Patient intensity in an ambulatory oncology research center: a step forward for the field of ambulatory care

Nursing leaders in ambulatory care need to objectively quantify patient intensity to balance patient care needs and nursing resources. In this three-part series the current literature on acuity/intensity tools will be reviewed, and the development of an Ambulatory Intensity System (AIS) to objectively quantify the nursing care will be described.     

Patient intensity in an ambulatory oncology research center: step forward for the field of ambulatory care--part III

Nursing leaders in ambulatory care need to objectively quantify patient intensity to balance patient care needs and nursing resources. The day-to-day application of the Ambulatory Intensity System (AIS) is illustrated in this final article of a three-part series that reviewed current literature on acuity/intensity tools, and described the development of an AIS system to objectively quantify the nursing care.     

Patient as center of the health care universe: a closer look at patient-centered care

We need to consider how the health care system should revolve around the patient, rather than the patient rotating around the hospital. Considering a patient-centric point of view when implementing and optimizing the use of health information technology (HIT) provides new perspectives on the meaning of "integrated" health care. ot only do we need to give patients the opportunities to participate as true partners in their health care, we must convince them why this partnership makes sense. We should not be naive and believe all patients want this involvement in their care today and are ready to do all their health care transactions electronically. But considering and using these practices are important steps in the health care reform journey to improve quality and decrease cost. Many patients will benefit by our working with them to demystify the health care experience through patient-centric practices and the use of HIT.     

The determinants of research and development intensity in the UK

The primary purpose of this paper is to discover whether research and development expenditures are related to firm size, market structure and technological influences in the UK. After providing a preliminary analysis of R & D activity, the paper tackles the problem of the rather limited data set. Two approaches are adopted: first, analysing part of the relationship using a broadly based sample, and second, providing data on a more narrowly based sample over three years. The results suggest that firm size and concentration have virtually no influence on R & D intensity in the UK among firms with R & D programmes.     

LM cointegration tests allowing for an unknown number of breaks: implications for the forward rate unbiasedness hypothesis

This article extends the Lagrange multiplier (LM) cointegration test proposed by Westerlund and Edgerton (WE 2007) by allowing for an unknown number of breaks. Monte Carlo simulations provide two main results. First, a loss of power in the LM cointegration tests is detected when potential multiple breaks are ignored. Second, the modified testing procedures do not affect the asymptotic distribution and major properties of the tests of WE under the null, but noticeably increase their testing power in presence of multiple breaks. We also provide empirical applications of the proposed tests for the forward rate unbiasedness hypothesis (FRUH). The results reveal that the FRUH does hold when the effects of the multiple structural breaks are taken into account.     

A mark II survey and critique of future research teaching in North America

In 1970, an initial survey was carried out on teaching futurism at the undergraduate level based on forty courses that could be located in Canada and the United States (Technological Forecasting and Social Change, December 1970). During 1971 and 1972, information was collected, primarily by a replicated questionnaire, on approximately 200 courses in North America; this was reported on to the Third World Future Research Conference in Bucharest (September 1972) indicating major changes that had occured over the two-year period in the field. Six generalizations were made: (1) Futurism is becoming increasingly institutionalized as more and more courses are being “futurized” to a greater or lesser degree. (2) Learning/teaching interaction tends increasingly to employ innovative or “futuristic” techniques. (3) Much influential and seminal work in future research is not made by “futurists” per se, but enters the field from outside: technological forecasting and assessment, systems analysis, gaming, model building, etc. (4) Interdisciplinary future-oriented research on contemporary problems may be adding a new dimension to human capability. (5) There is still much froth and nonsense in “futuristics”, but can future research be truly innovative without such imaginative inputs? (6) Future research may turn out to be merely a subset in the policy sciences, i.e., delivery systems.     

A predictive filtering approach for clarifying bibliometric datasets: an example on the research articles related to industry 4.0

ABSTRACT

This study proposes a filtering approach based on text classification and a fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making technique to select the relevant bibliometric data for further analyses in the scope of bibliometrics, scientometrics, and related methodologies. The proposed approach is illustrated on Industry 4.0 and internet of things which are the concepts that currently draw utmost attention with a growing number of research and applications. Accordingly, various findings are presented revealing the characteristics of the selected bibliometric data with the help of text and network analytics. The potential contribution of this study is two-fold such that the study not only suggests a novel approach for clarifying the retrieved bibliometric data but also emphasises the mainstream research areas and directions of Industry 4.0 along with the concept of the internet of things. Thus, an analysis framework with computing techniques has been used to reveal the characteristics of literature in a field of technology.     

