compared techniques. Moreover, the proposed method presents the average accuracy performance of 3.17 points higher than the state-of-the-art LSTM one shot method

Letter to the Editor (Human immunodeficiency virus in Costa Rica)

Recent reports of 12 confirmed cases of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) in Costa Rica have generated interest in the extent of spread of human T-lymphotropic virus type III/LAV (HTLV-III) in Latin America (1). To date, all cases of AIDS in Costa Rica have occurred in members of previously identified, high-risk groups, chiefly hemophiliacs. To examine the possibility of heterosexual transmission in Costa Rica, we utilized sera collected in a population-based case-control study of cervical cancer, conducted by the Costa Rican Demographic Association and other institution