Background In 2004, the health system in Iran initiated an organizational reform aiming to increase the autonomy of teaching hospitals and make them more decentralized. The policy led to the formation of a board of trustees in each hospital and significant modifications in hospitals’ financing. Since the reform aimed to improve its predecessor policy (implementation of hospital autonomy began i...

Trust management is becoming crucial in open systems because they may contain malicious and untrustworthy service providers. Trust management in multi-agent systems (used to model open systems) has gained a huge amount of attention from researchers in recent years. In our previous work, we proposed a generic agent trust management framework, called ScubAA, which is based on the theory of Human ...

This article summarizes the current financial condition and actuarial status of the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program, as shown in the 1987 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees. The Trustees note that the assets of the OASI and DI Trust Funds, on a combined basis, will be sufficient to permit the timely payment of OASDI benefits for many years into the future, on th...

Although ecological risk assessments (ERAs) and natural resource damage assessments (NRDAs) are performed under different statutory and regulatory authorities, primarily the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), as currently practiced, the activities typically overlap. ERAs performed as part of the response process (typically by the US Environmental Prot...

This paper outlines a conceptual architecture for an autonomic middleware component designed to provide application-independent access control for use in largescale highly-dynamic computing environments. In such environments, most notably ambient/pervasive computing environments, centralised access control policy determination is impossible or inadvisable because of the complexity of trust rela...

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) annually publishes two measures of Medicare's administrative expenditures. One of these appears in the reports of the Medicare Boards of Trustees and the other in the National Health Expenditure Accounts (NHEA). The latest trustees' report indicates Medicare's administrative expenditures are 1 percent of total Medicare spending, while the lat...