The driving forces of the change in China's energy intensity: An empirical research using DEA-Malmquist and spatial panel estimations

Energy shortage and environmental degradation have become significant hurdles for China's sustainable development nowadays. One of the most efficient and effective ways to ease energy shortage is to sufficiently reduce energy intensity. In the extant literature on the influential factors of China's energy intensity, the regional imbalance and spatial spillover effects were basically ignored, which may yield to biased and unreasonable results. As a result, in this paper, the driving forces of China's provincial energy intensity were for the first time investigated by combining the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)-Malmquist and spatial panel approaches for the period between 2000 and 2014. The results indicate that technological progress plays a dominant role in decreasing China's overall energy intensity. In both the Eastern and Central regions, the technological progress and its components can decrease energy intensity, while this effect doesnot significantly exist in the Western region. Rapid industrialization should be responsible for China's currently high energy intensity, while energy price hiking is conducive to the decrease in energy intensity. Moreover, there is also clear evidence that these factors influence on energy intensity partly through the spatial spillover effects.     

Thinking outside the exam room: accessing community resources for patients in ambulatory care settings

Patients and families receiving care in the ambulatory care setting have increasingly complex needs, requiring nurses to employ a large variety of resources. Parents of pediatric patients have identified services available through community resources as a high priority, although medical personnel do not tend to appreciate the value of these services. Learning about the services offered by community agencies requires some investment of nursing time, but may result in improved effectiveness of nursing care across an institution or network of ambulatory care nurses.     

The empirical analysis of the determinants for environmental technological change: A research agenda

Technological change is usually considered a necessary albeit not sufficient condition for a transition to sustainability. However, the empirical analysis of the determinants to environmental technological change has not received too much attention in the environmental/ecological economics literature and many open questions remain in this context. Based on a careful review of the literature, this paper argues that further analysis should address several issues at different levels: i.e., regarding the conceptual framework, the thematic scope of the studies, some methodological issues and other aspects related to the environmental policy variable. First, an integrated conceptual framework which takes into account the interplay between relevant variables influencing environmental technological change (i.e., factors internal and external to the firm and characteristics of the environmental technologies) and all the stages of this process, with a greater emphasis on the invention stage, should be developed. Other aspects should then be tackled, including a focus on several themes (i.e., a greater attention to cross-sectoral technologies, the barriers to different types of environmental technologies, the international dimension of environmental technological change and environmental technological change in small and medium size enterprises), methodological issues (combination of case studies and econometric modelling) and several issues related to the environmental policy variable.     

管理重心下移背景下地方高校科研管理队伍建设思考

管理重心下移背景下校院科研二级管理模式中,科研管理队伍的整体素质直接影响到学校科研工作的发展,从科研管理队伍的组成、职责、现状和存在的问题等方面对地方高校科研管理队伍建设进行思考,并提出了相关对策。     

知识管理:企业国际化经营的关键步骤

自20世纪工业革命以来,科技进步与生产自动化的变革使得生产效率大幅度提升,研发成本的增加和产品生命周期德缩短,使得过去将重心放在国内市场的企业纷纷走向国际化。早在 1984 年,就有著名专家学者指出了企业国际化经营的经济原由:发达国家选择其比较劣势产业,通过向发展中国家转移技术进行生产,使之在国际市场成为优势产业,从而获得更大的经济利益。因此,目前对企业而言,国际化经营活动的规划已经成为其不可或缺的策略之一。企业国际化通常,企业国际化的过程有如下几个阶段:一是新产品阶段。在此阶段跨国企业先在母国市场制造、销售及创新…     

Disentangling the sources of pro-socially motivated effort: A field experiment

This paper presents evidence from a field experiment, which aims to identify the two sources of workers' pro-social motivation that have been considered in the literature: warm glow altruism and pure altruism. We employ an experimental design that first measures the level of effort exerted by student workers on a data entry task in an environment that elicits purely selfish behavior and we compare it to effort exerted in an environment that also induces warm glow altruism. We then compare the latter to effort exerted in an environment where both types of altruistic preferences are elicited. We find evidence that women increase effort due to warm glow altruism while we do not find any additional impact due to pure altruism. On the other hand, men in our sample are not responsive to any of the treatments.     

