Kergoat and Lovasik [(1994). Ophthalmic and Physiological Optics, 14, pp. 401-407] reported that a transient decrease in ocular perfusion pressure (OPP) decreased the neural function in the test eye but increased the responsivity in the contralateral untouched (control) eye. Here the hypothesis tested was that a transient unilateral vascular stress would induce an increase in the Pulsatile Ocul...

CONTEXT Medicare's Incentive Payment (MIP) program provides a 10% bonus payment to providers who treat Medicare patients in rural and urban areas where there is a shortage of generalist physicians. PURPOSE To examine the experience of Alaska, Idaho, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Washington with the MIP program. We determined the program's utilization and which types of physicians receiv...

PURPOSE To report a new apparatus for noncontact, two-dimensional measurement of retinal microcirculation using the laser speckle phenomenon and to demonstrate that this apparatus can document known or expected changes in retinal blood flow. METHODS The rabbit fundus was illuminated by an argon (blue) laser spot (0.62 x 0.62 mm), and its image speckle was detected with an image sensor. The di...

Waste from agricultural products represents a disposal liability, which needs to be addressed. Palm oil is the most widely traded edible oil globally, and its production generates 85 million tons of aqueous by-products annually. This aqueous stream is rich in phenolic antioxidants, which were investigated for their composition and potential in vitro biological activity. We have identified three...

Costa Rica’s PSA (Pagos por Servicios Ambientales) environmental services payments, started in 1997, were the pioneers. Broadly cited, they have led to numerous suggestions that others emulate the PSA approach. Yet the PSA program has itself evolved over time. Following earlier work (Sanchez et al. 2007 and Pfaff et al. 2008 on PSA 1997-2000), we can evaluate here whether a change in implementa...

one-third of this increase, however, represented a shift from the money payment to the vendor payment. Although vendor payments for medical care for the four categories combined went up in all but six of the 42 States that made such payments in one or more of these programs, almost three-fourths of the total increase occurred in eight States.5 For the country as a whole, the increase in vendor ...