In Ghana, about 73% of households rely on solid fuels for cooking. Over 13,000 annual deaths are attributed to exposure to indoor air pollution from inefficient combustion. In this study, assessment of thermal efficiency, emissions and total global warming impact of three cookstoves commonly used in Ghana was completed using IWA water boiling test (WBT) protocol. Statistical averages of three r...

Yamada, Tomoaki—A politically feasible social security reform with a two-tier structure This paper investigates the welfare implications and political feasibility of social security reforms with a two-tier structure in Japan. We evaluate social security reforms from two points of view: (i) the ex-ante expected value of future generations, and (ii) whether current generations prefer reform to th...

BACKGROUND The primary purpose of this study was to rank US hospitals performing coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery on Medicare beneficiaries into 4 performance tiers and determine if there were overall and sex-specific differences in the risk-adjusted mortality rates across performance tiers. METHODS A retrospective analysis was done using a Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (ME...

The purpose of this paper is to present the design of a secure and more advanced authentication scheme for executing secure financial transactions over Internet. There has been continuous change in technology day by day, so security mechanisms like authentication schemes are also required to be updated. The security measures have very crucial role in banking and financial sector. For any intern...

Integration of emerging technologies and design patterns into the three-tier client-server architecture is required in order to provide a scalable and flexible architecture for novice to sophisticated portal user groups. The ability to provide user customizable portal interfaces is rapidly becoming commonplace and is driving the expectations of researchers and scientists in the scientific commu...

We have used five cats to investigate the effects of two distinct visual cortex lesions on the segregation of two different texture stimuli. The ablation of areas 17 and 18 (tier I) severely impaired the segregation between textures made of line elements differing in orientation, but spared the segregation between annulus and dot textures. In contrast, the ablation of those areas receiving dire...

Acoustic vehicle classification is a difficult problem due to the non-stationary nature of the signals, and especially the lack of strong harmonic structure for most civilian vehicles with highly muffled exhausts. Acoustic signatures will also vary largely depending on speed, acceleration, gear position, and even the aspect angle of the sensor. The problem becomes more complicated when the depl...

BACKGROUND Medication non-adherence is prevalent. We assessed the effect of electronic prescribing (e-prescribing) with formulary decision support on preferred formulary tier usage, copayment, and concomitant adherence. METHODS We retrospectively analyzed 14,682 initial pharmaceutical claims for angiotensin receptor blocker and inhaled steroid medications among 14,410 patients of 2189 primary...

When enterprise applications are consolidated on shared platforms, meeting application-level quality of service (QoS) goals becomes a challenge because complex interactions and dependencies exist among the components of multi-tier applications. Current consolidation tools just use system utilization metrics, and do not consider such dependencies when allocating resources to individual applicati...

A tiered approach for the assessment of human health risks of soil contamination with asbestos has been developed. When in a specific tier the human health risk can not be rejected, the assessment in the following tier has to be performed. Because the risks of asbestos are caused by inhalation of asbestos fibers, the emission of fibers from soil to air is the determining factor. In Tier 0 of th...