U.S. scales back plan for weather satellite program

Cloudy forecast for weather satellite data.

IN THE NEWS FOCUS STORY “WEATHER forecasts slowly clearing up” (9 November, p. 734), R. Kerr nicely summarizes how the growing improvement in prediction is coming from a focus on “more computer power, the assimilation of radar observations, and more physically realistic models.” He emphasizes that better assimilation of satellite data is a key element of improved forecasting. Unfortunately, the...

Composite Health Plan Quality Scales

This study employs exploratory factor analysis and scale construction methods with commercial Health Plan Employers Data Information Set (HEDISS) process of care and outcome measures from 1999 to uncover evidence for a unidimensional composite health maintenance organization (HMO) quality scale. Summated scales by categories of care are created and are then used in a factor analysis that has a ...

The US Federal Tox21 Program: A strategic and operational plan for continued leadership.

The traditional approaches to toxicity testing have posed multiple challenges for evaluating the safety of commercial chemicals, pesticides, food additives/contaminants, and medical products.The challenges include number of chemicals that need to be tested, time and resource intensive nature of traditional toxicity tests, and unexpected adverse effects that occur in pharmaceutical clinical tria...

Rating scales for low back pain.

INTRODUCTION During the past decades several rating scales have been developed to assess the functional status of patients with low back pain. METHODS We performed a search using the keywords 'spine' in combination with 'scoring system', 'scale', 'scores', 'outcome assessment', 'low back pain' and 'clinical evaluation'. RESULTS Twenty-eight scoring systems are currently available for the ev...

Magnetic Program Fusion Plan