The Nation spent $163 billion for health care in fiscal year 1977 or $737 per person, according to preliminary figures compiled by the Health Care Financing Administration. This figure was 12 percent higher than spending for such purposes in the previous 12 months and represented an 8.8-percent share of the GNP. Public spending, which financed 42 percent of all health care in 1977, increased 11...

This paper has two-fold contribution. First, normality of the crop yield residuals are examined using panel statistical procedures accounting for trend, autocorrelation and heteroskedasticity. Second, to evaluate the importance of accounting for spatial and temporal variation on the normality of crop yield residuals, the changes in the skewness, kurtosis and D’Agostino-Pearson 2 (K ) omnibus no...

In this paper, a new, high-speed multiplication algorithm using tree circuit and a novel inner product generator has been presented. In inner product generation step, a new Smith algorithm has been modified. In inner product reduction step, a new array structure has been proposed. In final addition step, a new algorithm has been used. In this work, improvements in multiplication algorithm by us...

Administrative costs account for 25 percent of health care spending, but little is known about the portion attributable to billing and insurance-related (BIR) functions. We estimated BIR for hospital and physician care in California. Data for physician practices came from a mail survey and interviews; for hospitals, from regulatory reporting; and for private insurers, from a consulting company....

OBJECTIVE This report presents national estimates of fertility, family planning, and reproductive health indicators among females 15-44 years of age in the United States in 2002 from Cycle 6 of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). For selected indicators, data are also compared with earlier cycles of the NSFG. METHODS Descriptive tables of numbers and percentages are presented and int...

Despite preventive measures, incidence of burns is still one of the important medical problems. Nowadays, it has been suggested that some strains of probiotic bacteria have beneficial effects in treatment of skin injures like skin wounds. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effects of Lactobacillus acidophilus on second-degree burn wounds in rats. Second-degree burn wounds were ind...

A 24-hour urine collection for 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid (HIAA) is commonly performed to evaluate patients with suspected carcinoid syndrome. However, carcinoids are rare, and elevated results are common even when using an analytically specific method. To characterize this problem, the incidence of elevated results was examined in a population of 947 patient specimens received in a clinical re...

I magine a society with perfect economic equality. Perhaps out of sheer coincidence, the supply and demand for different types of labor happen to produce an equilibrium in which everyone earns exactly the same income. As a result, no one worries about the gap between the rich and poor, and no one debates to what extent public policy should make income redistribution a priority. Because people e...

That tired Ten-Percent claim pops up all the time. Last year, national magazine ads for U.S. Satellite Broadcasting showed a drawing of a brain. Under it was the caption, "You only use 11 percent of its potential." Well, they're a little closer than the ten-percent figure, but still off by about 89 percent. In July 1998, ABC television ran promotional spots for "The Secret Lives of Men," one of...

An information retrieval performance measure that is interpreted as the percent of perfect performance (PPP) can be used to study the effects of the inclusion of specific document features or feature classes or techniques in an information retrieval system. Using this, one can measure the relative quality of a new ranking algorithm, the result of incorporating specific types of metadata or folk...