Companies spend millions of dollars on advertising to boost a brand’s image, while simultaneously spending millions of dollars on promotion that calls attention to price and erodes brand equity. This situation arises because both advertising and promotion are necessary to compete effectively in dynamic markets. Consequently, brand managers need to account for interactions between marketing acti...

Congress has required CMS to expand the Medicare outpatient prospective payment system (PPS) for dialysis services to include as many drugs and diagnostic procedures provided to end stage renal disease (ESRD) patients as possible. One important implementation question is whether dialysis facility case mix should be reflected in payment. We use fiscal year (FY) 2000 cost report and patient billi...

The Minimal-Hitting-Set attack (HS-attack) [10] is a well-known passive intersection attack against Mix-based anonymity systems, applicable in cases where communication behaviour is non-uniform and unknown. The attack allows an observer to identify uniquely the fixed set of communication partners of a particular user by observing the messages of all senders and receivers using a Mix. Whilst the...

1 Grupo CHICO; Universidad de Castilla La Mancha – Spain, [email protected] 2 Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia Spain Abstract Simulation environments requiring the creation of a model previous to the simulation stage raise a challenge for the student. In these environments the realization of the model itself, which is the basis for most part of the richness of the acquired knowledge,...

Complex problem solving can be substantially improved by the reuse of experience from previously solved problems. This requires that case libraries of successful problem solutions are transformed into problem solving knowledge with high utility, i.e. knowledge which causes high savings in search time, high application probability and low matching costs. Planning can be improved by explanation-b...

BACKGROUND: The study is of practical importance for policy makers and family planning (FP) program managers as the profile FP method-mix with a shift from mechanical method intrauterine devices (IUD) to hormonal methods such oral contraceptives (OCs) injectables predicts critical situation maternal child health reflects shortcomings in service delivery program. AIM: purpose current was identif...

One subclass of human computation applications are those directed at tasks that involve planning (e.g. tour planning) and scheduling (e.g. conference scheduling). Existing literature on these systems show that even primitive automated oversight on human contributors help in significantly improving the effectiveness of humans/crowd. In this paper, we explain how the automated oversight used in s...

Optimization mobile radio network planning is a very complex task, as many aspects must be taken into account. Deciding upon the optimum placement for the base stations (BS’s) to achieve best services while reducing the cost is a complex task requiring vast computational resource. This paper introduces the spatial clustering to solve the Mobile Networking Planning problem. It addresses antenna ...