Investments in the extension of health insurance coverage, the strengthening of public health services, as well as primary care and better hospitals, highlights the emerging role of healthcare as part of China's new growth regime, based on an expansion of services, and redistributive policies. Such investments, apart from their central role in terms of relief for low-income people, serve to reb...

BACKGROUND While atrial fibrillation is a recognized risk factor for stroke, contemporary data on trends in stroke incidence after the diagnosis of atrial fibrillation are scarce. METHODS AND RESULTS Olmsted County, MN residents with incident atrial fibrillation or atrial flutter (collectively referred to as AF) from 2000 to 2010 were identified. Cox regression determined associations of year...

I discuss the physics reach of a fixed-target charm experiment which can reconstruct >10 charm decays, three orders of magnitude beyond the largest extant sample. Such an experiment may run at Fermilab shortly after the Year 2000. In addition to “programmatic” charm physics such as spectroscopy, lifetimes, and tests of QCD, this “Charm2000” experiment will have significant sensitivity to new ph...

The Image Reduction and Analysis Facility is a scientific image processing package widely used throughout the astronomical community. IRAF has been developed and distributed by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona since the early 1980’s. Other observatories and projects have written many dozens of layered external application packages. More than ten thousand journal art...

JPEG2000 is the new standard for the compression of still images. Its objective and subjective image quality performance is superior to existing standards. In this paper the Part I of the JPEG2000 standard is presented in brief, and its implementation complexity on different computer platforms is reported.

In the terms of operational calculus the probability characteristics of direct and reverse residual renewal time of alternating renewal process, where renewal time depends on life-time, are found. 1. Definitions, Motivations and Formulation of the Problem 1.1 According to [1] let’s consider a system which fails after random life-time X1 and is fully renewed after the lapse of random time Y1. Th...

Despite the enormous media coverage that the issue of year 2000 (Y2K) readiness has received in recent months, the focus of that coverage has been restricted almost exclusively to technological aspects. Non-technical issues have tended to be either ignored completely or given very little attention. Most importantly, not much is known about the organisational processes of preparing to face this ...