Although the “usual, customary and reasonable” concept may have been reasonable and workable as a basis for [physicians] billing individual patients, it has been a failure as a basis for reimbursement from insurance funds. Because it contains none of the limits or standards that are applied to other services covered by insurance, the charges for medical services have escalated, with little or n...

— Using original data from an area of Zambia with contrasting tenure regimes (state and customary), the hypotheses are tested whether farmers with leases or titles have superior fixed investment and productivity to those without documentation. Results indicate that documentation is indeed associated with greater fixed investment independently of an array of control variables. Productivity also ...

This paper takes polymorphism to the multi-object level. Traditional inheritance, polymorphism, and late binding interact nicely to provide both flexibility and safety – when a method is invoked on an object via a polymorphic reference, late binding ensures that we get the appropriate implementation of that method for the actual object. We are granted the flexibility of using different kinds of...

Design-for-testability is a very important issue in software engineering. It becomes crucial in the case of OO designs where control flows are generally not hierarchical, but are diffuse and distributed over the whole architecture. We introduce the concept of a "testing conflict" when potentially concurrent client/supplier relationships between the same classes along different paths exist in a ...

Let Y = Z× (Z/LZ), where L > 1 is an integer, G = {−e1, e1,−e2, e2} where ej are coordinate vectors. We denote the coordinates of points y ∈ Y by (x(y), s(y)). Consider a cookie environment on Y, that is, for each y ∈ Y, j ∈ N, there is a probability distribution ω(y, j, e) on G. Consider an excited random walk Yn = (Xn, Sn) that is P(Yn+1 − Yn = e|Y1, . . . , Yn) = ω(Yn, ln, e) where ln is the...

Code reuse is a fundamental aspect of object-oriented programs, and in particular, the mechanisms of inheritance and late binding provide great flexibility in code reuse, without semantical limitations other than typecorrectness. However, modular reasoning about late binding and inheritance is challenging, and formal reasoning approaches place semantical restrictions on code reuse in order to p...