Background: Informal payments in the health sector of many developing countries are considered as a major impediment to health care reforms. Informal payments are a form of systemic fraud and have adverse effects on the performance of the health system. In this study, the frequency and extent of informal payments as well as the determinants of these payments were investigated in general hospita...

Data from a comparative study of 1975 African American, Puerto Rican, and non-Hispanic White persons age 60 and older in a large Northeastern city were used to investigate the relative contribution of ethnicity and socioeconomic status (SES) to explaining differences in the need for and receipt of informal care. It was hypothesized that differences in disability would be related largely to SES,...

BACKGROUND Informal care is often not included in economic evaluations in healthcare, while the impact of caregiving can be relevant for cost-effectiveness recommendations from a societal perspective. The impact of informal care can be measured and valued with the CarerQol instrument, which measures the impact of informal care on seven important burden dimensions (CarerQol-7D) and values this i...

This paper presents an informal discussion of my attempts to escape the bonds of paper (bad pun). It recalls my experiences with a traditional PC, a PocketPC, and finally a TabletPC. The goal of this paper is to provide an anecdotal form of a “selfethnography” to share with others who have already made, or have future plans that include, exploring moving to a more paperfree environment.

A novel method for understanding the equity of extracurricular learning opportunities within a regional learning ecosystem is presented. We apply the ecosystems concepts of abundance, richness, and evenness to understand the distribution of learning opportunities within the Chicago City of Learning. This analysis highlights the differences in learning opportunities across different neighborhood...

1.1. Description of the Model. For the sake of exposition, we kept the discussion in the main text at a somewhat informal level. Here is a simple extension of the model in the paper which formalizes several issues mentioned there. We consider a specification in which any member of a group might become an attacker, or a victim, or enjoy peace. In each such situation, his “earnings” for that peri...

This column is a forum for discussion of mathematical communities throughout the world, and through all time. Our definition of "mathematical community" is the broadest. We include "schools" of mathematics, circles of correspondence, mathematical societies, student organizations, and informal communities of cardinality greater than one. What we say about the communities is just as unrestricted....

We study the speciic problems concerning the application of reduction rules to algebraic Petri nets. In particular we express the application conditions for the rules by means of term operations and discuss the validity of reduction rules in diierent interpretations of an algebraic net. Thereby the discussion is rather informal, that is we do not add formal proofs of their correctness. Neverthe...