Abstract Consensus in the international community has grown over the past two years that HIV/AIDS poses a threat to development, security, and economic growth. A few studies over the last ten years have looked at the impact on workers and their employers. With momentum building to prevent new infections and treat those already afflicted, more information is needed to assess economic impact...

With the increase in compute nodes in large compute platforms, a proportional increase in node failures will follow. Many application-based checkpoint/restart (C/R) techniques have been proposed for MPI applications to target the reduced mean time between failures. However, rollback as part of the recovery remains a dominant cost even in highly optimised MPI applications employing C/R technique...

BACKGROUND Development of steroid dependency is one of the difficult problems in the management of children with idiopathic nephrotic syndrome, leading to increased morbidity, complications and cost of treatment. Thus, predicting early in the disease course will be useful in counseling parents and may improve treatment strategy. OBJECTIVES To determine the clinical characteristics that can pr...

the continuous spread of distributed energy resources (ders) such as combined heating and power (chp), diesel generators, boilers and renewable energy sources provide an effective solution to energy related problems to serve the power and heat demands with minimum cost. moreover, the ders may play a significant role for supplying power and heat in rural areas, where grid electricity is not avai...

This paper gives the optimal stack filtering theory under the mean absolute error (MAE) criterion a completely new meaning in terms of the a posteriori Bayes minimum-cost decision. It is shown that under certain conditions this always leads to a rank-order filter (ROF) as the best filter in the minimum MAE sense. It is further shown that for a mostly practical case, the solution becomes the med...

A large generation of baby boomers reaching retirement age, and a steadily decreasing dependency ratio (number of working people per retiree) in most developing countries (and not too far in the future in China and elsewhere) make the economics of healthcare an increasingly important topic in the public arena. One key issue in this area is the price of pharmaceutical products. With cost contain...

This paper reviews the recent debate on the role of aid in providing finance, in changing policies in recipient countries, and in transmitting knowledge. It argues that where economic reforms are recent, as in much of Africa, donors can play an important signalling role. This potential remains untapped because aid allocations have been largely based on political considerations. Donors fear " ai...

Demand Response (DR) is one way of providing more flexibility to the electric power system. Various approaches to enable control of small, thermostatically controlled loads such as air conditioners and Electric Water Heaters (EWHs) have been published in the past. This paper focuses on the optimal dispatch of these flexible loads. A Model Predictive Control is implemented to minimize total cost...

Most efforts to modify the diagnosis-related group (DRG) case classification system focus on variables related to medical management. In this study, we investigated the separate but related natures of medicine and nursing by examining 1,288 adult medical and surgical patients in an urban teaching hospital. The complexity of medical treatment was measured by use of the DRG relative cost weight. ...