OBJECTIVES This study investigated issues related to the use of environmental control units (ECUs) with persons who have spinal cord injury and disease (SCI/D) to ascertain what, if any, changes are needed to optimize occupational therapy service delivery in this area. METHOD A questionnaire was mailed to 120 occupational therapists employed by facilities nationwide that serve person with SCI...

We consider a problem, which we call secure grouping, of dividing a number of parties into some subsets (groups) in the following manner: Each party has to know the other members of his/her group, while he/she may not know anything about how the remaining parties are divided (except for certain public predetermined constraints, such as the number of parties in each group). In this paper, we con...

Fair payment protocol is designed to guarantee fairness in electronic purchasing, that is, no party can falsely deny involvement in the transaction or having sent/received the specific items/payment. In this paper we first present an efficient fair payment protocol providing invisibility of TTP, timeliness, and standard RSA signatures as the final non-repudiation evidences. Then we present a se...

Molecular genetics testing has made several huge breakthroughs in the past two decades and many molecular technologies have been applied to our daily medical progress. However, the clinical utility has not reach a consensus by the medical and genetic peers as well as third party payers. The predictive value and clinical applications are variable from one condition to the other. Numerous questio...

Reuse of software components has been seen as an effective way of decreasing costs and reducing software development cycle-time. Nowadays, reusable components are often acquired from outside organisations. Consequently, the use of third-party software components brings new aspects to software development. One aim of this research was to clarify the activities, roles and possible problems relate...

In PODC 2003, Micali presented a fair electronic exchange protocol for contract signing with an invisible trusted party [17]. The protocol was filed as a US patent No 5666420 in 1997 [16]. In the protocol, two mutually distrusted parties exchange their commitments to a contract in a fair way such that either each of them can obtain the other’s commitment, or neither of them does. The protocol i...

We present an efficient divisible digital cash scheme which is unlinkable and does not require Trusted Third Party. The size of the coin is proportional to the size of the primes we use, i.e., hundreds of bytes. The computational and communication complexity of the protocol is proportional to a polynomial of the size of the primes and polylogarithm of the maximum number of pieces to which a coi...

Bitcoin is a crypto currency with several advantages over previous approaches. Transactions are con®rmed and stored by a peer-to-peer network in a blockchain. Therefore, all transactions are public and soon solutions where designed to increase privacy in Bitcoin Many come with downsides, like requiring a trusted third-party or requiring modi®cations to Bitcoin. In this paper, we compare these a...

In recent years many academics, health care providers, and third-party payers have focused their attention on estimating and discussing the quality of health care. This focus is derived in part from concerns that the incentives of funding systems, such as prospective payments, result in cost/quality trade-offs that have a negative impact on the health of beneficiaries (Poland, Bollinger, Bedard...

The Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP) is a wellknown NP-complete problem in sports scheduling that was inspired by the application of optimizing schedules for Major League Baseball to reduce total team travel. The techniques and heuristics from the n-team TTP can be extended to optimize the scheduling of other sports leagues, such as the Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) league in Japan. In t...