The deficiencies of the Medicare program are rooted in its defined-benefit structure and in its use of price controls. Medicare should be transformed into a defined cash contribution made to beneficiaries' private plans or to the traditional Medicare program. The Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) is essentially such a system and is a good model for Medicare reform. The FEHBP has...

We discuss current progress and future plans for the general antiparticle spectrometer experiment (GAPS). GAPS detects antideuterons through the X-rays and pions emitted during the deexcitation of exotic atoms formed when the antideuterons are slowed down and stopped in targets. GAPS provides an exceptionally sensitive means to detect cosmic-ray antideuterons. Cosmic-ray antideuterons can provi...

In existing relational database systems, processing of group-by and computation of aggregate functions are always postponed until all joins are performed. In this paper, we present transformations that make it possible to push group-by operation past one or more joins and can potentially reduce the cost of processing a query significantly. Therefore, the placement of group-by should be decided ...

To date, research in separation of concerns has focused on the development of language abstractions having a syntax for encapsulating concerns and a semantics for automatically integrating them. These mechanisms are effective at separating concerns at the granularity of the abstraction but fail at a finer level of granularity. In this paper, we characterize the nature of concern interactions an...

Rather than begin by discussing the points where I seem to be in disagreement with Chapman and Schoppers, let me start with something about which we seem to concur: The work on reactive plans can be broken into two parts. First is the work on pure reactive plans, which specify actions for an agent to take in all situations. Second is the work on caching reactive plans, which specify actions in ...

The initial stages of spinodal decomposition were studied by subjecting a critical blend of model polyolefins to a pressure quench and monitoring the evolution by time-resolved small angle neutron scattering. Contrary to the predictions of the widely accepted Cahn-Hilliard-Cook theory, we demonstrate that coarsening of the phase-separated structure begins immediately after the quench and occurs...

This paper presents a theoretical model for studying the dynamics of ordering in alloys which exhibit modulated phases. The model is different from the standard time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau description of the evolution of a non-conserved order parameter and resembles the Swift-Hohenberg model. The early-stage growth kinetics is analyzed and compared to the Cahn-Hilliard theory of continuous o...

We establish existence and non-existence results for entire solutions to the fractional Allen-Cahn equation in R, which vanish on helicoids and are invariant under screw-motion. In addition, we prove that helicoids are surfaces with vanishing nonlocal mean curvature.

We study the effect of a higher-order nonlinearity in the standard Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation: partial differentialxG(Hx). We find that the stability of steady states depends on dv/dq , the derivative of the interface velocity on the wave vector q of the steady state. If the standard nonlinearity vanishes, coarsening is possible, in principle, only if G is an odd function of Hx. In this case...