Innovative Strategies to Help Affordable Consumer Operated and Oriented Plans (CO-OPs) Compete in New Insurance Marketplaces

Outlines provisions in the federal health reform law for CO-OPs, or innovative nonprofit health insurance and care plans designed for individuals and small businesses, challenges, and strategies for long-term sustainability and financial success

Regulation of securities markets : some recent trends and their implications for emerging markets

Recent rapid changes in the world economy, particularly the transformation of command economies into free market economies in many places around the world, can be expected to lead to an increase in the number of newly created securities markets through the 1990s. This follows a decade of unprecedented change in the world's securities markets. In the 1990s, it is expected that increased attention will be given to newly established and emerging securities markets as a result of the historic movement toward free market economies in central Europe and the Soviet Union and the need for more efficient capital markets to support the expanding role of the private sector in many developing countries around the world. Given the importance of the regulatory environment to capital market development, this paper focuses on the regulatory issues. It examines the interplay between regulation and market efficiency and reviews recent development in regulation, paying particular attention to the experience in the Korean market in the 1980s.Environmental Economics&Policies,Insurance&Risk Mitigation,Insurance Law,Markets and Market Access,Financial Intermediation

Loss tolerance in one-way quantum computation via counterfactual error correction

We introduce a scheme for fault tolerantly dealing with losses (or other "leakage" errors) in cluster state computation that can tolerate up to 50% qubit loss. This is achieved passively using an adaptive strategy of measurement - no coherent measurements or coherent correction is required. Since the scheme relies on inferring information about what would have been the outcome of a measurement had one been able to carry it out, we call this "counterfactual" error correction.Comment: Published version - much revised and with a new title. Here we now focus solely on the general aspects of the protocol - a much expanded and improved discussion of its application in linear optical quantum computation can now be found in quant-ph/070204

EU–originated MOOCs, with focus on multi- and single-institution platforms

No abstract available

AN ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF THE DAIRY ENVIRONMENTAL COOPERATIVE IN NORTHEAST KANSAS

In 1997, the Black Vermillion Dairy Environmental Cooperative (DEC) was started with an EPA 319A grant. Ten Kansas dairies located in the Kansas Black Vermillion Watershed were studied to evaluate the on-farm manure structures cost-shared by the DEC. Net present value (NPV) analysis was used to evaluate the profitability associated with the manure structures. The NPV analysis showed that in most cases, investing in a manure storage structure is a worthwhile venture and can be profitable for the dairy. However, cost-share assistance often will be needed in order to have positive pre-tax and after-tax NPVs.Dairy Environmental Cooperative (DEC), manure management, Net Present Value (NPV) analysis, cost-share, concrete manure storage, Environmental Economics and Policy,

Making Laplacians commute

In this paper, we construct multimodal spectral geometry by finding a pair of closest commuting operators (CCO) to a given pair of Laplacians. The CCOs are jointly diagonalizable and hence have the same eigenbasis. Our construction naturally extends classical data analysis tools based on spectral geometry, such as diffusion maps and spectral clustering. We provide several synthetic and real examples of applications in dimensionality reduction, shape analysis, and clustering, demonstrating that our method better captures the inherent structure of multi-modal data