In laboratory medicine, several studies have described the most frequent errors in the different phases of the total testing process, and a large proportion of these errors occur in the pre-analytical phase. Schemes for registration of errors and subsequent feedback to the participants have been conducted for decades concerning the analytical phase by External Quality Assessment (EQA) organizat...

Payment for Performance (P4P) schemes by which physicians get a financial reward as long as they reach quality and efficiency targets provided by regulator have become increasingly popular in recent years in OECD countries (1) : in 2012, P4P program for primary care physicians were implemented in about 15 OECD countries. In the US, the number of P4P schemes has grown spectacularly, from 39 in 2...

Royal Albert Hall (June 28) ; and the League of Mercy Fete in the Royal Botanic Gardens (June 30). There is a growing demand from leading tradesmen, both in the central area and in the boroughs, for supplies of collecting-boxes, Combined Appeal stamps, button-badges and rosettes, all of which will be put on sale. Distribution is being effected through the mayoral and other committees. London om...

The introduction of complex land surface parameterization schemes into regional climate models (RCMs) has been focused on improving the modeling of land surface feedbacks to the atmosphere. As such the modeling of streamflow was considered a by-product of the water balance and until recently it received relatively little attention. Comparison of four RCMs (RegCM2, MM5/BATS, MM5/SHEELS and MM5/O...

This paper is a continuation of the work initiated in [2] by M. Luby andC. Rackoff on Feistel schemes used as pseudorandom permutation generators.The aim of this paper is to study the qualitative improvements of “strong pseu-dorandomness” of the Luby-Rackoff construction when the number of roundsincrease. We prove that for 6 rounds (or more), the success probability of the<l...

Evolutionary developmental biology is based on the principle that evolution arises from hereditable changes in development. Most of this new work has centred on changes in the regulatory components of the genome. However, recent studies (many of them documented in this volume) have shown that development also includes interactions between the organism and its environment. One area of interest c...

Grade II gliomas are slowly growing primary brain tumors that affect mostly young patients. Cytotoxic therapies (radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy) are used initially only for patients having a bad prognosis. These therapies are planned following the "maximum dose in minimum time" principle, i. e. the same schedule used for high-grade brain tumors in spite of their very different behavior. These...

Cogeneration power plants simultaneously generate power and usable heat in a single, integrated system, which achieves a degree of overall efficiency that is much greater compared to electricity production alone. This makes better use of energy conversion and reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Combined heat and power production is already relatively common in Europe while it is less common, for ...