Since 1992, the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4) has published cardiac care report cards for coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery providers. We examine the impact of CABG report cards on a provider's aggregate volume and volume by patient severity and then employ a mixed logit model to investigate the matching between patients and providers. We find a reduction in...

The business of supporting legacy electronic systems is challenging due to mismatches between the system support life and the procurement lives of the systems’ constitute components. Legacy electronic systems are threatened with DMSMS-type obsolescence (Diminishing Manufacturing Sources and Material Shortages) and the knowledge of their system support lives based upon existing replenishable and...

Wiki and blog which enable end users to do their works only with a Web browser, since those tools do not require end users to learn some special skills about HTML. Some of end users have also involved in “End-user programming”, by writing some tools to change a behavior of an application to make their personal works more effectively. However, these tools are too difficult to be shared with othe...

The Flinders Technology Associates filter paper cards (FTA(®) cards) can be used to store nucleic acid from various samples and are easily portable. However, RNA is physicochemically unstable compared with DNA, and appropriate methods have not been established for storage and extraction of RNA from FTA(®) cards. The present study investigated the optimum conditions for storage and elution of vi...

During the course of their education, occupational therapy students learn to administer complex structured assessments. For easier administration of these assessments, students design note cards, which then replace cumbersome test manuals during administration. This study considered whether students could learn test administration with equal efficiency and efficacy if given test administration ...

Three different quantum cards which are non-orthogonal quantum bits are sent to two different players, Alice and Bob, randomly. Alice receives one of the three cards, and Bob receives the remaining two cards. We find that Bob could know better than Alice does on guessing Alice’s card, no matter what Bob chooses to measure his two cards collectively or separately. We also find that Bob’s best st...

Card-based protocols that are based on a deck of physical cards achieve secure multi-party computation with information-theoretic secrecy. Using existing AND, XOR, NOT, and copy protocols, one can naively construct a secure computation protocol for any given (multivariable) Boolean function as long as there are plenty of additional cards. However, an explicit sufficient number of cards for comp...

Various traps were evaluated for capture of western flower thrips, Franklinella occidentalis (Pergande). More thrips were attracted to blue sticky cards compared with yellow or white cards. With the addition of blue light emitting diodes (LEDs) thrips numbers on blue cards increased 2.2 fold. The numbers of thrips caught per 10cm on blue sticky cups were 2.4 times more than on blue sticky cards...

This report considers the technical features of smart cards and how they affect the way in which smart cards might be used in the health sector. This is an important issue since the government has highlighted smart cards as a likely means of improving patients' access to the NHS. We seek to contribute to the debate by undertaking a review of the technology and predicting technical development o...