Despite the enactment of significant changes to the Medicare program in 1997, Medicare's Hospital Insurance trust fund is projected to be exhausted just as the baby boom enters retirement. To address Medicare's financial difficulties, a number of reform proposals have been offered, including several to individualize Medicare financing and benefits. These proposals would attempt to increase Me...

Despite increasing concerns regarding the prevalence of violent behaviour in mainstream mental health settings, the impressive body of forensic research on violence risk assessment has thus far had only limited impact on front-line general mental health practice. The common objection raised by clinicians that risk assessment tools lack utility for clinical practice may contribute to this. The p...

The open source software (OSS) model is a fundamentally new and revolutionary way to develop software. The success of the OSS model is also setting the stage for a structural change in the software industry; it is beginning to transform software industry from manufacturing to a service industry. Despite the success of the OSS model, for-profit organizations are having difficulty building a busi...

The more common use of instrumentation in impact testing opened up the possibility to apply fracture mechanics testing methods to polymers at moderately high impact rates. Tensile impact testing offers some advantages over the more common three-point bending and compact tension geometries. Most importantly the dynamic effects encountered at (moderately) high impact rates are less significant du...

Predicting the effect of persuasion campaigns is difficult, as belief changes may cascade through a network. In recent years, political campaigns have adopted micro-targeting strategies that segment voters into fine-grained clusters for more specific targetting. At present, there is little evidence that explores the efficiency of this method. Through an Agent-Based Model, the current paper prov...

The battle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prevent the most dangerous consequences of climate change will be waged across multiple fronts, including efforts to increase energy efficiency; efforts to deploy nonfossil fuel sources, including renewable and nuclear energy; and investment in adaptation to reduce the impacts of the climate change that will occur regardless of the actions we ta...

Detecting early signs of autism is essential for timely diagnosis and initiation of effective interventions. Several research groups have initiated prospective studies of high-risk populations including infant siblings, to systematically collect data on early signs within a longitudinal design. Despite the potential advantages of prospective studies of young children at high-risk for autism, th...

Early language exposure is essential to developing a formal language system, but may not be sufficient for communicating effectively. To understand a speaker's intention, one must take the speaker's perspective. Multilingual exposure may promote effective communication by enhancing perspective taking. We tested children on a task that required perspective taking to interpret a speaker's intende...

The deployment of agent societies —as complex systems— in dynamic and unpredictable settings brings forth critical issues concerning their design. Organizational models have been advocated to specify open systems in dynamic environments in order to accomplish the need to represent regulating structures explicitly and independently from acting components (or agents). Despite several frameworks h...

Description of Polynomial Cancellation Coded OFDM system OFDM is the modulation method chosen for many high-speed digital communication systems. This is despite OFDM having a number of well-known disadvantages that include extreme sensitivity to frequency offset, large out-of-band power, and high peak-to-mean power ratio. One of the often-quoted advantages of OFDM is that by using a cyclic pref...