Incentive payments are a theoretically appealing complement to nursing home quality assurance systems that rely on regulatory enforcement. However, the practical aspects of incentive program design are not yet well understood. After reviewing the rationale for incentive approaches and recent State and Federal initiatives, the article considers a basic program design issue: creating an index of ...

Reliable measurements of effluent quality are important for different operational tasks such as process monitoring, online simulation, and advanced control in the wastewater treatment process (WWTP). A kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) and extreme learning machine (ELM) based ensemble soft sensing model for effluent quality prediction was proposed. KPCA was used to extract nonlinear fe...

In modern electrical power systems, electricity is produced at generating stations, transmitted through a high voltage network, and finally distributed to consumers. Due to the rapid increase in power demand, electric power systems have developed extensively during the 20th century, resulting in today’s power industry probably being the largest and most complex industry in the world. Electricit...

This article describes a risk-adjustment method for profiling hospitals and physicians on key measures of clinical quality using readily available administrative data. By comparing actual and expected rates of mortality, complications, readmissions, and patient safety events, this method enables providers to identify both favorable and adverse outcomes performance.

Fundamental to the study and practice of nutrition is the understanding that nutritional status and nutrition-related health are not just the result of exposure to individual nutrients found in the diet, but also the complexity of interactions between nutrients and non-nutrient components in foods. This has prompted the relatively recent study of diet quality as an index for assessing the relat...

Introduction The quality of voltage waveforms is nowadays an issue of the utmost importance for power utilities, electric energy consumers and also for the manufactures of electric and electronic equipment. The proliferation of nonlinear loads connected to contemporary power systems has triggered a growing concern with power quality issues. The inherent operation characteristics of these loads ...

The unbalanced non-sinusoidal operation represents a common steady state of the modern distribution power grids. The unbalance is produced by supplying of unbalanced loads or by different unbalanced faults. According to the existing norms, this operating state is evaluated using the well-known negative and zero unbalance factors that practically keep out the harmonic pollution that coexists wit...

Aquatic ecosystem biomonitoring tools are largely lacking for many developing countries, resulting in adoption of tools developed from other countries/regions. In many instances, however, the applicability of adopted tools to the new system has not been explicitly evaluated. The objective of this study was to test the applicability of foreign diatom-based water quality assessment indices to urb...

T his study investigates the relationship between quality of environment and democracy among different countries over the period of 2002 - 2012. Democracy and accumulated democracy indices have been considered as political inequality variables influencing the quality of the environment among different countries in the reduced form of Kuznets’ environmental curve (EKC) hypotheses mode...

We investigated the power of near infrared (NIR) analysis for the quantitative assessment of soil quality in a wildfire chronosequence. The effect of wildfire disturbance and soil engineering activity of earthworms on soil organic matter quality was first assessed with principal component analysis of NIR spectra. Three soil quality indices were further calculated using an adaptation of the meth...