Risk-adjusted capitation payments (RACPs) to competing health insurers are an essential element of market-oriented health care reforms in many countries. RACPs based on demographic variables only are insufficient, because they leave ample room for cream skimming. However, the implementation of improved RACPs does not appear to be straightforward. A solution might be to supplement imperfect RACP...

Background: Milk is one of the most nutritious foods providing a variety of proteins, fats, minerals, and vitamins needed to maintain, grow, and develop the body. The aim of this study was to assess microbial and chemical adulterants of raw cow milk collected from dairy farms of Hlabisa villages, KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa. Methods: A total of 68 raw cow milk samples were obtained fr...

This paper examines the assertion that partial pooling of customers is sometimes favored over complete pooling on the sole basis of demand correlation. First, the management of inventory within a supply chain is discussed, with speci2c attention paid to risk-pooling. Then, the claim that partial pooling can dominate is theoretically discussed. The conditions under which previous research found ...

In rural economies with missing or incomplete markets, idiosyncratic risk is frequently pooled through informal networks. Idiosyncratic shocks, however, are not limited to private goods but can also restrict an individual from partaking in or benefitting from a collective activity. In these situations, a group must decide whether to provide insurance to the affected member. In this paper, we de...

Resistin levels have been reported to be abnormal in obesity-related cancer patients with epidemiological studies yielding inconsistent results. Therefore, a meta-analysis was performed to assess the association between blood resistin levels and obesity-related cancer risk. A total of 13 studies were included for pooling ORs analysis. High resistin levels were found in cancer patients (OR= 1.20...

MOTIVATION If there is insufficient RNA from the tissues under investigation from one organism, then it is common practice to pool RNA. An important question is to determine whether pooling introduces biases, which can lead to inaccurate results. In this article, we describe two biases related to pooling, from a theoretical as well as a practical point of view. RESULTS We model and quantify t...

Being at the same time a major staple food and a crop very sensitive to weather and price fluctuations, maize is in the core of food security challenges in Tanzania. In a country where agricultural production is mainly driven by smallholder farmers and where the exposure to weather shocks such as drought is likely to increase because of climate change, implementing an efficient and affordable i...

Convolutional networks almost always incorporate some form of spatial pooling, and very often it is α × α max-pooling with α = 2. Max-pooling act on the hidden layers of the network, reducing their size by an integer multiplicative factor α. The amazing by product of discarding 75% of your data is that you build into the network a degree of invariance with respect to translations and elastic di...