BACKGROUND Pancreatic cancer outcomes vary considerably among hospitals. Assessing pancreatic cancer care by using quality indicators could help reduce this variability. However, valid quality indicators are not currently available for pancreatic cancer management, and a composite assessment of the quality of pancreatic cancer care in the United States has not been done. METHODS Potential qua...

In this paper we investigate (1) the measurement of health status for both adults and children) (2) the importance of health status measures in demand analysis for medical care) and (3) attitudinal measures toward health care and their role in demand for medical care. Finally we develop a structural model of demand for medical care) incorporating a number of health status measures as indicators...

The effect of adding xanthan gum and locust bean gum at low concentrations (0.15% w/w) on the freeze/ thaw stability of white sauces prepared with native starches from four different sources (corn, waxy corn, potato, and rice) was investigated. Linear viscoelastic properties were taken as structural indicators and these and syneresis as indicators of the freeze/thaw stability of the sauces. The...

The fact that the usage of metrics at early phases of OO development can help designers make better decisions is gaining relevance. Moreover, the necessity of having early indicators of external quality attributes, such as understandability, based on early metrics is growing. There exists several works related to metrics for UML structural diagrams such as class diagrams. However, UML behaviora...

This paper describes a system that uses evolutionary computation to evolve tower-like structures. The construction takes place in a computer simulated gravitational environment. The evolution targets the morphology; each chromosome carries structural description of the entity. Fitness functions evaluate the structural integrity and “goodness” of each individual based on indicators such as joint...

BACKGROUND Two new sets of stratification indicators--family's material affluence and adolescent's personal social position- were compared with traditional indicators of familial social position based on parental occupation and education for their ability to detect health inequality among adolescents. METHODS Survey data were collected in the Adolescent Health and Lifestyle Survey in 2003 fro...

We analyse the evolution of the Indian economy over the past six decades, particularly identifying structural breaks. We find that usually there has been a gradual change in the indicators of the economy .The growth rate of per capita GDP after falling in the decade mid 60s to mid 70s has been accelerating gradually since then. Since 1991 exports have played an important role in this growth. Th...

The increasing complexity of legal systems has many origins, which are worth a deeper analysis. This paper is an attempt to unveil the complexity in legal texts driven by structural, lexical and syntactical properties. Thereby we transferred established quantitative methods from structural network analysis and linguistics into the domain of legal text analysis. Based on 3 553 German laws, respe...