The Qualitative Performance of the French Health Care System Evolutions compared to Europe since 1970

To judge a health care system, it is necessary to analyse its results in terms of health and to bring them back to its economic effectiveness. Health outcomes can be evaluated in several ways but none of them is really representative. To locate the performance in terms of health for the French system, we thus compared France with four European countries (Germany, Denmark, Sweden and the United-Kingdom), which are close in relation to and comparable in terms of behaviour and standard of living, from 1960 to 1995. We selected a sample of frequent and revealing pathologies of the Health care system activity and risks behaviour. The result of this approach is paradoxical and sometimes in contradiction with the common belief, which often confuses the means and the results and allots the health status mainly to the action of the Health care system.Health Status Indicators, Health care system performance, Death rates, France and OECD countries

Analog Computing for the 21st Century

Many people think of analog computing as a historic dead-end in computing. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth as analog computing - together with quantum computing - has the potential to bring computing to new levels with respect to raw computational power and energy efficiency. The following paper explains the limits of digital computers, gives a quick introduction to analog computing in general, and shows a number of recent developments that will change the way we think about computers in the next few years

Health Economics : some stylized facts

The study of the stylized facts of economic growth has allowed an advance of this field of economic analysis in its empirical and theorical works. Today, Health Economics is faced with new requirements of society, i.e. better care at a sustainable cost. Furthermore, since the problems linked with health care system and with the health status are more and more connected with the economic sphere, a global approach of Health Economics proves necessary. Prior to the development of such an approach, some thorough knowledge of the related facts is essential. This paper presents a first synthesis of what is commonly referred as the sytilized facts of health economics, and suggests some research tracks, little exploited so far.Stylized facts, economic growth, health care expenditure, health status, health care system.

Local motion inside an object affects pointing less than smooth pursuit

During smooth pursuit eye movements, briefly presented objects are mislocalized in the direction of motion. It has been proposed that the localization error is the sum of the pursuit signal and the retinal motion signal in a ~200ms interval after flash onset. To evaluate contributions of retinal motion signals produced by the entire object (global motion) and elements within the object (local motion), we asked observers to reach to flashed Gabor patches (Gaussian-windowed sine-wave gratings). Global motion was manipulated by varying the duration of a stationary flash, and local motion was manipulated by varying the motion of the sine-wave. Our results confirm that global retinal motion reduces the localization error. The effect of local retinal motion on object localization was far smaller, even though local and global motion had equal effects on eye velocity. Thus, local retinal motion has differential access to manual and oculomotor control circuits. Further, we observed moderate correlations between smooth pursuit gain and localization erro

Analog Computing for Molecular Dynamics

Modern analog computers are ideally suited to solving large systems of ordinary differential equations at high speed with low energy consumtion and limited accuracy. In this article, we survey N-body physics, applied to a simple water model inspired by force fields which are popular in molecular dynamics. We demonstrate a setup which simulate a single water molecule in time. To the best of our knowledge such a simulation has never been done on analog computers before. Important implementation aspects of the model, such as scaling, data range and circuit design, are highlighted. We also analyze the performance and compare the solution with a numerical approach.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Emerging Topics in Computing, IEEE Tran

Aerodynamic characteristics of low-aspect-ratio wings at high supersonic Mach numbers

This paper presents some recently obtained data on the aerodynamic characteristics of low-aspect-ratio wings at supersonic Mach numbers of 4.04 and 6.9 and discusses some new methods of predicting the lift and drag of such wings. Data on lifting wings in the Mach number range above 2.5 are not plentiful and most of the available data may be found in NACA RM L51D17, NACA RM L51D30, NACA RM L52D15a, NACA RM L52K19, NACA RM L53D03, and NACA RM L53D30