In the context of the historical development of portfolio theory the authors describe a stochastic asset/liability modelling exercise for a closed pension fund portfolio, illustrating the reduction in variance of estimated future surplus which can be achieved by investment in index-linked securities. Equity investment would increase the expected level of surplus, but the outcome would be more u...

Healthcare organizations continue to make large investments in health information technology to improve quality of care and lower costs. Therefore, there is an evergrowing need to have an ever-clearer understanding of how IT investments impact these organizations. In this paper, we present an extensive review of literature on the impact of health information technology on quality. We identify a...

This study investigates inequalities at the province level of the use of modern contraception and the proportion of short birth intervals among women in the DRC using data from the 2007 Demographic and Health Survey. Logistic regression and Bayesian geo-additive models were used. The posterior odds ratio and the associated 95% credible interval (95% CI) were estimated using Markov Chain Monte C...

Modern portfolio theory(MPT) addresses the problem of determining the optimum allocation of investment resources among a set of candidate assets. In the original mean-variance approach of Markowitz, volatility is taken as a proxy for risk, conflating uncertainty with risk. There have been many subsequent attempts to alleviate that weakness which, typically, combine utility and risk. We present ...

The intensification of agriculture is often associated with declining mobility and bone strength through time, although women often exhibit less pronounced trends than men. For example, previous studies of prehistoric Central European agriculturalists (~5300 calibrated years BC to 850 AD) demonstrated a significant reduction in tibial rigidity among men, whereas women were characterized by low ...

translation is an indispensable tool for communication between the diverse linguistic groups. it opens new horizons for the people living in a country so that it makes changes and improvements in their society, especially in the literature. through the translation process, some literary principles and elements are introduced into the home literature which did not exist before. these features em...

An important question in palaeoanthropology is whether, among the australopiths and the first fossil hominins attributed to early Homo, there was a shift towards a more prolonged period of growth that can be distinguished from that of the living great apes and whether between the end of weaning and the beginning of puberty there was a slow period of growth as there is in modern humans. Evidence...