WHO's Fooling Who? The World Health Organization's Problematic Ranking of Health Care Systems

The World Health Report 2000, prepared by the World Health Organization, presented performance rankings of 191 nations' health care systems. These rankings have been widely cited in public debates about health care, particularly by those interested in reforming the U.S. health care system to resemble more closely those of other countries. Michael Moore, for instance, famously stated in his film SiCKO that the United States placed only 37th in the WHO report. CNN.com, in verifying Moore's claim, noted that France and Canada both placed in the top 10. Those who cite the WHO rankings typically present them as an objective measure of the relative performance of national health care systems. They are not. The WHO rankings depend crucially on a number of underlying assumptions -- some of them logically incoherent, some characterized by substantial uncertainty, and some rooted in ideological beliefs and values that not everyone shares. The analysts behind the WHO rankings express the hope that their framework "will lay the basis for a shift from ideological discourse on health policy to a more empirical one." Yet the WHO rankings themselves have a strong ideological component. They include factors that are arguably unrelated to actual health performance, some of which could even improve in response to worse health performance. Even setting those concerns aside, the rankings are still highly sensitive to both measurement error and assumptions about the relative importance of the components. And finally, the WHO rankings reflect implicit value judgments and lifestyle preferences that differ among individuals and across countries

From Trade Liberalization to Economic Integration: The Clash between Private and Public Goods

As tariffs and quotas have fallen substantially during successive rounds of multilateral trade negotiations, attention has increasingly focused on harmonizing a variety of "domestic" policies that limit or distort international trade and investment, such as intellectual property protection, environmental rules, labor standards, and competition (antitrust) policies. An increase in such "deep integration" or "system convergence" would indeed maximize global welfare as regards transactions in private goods, but it also undermines the ability of sovereign states to respond to their own voters' preferences as regards such public goods as inflation and unemployment rates, national defense, income distribution, environmental quality, and worker protection. The resulting tensions have made the negotiation of multilateral trade agreements and regional integration arrangements more complex and difficult and the resistance to them more pronounced.

Utilizing Convolutional Neural Networks for Global Seagrass Habitat Mapping

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are becoming an increasingly prevalent machine learning algorithm due to their high accuracy and lack of reliance on heuristic processes. One of the major drawbacks of convolutional neural networks is their reliance on large amounts of training data in order to generate sensible results. This talk will cover how our team has utilized the strengths and overcome the weaknesses of convolutional neural networks as they apply to seagrass habitat mapping. We will share our technical CNN results over time, detail the requirements and challenges that our team overcame and explore how other teams can better incorporate a stronger seagrass component into their machine learning projects

American Capitalism and Global Convergence: After the Bubble

Throughout the 1990s, the social-market capitalism that prevailed in most of the larger countries of continental Western Europe and the producer-oriented or mercantilist capitalism characteristic of Japan and a number of other large Asian economies were under strong pressures to migrate their economies toward U.S. (or Anglo-Saxon)-style investor capitalism. This paper explores whether the pressures for convergence exerted by globalization persisted into the first decade of the 21st century, after the American "bubble" burst and the United States fell from grace in a number of economic, social, and political dimensions. American-style investor capitalism indeed continues to be the dominant model where capital markets and corporate governance are concerned. Various pressures continue to push the labor markets of industrial nations in that direction as well, despite strong political and social backlash. Where relations with customers are concerned, however, it is the requirements imposed on products, services and production processes by the stringent regulations of the EU's social market capitalism, and its adherence to the precautionary principle, that dominate. At the same time, U.S.-style capitalism is itself evolving as its participants struggle to restore public trust and to integrate the adaptability and market-responsiveness of its institutions with a broadened focus on corporate responsibility to multiple stakeholders.

Another Theory is Possible: Dissident Voices in Theorising Europe

The article argues that dissident voices which attempt to theorise Europe differently and advocate another European trajectory have been largely excluded and left unheard in mainstream discussions over the past decade of scholarship and analysis. Dissident voices in European Union studies are those that seek to actively challenge the mainstream of the study of Europe. As all the contributors to the special issue make clear, there is a rich diversity of alternatives to mainstream thinking and theorising the EU on which to draw for different ways of theorising Europe. The introductory article briefly examines the discipline of mainstreaming, then surveys extent of polyphonic engagement in EU studies before setting out how the special issue contributors move beyond the mainstream. The article will argue the merits of more polyphonic engagement with dissident voices and differing disciplinary approach for the health and vitality of EU studies and the EU policy field itself. The article sets out the wide range of contributions which the special issue articles make to theorising the EU. It summarises the special issue argument that by allowing for dissident voices in theorising Europe another Europe, and another theory, is possible indeed probable

Topics in Aging: Income and Poverty Among Older Americans in 2004

This report describes the income and poverty status of the 35.2 million Americans age 65 and older living in the community in 2004.1 Older persons receive income from a variety of sources, including earnings, pensions, personal savings, and public programs such as Social Security and Supplemental Security Income. The substantial variation in the number of people receiving income from each source and the amounts they receive from each source are the main topics of this report. Using data from the March 2005 Current Population Survey, we describe both the number of elderly receiving income from each of 10 major sources and the extent to which income from each source is either concentrated at the high- or low-end of the income distribution or is more evenly distributed among the elderly population

Effects of three transmission models in the rotational water-vapor band on radiance calculations and constituent inferences

Transmission model effects on water vapor mixing ratios and radiance calculations for infrared horizon scanner