background: in 2012, switzerland changed from retrospective to prospective hospital payment based on diagnosis related groups (drgs), following the example of the united states, australia, and germany. as in these countries, the objective of this transition was to motivate hospitals to improve efficiency by making them bear financial risk to some extent.objective: this contribution seeks to fin...

BACKGROUND Numerous interventions have been shown to increase physical activity but have not been ranked by effectiveness or cost. PURPOSE This study provides a systematic review of physical activity interventions and calculates their cost-effectiveness ratios. METHODS A systematic literature review was conducted (5579 articles) and 91 effective interventions promoting physical activity wer...

A novel method is described for obtaining superior classification performance over a variable range of classification costs. By analysis of a set of existing classifiers using a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, a set of new realisable classifiers may be obtained by a random combination of two of the existing classifiers. These classifiers lie on the convex hull that contains the o...

The meal patterns of 2 cats in a laboratory habitat with variable foraging costs were examined in a foraging paradigm in which subjects could initiate meals at any time by completing a predetermined number of bar presses (the procurement price) and then could eat any amount. From meal to meal, the procurement price either was fixed or varied among a geometric series of five prices. As the fixed...

Encoders and decoders for variable-length codes such as Huffman Codes can be costly to implement. This paper describes low-cost encoder and decoder for binary variable-length codes that is simple to implement when decoding speed is not an issue.

In recent years, the application of Activity-Based Costing in Port industry has been deeply researched in theory and practice, but researchers only concentrate on the bulk and general cargo’s ABC in loading and unloading operations and there is little about the liquids and chemicals’. Based on the liquids and chemicals’ handling process and the particularity of their cost accounting, the paper ...

The berth allocation problem is to allocate space along the quayside to incoming ships at a container terminal in order to minimize some objective function. We consider minimization of total costs for waiting and handling as well as earliness or tardiness of completion, for all ships. We assume ships can arrive at any given time, i.e., before or after the berths become available. The resulting ...

This paper introduces a programmable delay line circuit suitable for Impulse Radio Ultra Wideband (IR-UWB) architectures. When dealing with Impulse Radio Technologies, fine synchronisation used to be related to relative high cost devices. The low cost, low power architecture reported, has been tested into a COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) breadboard, but is being easily implemented into Silicon...

We present an utility accrual real-time scheduling algorithm called VCUA, for tasks whose execution times are functions of their starting times. We model such variable execution times with variable cost functions (or VCF). The algorithm considers application activities that are subject to time/utility function time constraints, VCFs, and the multi-criteria scheduling objective of assuring that ...