Cream skimming can be defined as the selective treatment of patients that demand few resources while providing high economic refunds. We test whether cream skimming occurs after the introduction of DRG-based activity-based financing (ABF) in Norway in 1997 and if the problem further increased after the 2002 organizational reform when hospitals were turned into trusts. The DRG-system offers the ...

The surface-skimming hypothesis for the evolution of insect flight poses that insects first used wings and aerodynamic locomotion to move in two dimensions across water surfaces. Here I present an overview of recent advances in our understanding of surface-skimming locomotion, and how these findings relate to phylogenetic origins of insects and developmental and anatomic origins of insect wings...

In microvascular transport, where both blood and drug carriers are involved, plasma skimming has a key role on changing hematocrit level and drug carrier concentration in capillary beds after continuous vessel bifurcation in the microvasculature. While there have been numerous studies on modeling the plasma skimming of blood, previous works lacked in consideration of its interaction with drug c...

In this paper, we propose an automatic home video skimming system based on media aesthetics. Unlike other similar works, the proposed system considers video editing theory and realizes the idea of computational media aesthetics. Given a home video and a incidental background music, this system generates a music video (MV) style skimming video automatically, with consideration of video quality, ...

Similarities between the anatomies of living organisms are often used to draw conclusions regarding the ecology and behaviour of extinct animals. Several pterosaur taxa are postulated to have been skim-feeders based largely on supposed convergences of their jaw anatomy with that of the modern skimming bird, Rynchops spp. Using physical and mathematical models of Rynchops bills and pterosaur jaw...

Although redistribution of red blood cells at bifurcated vessels is highly dependent on flow rate, it is still challenging to quantitatively express the dependence of flow rate in plasma skimming due to nonlinear cellular interactions. We suggest a plasma skimming model that can involve the effect of fractional blood flow at each bifurcation point. To validate the model, it is compared with in ...

Critics of school choice argue that cream-skimming will worsen outcomes for those left behind in public schools, a dynamic that relies on a substantial degree of withinschool heterogeneity. Since “high quality” families may have already sorted themselves, or may represent a small fraction of the total, this paper will examine whether existing within-school heterogeneity leaves any scope for cre...

RFID systems often use near-field magnetic coupling to implement communication channels. The advertised operational range of these channels is less than 10 cm and therefore several implemented systems assume that the communication channel is location limited and therefore relatively secure. Nevertheless, there have been repeated questions raised about the vulnerability of these near-field syste...