BACKGROUND Implementing health improvement is often perceived as diverting resource away from schools' core business, reflecting an assumption of a "zero-sum game" between health and education. There is some evidence that health behaviors may affect young people's educational outcomes. However, associations between implementation of school health improvement and educational outcomes remains und...

Under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Act of 1967 the Health Care Financing Administration's proficiency-testing requirement applies to approximately 12,000 hospital, reference, and large-clinic laboratories in the United States. The Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene is approved by the Health Care Financing Administration to provide proficiency testing in all specialties and subspecialt...

Traditional quality-control methods are effective for detecting systematic error caused by deterioration of reagents or instruments, but ineffective for detecting sporadic error, which is more likely to occur in low-volume testing environments. Decentralized testing performed by individuals without formal laboratory training has a high potential for sporadic errors. New methods for validating t...

Drastic genetic changes have occurred in many commercial broiler lines during the last years with regard to performance. This genetic improvement needs a corresponding adjustment of our knowledge about amino acid nutrition in broilers. Additionally, today broiler feed formulators are not only focused on minimising the costs. They also have to take into consideration environmental issues and the...

CONTEXT Local health departments are increasingly challenged to meet emerging health problems at the same time that they are being challenged with dwindling resources and the demands of accreditation. OBJECTIVE To assess the capacity of Multicounty health districts to serve as "Quality Improvement Collaboratives" and support local health departments to meet accreditation standards. DESIGN T...

Public concern over increasing health-care costs plus dramatized testing errors, has resulted in CLIA '88 with its more stringent rules governing laboratory performance. The purpose of the 1990 U.S. Health Care Financing Administration Final Rules for Proficiency Tests is to separate the quality laboratory from the poorly performing one. From the perspective of total quality management, the cus...

Simulation of crop systems has evolved from a neophyte science into a robust and increasingly accepted discipline. Our vision is that crop systems simulation can serve important roles in agriculture and environment. Important roles and uses of crop systems simulation are in five primary areas: (1) basic research synthesis and integration, where simulation is used to synthesize our understanding...

We show genetic improvement of programs (GIP) can scale by evolving increased performance in a widely-used and highly complex 50 000 line system. GISMOE found code that is 70 times faster (on average) and yet is at least as good functionally. Indeed it even gives a small semantic gain.