Technology in the prenatal setting is advancing at an exceptional rate, and these advancements will likely result in major changes to current pregnancy screening and testing paradigms. In Australia, prenatal testing is increasingly becoming a routine part of antenatal care and pregnant women are offered an assortment of screening and diagnostic tests, which give them information about their fet...

Most employees contribute towards the cost of employer-sponsored insurance, despite tax laws that favor zero contributions. Contribution levels vary markedly across firms, and the average contribution (as a percentage of the premium) has increased over time. We offer a novel explanation for these facts: employers raise contribution levels to encourage their employees to obtain coverage from the...

As part of an ongoing multi-year project investigating hospital-based clinical pharmacy services, the variation in clinical pharmacy services among hospitals with various teaching affiliations was studied. Survey documents, completed by the director of pharmacy, were completed for 1597 hospitals, representing 43 percent of the nation’s acute care general medical surgical hospitals. Hospitals we...

One of the main challenges that the telecom industry is currently facing, is how to manage complex personal communication environments. These environments present an increasing number of varied devices such as computers, PDAs, webcams, Home gateway, sensors, etc. This implies a radical change from traditional telecommunication settings, composed of just a few types of standardized terminals. In...

One of the challenges in Service Oriented Computing consists in supporting service discovery and composition according to the so-called non functional properties (NFP). In this paper we propose a linguistic framework to describe NFPs of services independently of the grounding technology by means of semantic Web technologies. In particular, the approach is based on an extension of the Web Servic...

Devices that integrate multiple functions together are popular in consumer electronic markets. Examples include the cellular phone that takes digital pictures and plays MP3’s, the PDA with cell phone, and multi-function office machines. We describe these multi-function devices as fusion products since they fuse together products which traditionally stand alone in the marketplace. In this paper,...

The story of the widow’s oˆering as found in Mark 12:41–44 has long provided the Church with an example of humble devotion to the Lord. Further, it speaks to the people of God about the true nature of giving. Calvin considered this account as providing “a highly useful doctrine, that whatever men oˆer to God ought to be estimated not by its apparent value, but only by the feeling of the heart, ...

As a fundraising method, Initial Coin Offering (ICO) has raised billions of dollars for thousands startups. Existing ICO mechanisms place more emphasis on the short-term benefits maximal while ignoring problem unbalanced token allocation, which negatively impacts subsequent and bad effects introducing new investors resources. We propose mechanism uses concept Gini index very first time as desig...