Capabilities and utilities

Plumbing and Other Utilities

Plumbing is a new mechanism for interprocess communication in Plan 9, specifically the passing of messages between interactive programs as part of the user interface. Although plumbing shares some properties with familiar notions such as cut and paste, it offers a more general data exchange mechanism without imposing a particular user interface. The core of the plumbing system is a program call...

Utilities , Preferences and Choice

Investments and forward utilities

This paper proposes a new approach for portfolio allocation. The novel concept of forward dynamic utility is introduced. General classes of such utilities are constructed by combining the local variational utility input with the market dynamics represented by multidimensional Ito process. Explicit closed form expressions for optimal allocations are obtained. They depend exclusively on the optim...

The Health Utilities Index 1 the Health Utilities Index

The Health Utilities Index (HUI) system is a generic, preference-based measure of health status intended for use in clinical outcomes measurement, in health surveys, in program planning and resource allocation. The utility scores provide a summary index of health-related quality of life on a zero to 1.0 scale; they may be used in cost-utility analyses to calculate quality-adjusted life years an...

Scorecards for Utilities and Regulators

Benchmarking is one of several regulatory tools to encourage continuous improvement of water utility operations and to evaluate utility performance. Regulators of water utilities can use benchmarking, in conjunction with incentive regulation, to reward efficient utilities that provide high quality service. However, benchmarking requires careful planning. This article, the fourth in a series abo...