BACKGROUND Glomerulonephritis (GN) is a group of rare kidney diseases with a substantial health burden and high risk of progression to end-stage renal disease. Research in GN has been limited by poor availability of large comprehensive registries. Substantial variations in access to and administration of treatment and outcomes in GN have been described. Leveraging provincial resources and exist...

This paper introduces the speech emotion corpus, a multilingual speech emotion database recorded in the provincial languages of Pakistan: Urdu, Punjabi, Pashto and Sindhi for analyzing the speech emotions present in the recorded speech signals with the four different emotions (Anger, Sadness, Comfort and Happiness). The objective of this paper is to evaluate the performance of the learning clas...

An empirical comparison is made of the impact on disaggregated education costs of three types of education spending control regimes — state-level control of education spending; local school board control of spending with non-overlapping jurisdictions; and local school board control with overlapping jurisdictions. A model is specified which describes the determination of teacher wages, the teach...

"This paper develops a forward demographic rates-based multiregional population model on the basis of a set of multiregional population accounts. Forward emigration rates and immigration flows are adopted to describe the external migrations. The model is used to make consistent multiregional population projections of China at a provincial level.... Three sets of multiregional population project...

The East China Power Grid (ECPG) is the biggest regional power grid in China. It has the biggest installed capacity of pumped storage power plants (PSPPs) and is responsible to coordinate the operation of its five provincial power grids. A recent challenge of coordinating operations is using PSPPs to absorb surplus energy during off-peak periods and generate power during peak periods. Differing...

This paper discusses central-local relations for healthcare policy in China from a principal-agent perspective, based on schistosomiasis control. In order to control the disease, the central government produced the Outline of the Mid-Long-Term National Plan for Schistosomiasis Prevention and Control (2004-2015) in 2004. By discussing the implementation of the National Outline at the provincial ...

We aimed to determine the distribution of ophthalmic care providers and its correlation with health and socioeconomic status and health system indicators. Data were gathered from the Iran Medical Council and the Iranian Societies of Ophthalmology and Optometry. Concurrent indicators were collected from the Statistical Center of Iran and national studies. A population-adjusted number of combined...

Objective: To study the trends of socioeconomic inequalities and socioeconomic inequalities in self-perceived health in Spain between 1987 and 2001. Methods: We estimated the distribution of educational level and per capita provincial income, and the differences in lessthan-good self-perceived health by educational level and per capita provincial income in each period. Results: The percentage o...

OBJECTIVE To examine variation in patients' access to a set of cancer drugs through publicly funded provincial drug programs. DATA SOURCES/STUDY DESIGN We surveyed provincial drug program managers about their highest-expenditure intravenous and oral cancer drugs. We then investigated whether the same cancer drugs account for the highest expenditures across the provincial programs. We also com...