Measuring income related inequality in health and health care: the partial concentration index with direct and indirect standardisation.

The partial concentration index measures income related inequality in health (or health care) after removing the effects of standardising variables which affect health (or health care), are correlated with income but not amenable to policy. When the marginal effects of income are independent of the standardising variables, direct standardisation yields consistent estimates of the partial concentration index. Indirect standardisation underestimates the partial concentration index whenever the standardising variables are correlated with income, irrespective of the signs of the correlation of standardising variables and income with each other and with health. A generalised version of the partial concentration index is proposed for cases where the marginal effect of income depends on the standardising variables. Direct standardisation again yields a consistent estimate but indirect standardisation does not. It is also shown that the direct standardisation procedure can be applied to individual or grouped data and that the conclusions about the merits of direct and indirect standardisation hold for grouped data.Concentration index, inequality, direct standardisation.

On the standardisation of Web service management operations

Given the current interest in TCP/IP network management research towards Web services, it is important to recognise how standardisation can be achieved. This paper mainly focuses on the standardisation of operations and not management information. We state that standardisation should be done by standardising the abstract parts of a WSDL document, i.e. the interfaces and the messages. Operations can vary in granularity and parameter transparency, creating four extreme operation signatures, all of which have advantages and disadvantages

Standardisation and innovation

The paper discusses the relations that exist between standards on the one hand, and innovation and implementation on the other. We will argue that these activities must not be considered separately, especially since standards-based components are going to play an increasingly important role in implementation processes

Reinterpreting Compression in Infinitary Rewriting

Departing from a computational interpretation of compression in infinitary rewriting, we view compression as a degenerate case of standardisation. The change in perspective comes about via two observations: (a) no compression property can be recovered for non-left-linear systems and (b) some standardisation procedures, as a ‘side-effect’, yield compressed reductions

A standardisation proof for algebraic pattern calculi

This work gives some insights and results on standardisation for call-by-name pattern calculi. More precisely, we define standard reductions for a pattern calculus with constructor-based data terms and patterns. This notion is based on reduction steps that are needed to match an argument with respect to a given pattern. We prove the Standardisation Theorem by using the technique developed by Takahashi and Crary for lambda-calculus. The proof is based on the fact that any development can be specified as a sequence of head steps followed by internal reductions, i.e. reductions in which no head steps are involved.Comment: In Proceedings HOR 2010, arXiv:1102.346

KB-WOT Quality assurance acoustics: overview and protocols 2008 version

The quality of IMARES' acoustic surveys proved quite unstable in recent years despite extra effort in this field to bring this instability down. The amount of involved scientists in acoustics has been small compared to demersal survey work. Therefore scientific standards of acoustic surveys are relatively low compared resulting in poor standardisation and minimal transparency. Highly specialised technical work made it even more difficult to exchange scientists within IMARES and the quality of acoustic surveys proved to be very sensitive to loss or change in personnel. This situation improved drastically in 2008 when more scientists got involved in acoustic projects and more effort was put in standardisation

Identifying and using eHealth phobias to implement communication protocols and change cultural and social behaviours in eHealth

Standardisation of validated communication protocols that aid in the adoption of policies, methods and tools in a secure eHealth setting require a significant cultural shift among clinician

The Importance of Being Standard

Contract standardisation in the sovereign debt market saves time and money in preparing documents and endows widely-used terms with a shared public meaning, which in turn saves investors the costs of acquiring information, facilitates secondary market trading and reduces the scope for mistakes in the judicial interpretation of contract terms. Sovereign debt issuers and investors claim to value standardisation and list it as an important contractual objective. Issuers generally insist that their bond contracts are standard and reflect market practice. Variations from past practice and market norm must be explained in disclosure documents and through market outreach. Standardisation is not just part of the fabric of market expectations: international policy initiatives to prevent and manage financial crises rest on the assumption that sovereign debt contracts follow a generally accepted standard. Such initiatives would make no sense in the absence of standardisation. On closer examination, however, it turns out that sovereign bond contracts are not nearly as standardised as market participants and policy makers seem to suggest. It is common to see a handful of negotiated terms embedded in a mish-mash of different generation industry models, sprinkled with bits of creative expression that no one can explain, usually attributed to some long-forgotten lawyers. At least some of the variation appears to be deliberate. But to the extent that it is inadvertent, variation can be costly. For example, it can make contracts internally inconsistent, vulnerable to opportunistic lawsuits and errors of judicial interpretation. Variation could also make debt instruments less liquid, especially during periods of market stress. In this essay, I argue that the problem of inadvertent variation would diminish substantially if sovereign debt markets were to adopt a more centralised, modular approach to contracting, whereby a subset of widely-used non-financial terms would be produced by an authoritative third party (a public, private, or public-private body) and incorporated by reference in individual transactions

Best Practice In Company Standardisation

Though the majority of standards are company standards, scientificstandardisation literature pays hardly any attention to them. In thispaper we describe results from a research project on companystandardisation (Oly & Slob, 1999). The researchers investigated sixchemical and petrochemical industries in the Netherlands: Akzo Nobel,Dow Chemical, DSM, Gasunie, NAM and Shell. These companies havenumerous standards for their installations. Best practice fordeveloping such standards was developed by examining the companies andusing insights from relevant literature. This paper describes thescientific approach used and some of the best practice results.benchmarking;standard;standardization;company standardization;process industry