Deficiencies in quality have been widely documented in the U.S. health care system. A recent component of purchaser response to these data has been the pursuit of quality-based purchasing (QBP). However, purchasers have been uncertain both how to measure quality and what incentives to offer to stimulate performance improvement. Furthermore, there has been dispute in the literature about the val...

We consider a simple pure exchange economy with two assets, one riskless, yielding a constant return on investment, and one risky, paying a stochastic dividend. Trading takes place in discrete time and in each trading period the price of the risky asset is fixed by imposing market clearing condition on the sum of traders individual demand functions. We assume that agents’ strategies are consist...

The state of the art of reconstruction of the axonal tracts in the central nervous system (CNS) using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is reviewed. This relatively new technique has generated much enthusiasm and high expectations because it presently is the only approach available to non-invasively study the three-dimensional architecture of white matter tracts. While there is no doubt that DTI f...

In this study, the performance of ordinal GA-based trading strategies is evaluated under six classes of time series model, namely, the linear ARMA model, the bilinear model, the ARCH model, the GARCH model, the threshold model and the chaotic model. The performance criteria employed are the winning probability, accumulated returns, Sharpe ratio and luck coefficient. Asymptotic test statistics f...

The use of knowledge-based machine translation with controlled technical text can produce high-quality translations. However, building and maintaining knowledge bases can require significant time and effort, since they typically involve handcoding of semantic preferences. When a system can't disambiguate based on semantic preferences, it can initiate interactive disambiguation with the author t...

In this research, efficiency of Iranian forest and rangeland decision making unit was assessed using non-parametric method. Inputs and outputs determined by field research and with applying a Delphi method the final input and output variables selected. Forty five wood-producing units (forestry plans) in three northern Iranian province were studied using Data Envelopment Analysis. The efficiency...

the newly administered iranian ph.d. program entrance exam (ppee) is supposed to have had different washback effects on university curriculums. this qualitative study examined the effects of the new tefl ppee on the applicants’ study plans and strategies from the points of view of both iranian university instructors and applicants. to this end, we conducted in-depth interviews with 10 experienc...

information technology has been considered the greatest innovation of the new era because it has a lot of fruitful social economic and scientific impacts. e-marketing joins creative and technical aspects of the internet, including: design, development, advertising and sales. this research aims to design an e-marketing framework by using meta-synthesis method. in order to design and explain a co...

The paper proposes an application of Empirical Mode Decomposition in technical analysis. The EMD-candlestick is designed to replace the traditional candlestick as the signal generators in technical trading strategies to improve the profitability. We investigate a representative set of technical trading strategies, including moving average, trading range break-out, relative strength index, and i...