Commodification of health care is a central tenet of managed care as it functions in the United States. As a result, price, cost, quality, availability, and distribution of health care are increasingly left to the workings of the competitive marketplace. This essay examines the conceptual, ethical, and practical implications of commodification, particularly as it affects the healing relationshi...

With long-lived multi-party connections, resource allocation subsystems in distributed real-time systems or communication networks must be aware of dynamically changing network load in order to reduce call-blocking probabilities. We describe a distributed mechanism to dynamically reallocate (“migrate”) resources without adversely affecting the performance that established connections receive. I...

In 2002, several hospitals in the Tenet system were accused of overbilling Medicare for cardiac surgery. This led to increased scrutiny of so-called outlier payments, which are used to compensate hospitals when actual costs far exceed those anticipated under prospective payment. Since then, the overall proportion of coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) procedures associated with outlier payments...

This article explores effectual processes within home-based online businesses. Our empirical evidence provides a number of refinements to the concept of effectuation in this specific domain. First, the ubiquity of non-proprietary online trading platforms encourages the adoption of effectual approaches and removes the importance of forming proprietary strategic alliances and pre-commitments. Sec...

1. Background. At least from the time of the ancient Greeks, most philosophers have held that some of our knowledge is independent of experience, or “a priori”. Indeed, a major tenet of the rationalist tradition in philosophy was that a great deal of our knowledge had this character: even Kant, a critic of some of the overblown claims of rationalism, thought that the structure of space could be...

Modular-functional decomposition is a fundamental tenet of Computer Science. Cognitive Robotics, with strong roots in Cognitive Science and Biology, replaces modularfunctional decomposition with a more opportunistic approach. Nonetheless, we can extract heuristics with both analytic and synthetic power: architectural principles for neo-modular systems. This paper describes three neo-modular pri...

On July 21, 1998, the nonprofit Allegheny Health, Education, and Research Foundation (AHERF) filed for bankruptcy, with $1.3 billion in debt and 65,000 creditors. The Pittsburgh-based organization had pursued an aggressive strategy of acquiring physicians and hospitals in the Philadelphia area. Its dramatic collapse prompted the entry of a for-profit hospital chain into the Philadelphia market,...

Affective computing (AC) is an emerging field that aspires to narrow the communicative gap between the highly emotional human and the emotionally challenged computer by developing computational systems that recognize and respond to the affective states (for example, moods, emotions) of the user. e basic tenet behind AC systems is that automatically recognizing and responding to a user’s affect...

A central tenet of economics is that individuals respond to incentives. For psychologists and sociologists, by contrast, rewards and punishments are often counterproductive, because they undermine “intrinsic motivation”. We reconcile these two views, showing how performance incentives offered by an informed principal (manager, teacher, parent) can adversely impact an agent’s (worker, child) per...

The Real-time Channel Administration Protocol (RCAP) provides control and administration services for the Tenet real-time protocol suite, a connection-oriented suite of network and transport layer protocols for realtime communication. RCAP performs per-channel reservation of network resources based on worst-case analysis to provide hard guarantees on delay, jitter, and packet loss bounds. It us...