* In the three linked articles Drs Clarke, Chambers, and Milne deal with the issue of using readmission rates as an outcome indicatorfor hospital care. Thefirst paper assesses thefeasibility ofmeasuring readmission ratesfrom routinely collected Korner data in a study of three districts in North East Thames region and the second, based on a study in one district, whether readmissions may be judg...

In the customary VCG (Vickrey-Clarke-Groves) mechanism truth-telling is a dominant strategy. In this paper we study the sequential VCG mechanism and show that other dominant strategies may then exist. We illustrate how this fact can be used to minimize taxes using examples concerned with Clarke tax and public projects.

In this paper, we establish a new analogue of the classical Bonferroni inequalities and their improvements by Galambos for sums of type ∑ π∈P(U)(−1)(|π| − 1)!f(π) where U is a finite set, P(U) is the partition lattice of U and f : P(U) → R is some suitable non-negative function. Applications of this new analogue are given to counting connected k-uniform hypergraphs, network reliability, and cum...

Due to the importance of the growth of biotechnology in Taiwan, the question of how the operation performance of the industry can be upgraded to sustain its competitive advantages has become an important question for Taiwanese biotechnology insiders. Recently, a growing number of organizations have implemented TQM in order to give them a competitive advantage [Chan, T. H., & Quazi, H. A. (2002)...

Existing bounds on the minimum weight d of the dual 7-ary code of a projective plane of order 49 show that this must be in the range of 75 < d < 99. We use combinatorial arguments to improve this range to 87 < d < 99, noting that the upper bound can be taken to be 91 if the plane has a Baer subplane, as in the desarguesian case. A brief survey of known results for the minimum weight of the dual...

Proof. First note that the map φ is uniquely determined by its components φ11, φ12, φ21, φ22. Indeed, by the universal property of the coproduct M1 ⊕ M2 we see that φ is uniquely determined by the maps φ∗1 := φ◦ι1 and φ∗2 := φ◦ι2. Then from the universal property of the product N1⊕N2 we see that the map φ∗1 is uniquely determined by the maps φ11 = π1 ◦φ∗1 and φ21 = π2 ◦ φ∗1. Similarly, φ∗2 is u...

for −∞ < z < ∞. The properties of this distribution and its generalizations have been studied by several authors. Of particular eminence are the numerous papers on this topic by Professor N. Balakrishnan and his colleagues; see, for example, Balakrishnan [1, 2, 3], Balakrishnan and Aggarwala [4], Balakrishnan et al. [5, 7, 12], Balakrishnan and Chan [6], Balakrishnan and Joshi [8], Balakrishnan...

We consider VC-minimal theories admitting unpackable generating families, and show that in such theories, forking of formulae over a model M is equivalent to containment in global types definable over M , generalizing a result of Dolich on o-minimal theories in [4].

In ring theory, the notion of annihilator is an important tool for studying the structures. Many characterizations and structure theorems can be derived by using this notion. On the other hand, certain classes of rings (e.g., Baer rings and Rickart rings) are defined by considering annihilators ideals. In the present work, we introduce a class of rings which is close to the class of Rickart rin...

While environmental pollution is becoming more and more serious, many countries are adopting policies to control pollution. At the same time, the environmental regulation will inevitably affect economic and social development, especially employment growth. The environmental regulation will not only affect the scale of employment directly, but it will also have indirect effects by stimulating up...