Language constructs for managing change in process-centered environments

Change is pervasive during software development, af-fecting objects, processes, and environments. In pro-cess centered environments, change management can be facilitated by software-process programming, which for-malizes the representation of software products and pro-cesses using software-process programming languages (SPPLs). To fully realize this goal SPPLs should in-clude constructs that specifically address the problems of change management. These problems include lack of representation of inter-object relationships, weak se-mantics for inter-object relationships, visibility of im-plementations, lack of formal representation of soft-ware processes, and reliance on programmers to manage change manually

Choice of contracts for quality in health care: Evidence from the British NHS

We examine how public sector third-party purchasers and hospitals negotiate quality targets when a fixed proportion of hospital revenue is required to be linked to quality. We develop a bargaining model linking the number of quality targets to purchaser and hospital characteristics. Using data extracted from 153 contracts for acute hospital services in England in 2010/11, we find that the number of quality targets is determined by the purchaser's population health and its budget, the hospital type, whether the purchaser delegated negotiation to an agency, and the quality targets imposed by the supervising regional health authority

Power Law Scaling for a System of Interacting Units with Complex Internal Structure

We study the dynamics of a system composed of interacting units each with a complex internal structure comprising many subunits. We consider the case in which each subunit grows in a multiplicative manner. We propose a model for such systems in which the interaction among the units is treated in a mean field approximation and the interaction among subunits is nonlinear. To test the model, we identify a large data base spanning 20 years, and find that the model correctly predicts a variety of empirical results.Comment: 4 pages with 4 postscript figures (uses Revtex 3.1, Latex2e, multicol.sty, epsf.sty and rotate.sty). Submitted to PR