Assessing physician performance is important for the purposes of measuring and improving quality of service and reducing healthcare delivery costs. In recent years, physician performance scorecards have been used to provide feedback on individual measures; however, one key challenge is how to develop a composite quality index that combines multiple measures for overall physician performance eva...

We say that a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) A is composite if there are DFAs A1, . . . ,At such that L(A) = ⋂t i=1 L(Ai) and the index of every Ai is strictly smaller than the index of A. Otherwise, A is prime. We study the problem of deciding whether a given DFA is composite, the number of DFAs required in a decomposition, decompositions that are based on abstractions, methods to prove ...

The Vancouver Composite Index fell by over 25% in less than six weeks during spring 1997 as the junior mining sector collapsed. We argue that this market collapse was triggered by the failure of Bre-X Minerals when that company’s Indonesian claims, previously believed to contain the world’s largest gold deposit, were shown to be pure fraud. Our event study, based on market returns for the Vanco...

This paper reproduces the performance of a geometric average Spot Energy Index by investing only in a subset of stocks from the Dow Jones Composite Average, the FTSE 100 and Bovespa Composite indexes, and in two pools that include only energy-sector stocks from the US and the UK respectively. Daily data are used and the index-tracking problem for passive investment is addressed with two evoluti...

We investigate the strength and the direction of information transfer in the U.S. stock market between the composite stock price index of stock market and prices of individual stocks using the transfer entropy. Through the directionality of the information transfer, we find that individual stocks are influenced by the index of the market.

Effective conductivity of a 2D random composite is expressed in the form of long series in the volume fraction of ideally conducting disks. The problem of a direct reconstruction of the critical index for superconductivity from the series is solved with good accuracy, for the first time. General analytical expressions for conductivity in the whole range of concentrations are derived and compare...

Impact of investor sentiments on mean variance trade off with respect to Pakistani market has been investigated in this paper. Composite index for Investor Sentiments for Karachi stock exchange is developed. The six measures incorporated in the composite investor sentiment index are closed end fund discount, KSE turnover, the number of IPOs, average first day returns of IPOs, equity share in ne...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate sexual function in midlife women taking low-dose oral estradiol or venlafaxine for hot flushes. METHODS In an 8-week randomized controlled trial among women aged 40-62 years, sexual function was compared between 0.5 mg oral estradiol per day or 75 mg venlafaxine per day (both compared with a placebo). Measures included composite and six domain scores from the Female Sexu...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate the influence of thickness on the optical properties of two enamel shade composites, one with a high refractive index and one traditional. METHODS A medium value enamel shade was selected from the resin composites Enamel Plus HRi (UE2) and Enamel Plus HFO (GE2). Enamel Plus HRi is a high refractive index composite. Samples were fabricated in five different thicknesses: ...

The term ‘digital divide’ refers to the gap between individuals, households, businesses and geographic areas with regard to both their opportunities to access Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and to their use of Internet. Composite indicators are regularly used for measuring the divide and in benchmarking the country’s performance. But often it creates controversies regarding th...