Recycling schemes are being used worldwide to reduce the impact of municipal waste. Those using public funds are usually obliged to set performance indicators by which the standards of such schemes can be measured. In the UK, a set of statutory Best Value Performance Indicators (BVPI) must be reported annually, such as the Quality of Fair Access, which monitors the public's access to recycling ...

A key element in the construction of a physician fee schedule is the underlying relative value scale (RVS). The focus in this article is on the development and comparison of RVS's based on alternative data sources and construction methods. Results suggest that medical procedures' values are preserved across alternative charge-based RVS's. Some differences are observed, however, when comparing p...

Humans often slow down after mistakes (post-error slowing [PES]), but the neural mechanism and adaptive role of PES remain controversial. We studied changes in the neural mechanisms of decision making after errors in humans and monkeys that performed a motion direction discrimination task. We found that PES is mediated by two factors: a reduction in sensitivity to sensory information and an inc...

In Table 2, the matched and unmatched samples and their values have been combined. Please see the correct Table 2 here. Copyright: © 2015 Arriagada et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

The elderly population in the United States is increasing exponentially in tandem with risk for frailty. Frailty is described by a clinically significant state where a patient is at risk for developing complications requiring increased assistance in daily activities. Frailty syndrome studied in geriatric patients is responsible for an increased risk for falls, and increased mortality. In effort...

Evaluating the fit of a structural equation model via bootstrap requires a transformation of the data so that the null hypothesis holds exactly in the sample. For complete data, such a transformation was proposed by Beran and Srivastava (1985) for general covariance structure models and applied to structural equation modeling by Bollen and Stine (1992) . An extension of this transformation to m...

Background: There has been considerable development in the clinometric of stroke. But, researcher is concerned that some scales are too generic, inherently and the insight may not be provided. The current study was conducted to determine which scale or scales should be used in stroke survivors. Methods: We selected 67 studies which published between January 2010 and December 2018 from Up to d...

Medicare has begun to implement a new payment system for physician services; the system's cornerstone is a resource-based relative value scale (RBRVS) that divides physician services into three components--physician work, practice expense, and malpractice insurance--and calculates a relative value for each component. The relative values for the components are adjusted for geographic differences...

An analytical model for mid-infrared (mid-IR) silicon Raman lasers (SRLs) is developed. The relative intensity noise (RIN) transfer from the pump to the Stokes in the lasers is also investigated. The analytical model can be used as a versatile and efficient tool for analysis, design and optimization of mid-IR SRLs. It is shown that conversion efficiency of 70% is attainable and the low-frequenc...

OBJECTIVE To examine changes in reported functioning over a 12-month follow-up period and predictors of those changes for a cohort of young children enrolled in foster care. DESIGN Data came from a longitudinal follow-up of a cohort of young children entering foster care in one Connecticut region. These data were originally assembled to evaluate the effectiveness of a specialized set of servi...