The Business Case for Quality: Ending Business as Usual in American Health Care

Examines some of the reasons why establishing a business case for improving health care is so difficult, and considers possible solutions. Includes comments on quality provisions of the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003

Tensor Networks and Quantum Error Correction

We establish several relations between quantum error correction (QEC) and tensor network (TN) methods of quantum many-body physics. We exhibit correspondences between well-known families of QEC codes and TNs, and demonstrate a formal equivalence between decoding a QEC code and contracting a TN. We build on this equivalence to propose a new family of quantum codes and decoding algorithms that generalize and improve upon quantum polar codes and successive cancellation decoding in a natural way.Comment: Accepted in Phys. Rev. Lett. 8 pages, 9 figure

Disability Experience and Economics Correlations

There is anecdotal evidence of the influence of economic conditions on disability claims costs and the proposition is generally accepted. However, there has only been a limited amount of “hard” evidence published in relation to this assumed correlation both in Australia and overseas. This paper examines three distinct measures of disability experience in Australia. These are claim incidence and claim duration for insured disability data and the proportion of the working population disabled, which is obtained from the number of recipients of a Commonwealth disability pension. As there is no universally agreed measure of “the economy”, a range of economic variables is analysed, and the resulting correlations with the measures of disability experience determined For each measure of disability a statistically significant relationship is indicated. The authors consider the extent to which the observed correlation might be explained by other causes e.g. liberalisation of definitions, higher levels of claims awareness, looser underwriting, etc. Finally the authors predict the experience to be expected for the period after 1995 on the basis of their regression models and test this against the actual published industry experience

Virus diseases of subterranean clover pastures and their management

In Western Australia and southern Australia generally, subterranean clover mottle (SCMV) and bean yellow mosaic (BYMV) are the most damaging virus diseases of subterranean clover pastures. Although infected plants cannot be cured of virus infection, pastures can be managed to reduce both virus spread and persistence from year to year. Management options depend on which virus is present and include reseeding with resistant varieties; changing the pasture composition so that non-host species predominate; altering grazing practices to limit spread; and application of pesticide sprays to kill aphids

Modeling Residential Development in the Baltimore Metro Region

Presentation to the Maryland Department of Plannin

Automated Image Analysis of Offshore Infrastructure Marine Biofouling

Supplementary Materials: The following are available online at www.mdpi.com/2077-1312/6/1/2/s1 Acknowledgments: This project was funded by the Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC) project No.: NE/N019865/1. The authors would like to thank Melanie Netherway and Don Orr, from our project partner (company requested to remain anonymous) for the provision of survey footage and for supporting the project. In addition, many thanks to Oscar Beijbom, University California Berkley for providing guidance and support to the project. Additional thanks to Calum Reay, Bibby Offshore; George Gair, Subsea 7; and Alan Buchan, Wood Group Kenny for help with footage collection and for allowing us to host workshops with them and their teams, their feedback and insights were very much appreciated.Peer reviewedPublisher PD