OBJECTIVE To investigate how affordable cigarettes are in developed and developing countries, and to calculate by how much the affordability of cigarettes has changed between 1990 and 2001; and secondly, to investigate the relation between cigarette affordability and consumption. DESIGN Affordability was defined as the cost of cigarettes relative to per capita income. Trends in cigarette affo...

OBJECTIVE To provide state-level estimates of the size and structure of the US individual market for health insurance and to investigate the potential impact of new medical loss ratio (MLR) regulation in 2011, as indicated by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). STUDY DESIGN Using data from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, we provided state-level estimat...

In the early stages of drafting what would become the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the notion of including a federal health insurance issuer in the online marketplaces engen-deredanintensedebate. 1

The voluminous bill known as the PPACA of 2010 enabled substantial changes to our health care delivery system, some of which remain to be enacted for several years to come. While the overarching goal is to align incentives and improve quality and access, implementing PPACA initiatives in a highly complex environment is fraught with economic and political implications. The purpose of this and fu...

Public health in the United States can be improved by building workplace "cultures of health" that support healthy lifestyles. The Affordable Care Act (ACA), which includes the Prevention and Public Health Fund, will support a new focus on prevention and wellness, offering opportunities to strengthen the public's health through workplace wellness initiatives. This article describes the opportun...

In Japan, cramming of too much knowledge into students was criticized and more relaxed education policy has been introduced to develop the individuality of each student. If students can afford to study carefully, creativity of the individual is fostered. We consider that it is very important to pay attention to “Affordable” concept in the field of engineering. In our previous research, we have ...

An identifying code of a graph is a dominating set which uniquely determines all the vertices by their neighborhood within the code. Whereas graphs with large minimum degree have small domination number, this is not the case for the identifying code number (the size of a smallest identifying code), which indeed is not even a monotone parameter with respect to graph inclusion. We show that every...

Fault-tolerant programs are typically not only difficult to implement but also incur extra costs in terms of performance or resource consumption. Failures are typically relatively rare but the fault-tolerance overhead must be paid regardless if any failures occur during the program execution. This paper presents an approach that reduces the cost of fault-tolerance, namely, adaptations to a chan...

We analyze the scalability of r-ary f-cube topologies built from state-of-the-art SCI technology. The actual implementation architecture is studied, and this work serves as a guide to select the right topology for a given system size. We discuss how the interconnect scales with respect to the amount of traffic each node can generate, which is limited to the bandwidth of a single PCI bus. We sho...

The fact that energy efficiency is a key design constraint in the late CMOS era is now very well known. Indeed, it is such a critical aspect of chip and system design that the editorial board and I have devoted at least one IEEE Micro issue each year to this general topic. There are, of course, at least two ways of looking at energy-efficient design: meeting a power consumption target at accept...