Norway has the preconditions for world-class health services. They should enjoy the confidence of all social strata, be organised by the state and provide maximum benefit in exchange for the resources that the community invests in them. Everybody agrees to these general goals. The disagreement pertains to the means. The Minister of Health prescribes a steady course; we believe that a steady cou...

he health care industry is enduring tumultuous upheaval as hospitals, insurers, physician practices and other industry participants reconfigure themselves to thrive in the 21st century. At the same time, health care systems face pressing near-term challenges: deteriorating payer mix, hospital admission declines, reimbursement pressures and the need for massively expensive technology investments...

A perceived advantage of cap-and-trade programs over more prescriptive environmental regulation is that enhanced compliance flexibility and cost effectiveness can make more stringent emissions reductions politically feasible. However, increased compliance flexibility can also result in an inequitable distribution of pollution. We investigate these issues in the context of Southern California’s ...

This paper describes the experience obtained from the conception and implementation of a system for garbage collection in the INESC Comandos platform. The garbage collector is presently being used not only by applications written in C++ but also in Objective-C (both with some minor restrictions) since both languages are supported by the platform. In order to reclaim the memory used by objects, ...

The privacy concerns associated with the popularity of online social networks have given rise to numerous research papers which focus on either storing the data in encrypted form, or decentralizing the network. However, without the incentive of being able to read private data, a centralized system cannot be sustained. A decentralized network does not rely on such incentives and can continue to ...

Researchers Meredith Fowlie (University of California, Berkeley), Stephen Holland (University of North Carolina, Greensboro) and Erin Mansur (Yale University) take a rigorous and sophisticated approach in creating a “what if” scenario within Southern California’s Regional Clean Air Initiatives Market (RECLAIM) program. In their paper, “What do Emissions Markets Deliver and to Whom? Evidence fro...

This paper uses a nearest neighbor matching estimator to examine the effects of an emissions trading program. An important perceived advantage of “cap-and-trade” programs over more traditional, more prescriptive forms of regulation is that enhanced compliance flexibility and cost effectiveness can make more stringent emissions reductions politically feasible. A potential disadvantage is that a ...

Reference counting schemes are suitable for garbage collection on distributed systems because they do not require global information to nd garbage. However, reference counting schemes have a serious drawback: they cannot reclaim garbage which form cyclic structures. In this paper, we propose an extension of the traditional reference counting scheme, group reference counting, which alleviates th...