The many audiences for information about the quality of health care have different and sometimes conflicting interests and priorities. This is reflected in the diversity of current efforts to use health care data to identify, measure, and demonstrate quality. The author surveys three of these approaches in depth: (1) the professional approach, which relies on the actions of private-sector accre...

The main institutions responsible for governing international trade and health-the World Trade Organization (WTO), which replaced the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1995, and WHO-were established after World War 2. For many decades the two institutions operated in isolation, with little cooperation between them. The growth and expansion of world trade over the past half centur...

In expository discourse, listeners ask questions in response to unsatisfactory explanations. A system that explains interactively must be able to recognize how to elaborate its answer to produce an explanation that meets a listener’s informational needs. Sometimes, listeners ask questions that digress from the purpose of the discussion. Therefore, a system that provides interactive explanations...

Two issues may have a tremendous impact on the adequacy of retirement income for American workers. The first is the growth of 401(k) pension plans, which allow participants to contribute, before taxes, a portion of their salary to a qualified retirement account.1 By 1998, the most recent year that published information is available, 401(k) plans accounted for about 41 percent of all pension pla...

The Health Reform Monitoring Survey (HRMS) was launched in 2013 as a mechanism to obtain timely information on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) during the period before federal government survey data for 2013 and 2014 will be available. Based on a nationally representative, probability-based Internet panel, the HRMS provides quarterly data for approximately 7,400 nonelderly adults and 2,400 childr...

in iran, new centralization characteristic, especially during pahlavi dynasty, has been convergence and its vast use in bureaucracy. historical sociological studies have consensus on the issues of centralization, power centralization, and political sovereignty in iran; however, these issues have some divisional interruptions and different levels of strength in some parts of the history. this es...

Sustainable development is a Controversial concept which has been considered over the three decades. It is comprehensive development and includes all of dimensions as “economic’’, “social’’ and ‘‘environmental’’. In economic objective, it requires substantial economic change that can be brought about by investment and trade. They are effective factors of sustainable developm...

Ethnopharmacologists are scientists and anthropologists that study indigenous medicines and healing practices, and who often develop new therapies and medicines for wider use. Ethnopharmacologists do fieldwork with indigenous peoples in traditional societies, where they encounter a wide range of cultural values and varying ideas about the nature of property relations. This poses difficulties fo...

SUMMARY The goal of the Climate Collaboratorium project is to harness the collective intelligence of thousands of people around the world to address one of the most important problems confronting humanity today: global climate change. Inspired by systems like Wikipedia and Linux, the project will develop a global, on-line forum in which people can create, analyze, and ultimately select detailed...