The rule approach in evolutionary economics: A methodological template for empirical research

Dopfer and Potts (2008) have proposed a new analytic foundation to evolutionary economics based on the unified rule approach. While they contend that their approach is ontologically and analytically coherent and useful, scholars sympathetic with it, e.g., Ostrom and Basurto (2011), have called for further methodological and empirical specification. In the same vein, this paper seeks to develop the Dopfer-Potts framework by proposing an analytic methodology to translate their rule-based approach into an operational method for identifying and testing hypotheses that relate to rules. It does so by defining a methodology connecting explanandum (response rule) and explanantia (factor rules) at the same level of rules. The concept of a ‘savings rule’ serves as a roving example that later is extended into a case study. The paper offers a methodological template for applied evolutionary analysis in economics.     

Monetary policies to counter the zero interest rate: an overview of research

Many central banks have lowered their interest rates close to zero in response to the crisis since 2008. In standard monetary models the zero lower bound (ZLB) constraint implies the existence of a second steady state in addition to the inflation-targeting steady state. Large scale asset purchases (APP) have been used as a tool for easing of monetary policy in the ZLB regime. I provide a theoretical discussion of these issues using a stylized general equilibrium model in a global nonlinear setting. I also review briefly the empirical literature about effects of APP’s.     

民营企业国际化:学术研究与理论推进

经过二十多年的重生与发展和十多年的国际化努力,民营企业已经成为我国经济对外开放的重要微观支撑点。民营企业国际化不仅关乎民营企业自身发展前景,而且也成为“走出去”国家战略实施过程中的重要组成部分。民营企业的国际化进程,尤其是一些企业在跨国并购等方面的举措,已经引起了国内外经济界的极大关注,成为近年来国内经济界的一个热门话题。浙江大学国际经济研究所在10月下旬主办了一次国际学术研讨会,围绕中国民营企业国际化理论与现实问题,邀请了国内外五十多位经济学专家、学者进行了广泛的探讨,从不同的角度提出了自己独到的见解。…     

Foresight within ERA-NETs: Experiences from the preparation of an international research program

In this paper, we address challenges of organizing future-oriented consultation processes within European coordination tools for ‘Open Method of Coordination’ – such as ERA-NETs – which are promoted by the European Commission towards the establishment of the European Research Area. Specifically, we report experiences from a recent consultation process that was organized within WoodWisdom-Net (ERA-NET) with the aim of creating an international research agenda, based on the recognition of long-term challenges of the European forest sector and the attendant identification of gaps and new opportunities in wood material science and engineering. This consultation process involved eighteen funding organizations from eight European countries, as well as over 400 participants who represented relevant stakeholder groups, most notably leading researchers and industrialists. Methodologically, the process was based on the Internet-based solicitation and assessment of research issues, the deployment of Robust Portfolio Modeling (RPM) in the identification of promising research issues, and facilitated workshops where the results of Internet-based activities where discussed, validated and synthesized. In addition, extensive network analyses were conducted to support the identification of possible collaboration networks and the development of joint calls for proposals. Drawing on the results from the WoodWisdom-Net consultation process, we discuss the broader potential of Internet-based decision support tools and participatory workshops in promoting foresight activities within ERA-NETs and European coordination tools.     

Average size of plants in manufacturing and capital intensity: A cross-country analysis by industry

This paper attempts to show that because the production function in manufacturing industries is nonhomothetic and relative factor prices vary across countries, the average size of plants is positively associated not only with the level of economic development but also with physical capital intensity. The measures of average size by employment is derived for a large number of industries from the parameters of the fifted lognormal distribution. Nonwage value added per employee is deployed as a proxy for physical capital intensity. The posited hypothesis are tested for a sample of 23 countries at various levels of development.     

Secession Clauses: A Tool for the Taming of an Arising Leviathan in Brussels?

Several scholars have recently come out in support of the argument by James Buchanan that each member state of the European Union be given the right to secede from the EU. According to these scholars, a simple majority ought to be sufficient for secession, since this would help check the tendency of EU institutions to increase their power against the will of both member states and individuals. This paper, however, argues that while secession may be a means to increase individual liberty vis-a-vis a central government, it may also be abused by a majority in order to oppress the minority of the respective jurisdiction's inhabitants. Since in a federation different government levels check each others' power, thereby enhancing individual freedom, secession removes one of these governmental levels and, hence, distorts the existing system of checks and balances. This paper argues that such a drastic step has the character of a constitutional act and thus should be decided on under rules reserved for post constitutional legislation.     

Patient selection in a mixed oligopoly market for health care: the role of the soft budget constraint

Competition in hospital care is often implemented through mixed markets where public and private hospitals compete for patients. The optimality of this market form has long been debated in the literature. In this paper, we investigate the role of soft budget constraint in affecting patient selection within a mixed market. Patient selection is the undesired effect of hospital competition when three conditions are met: asymmetry in hospitals’ objectives, presence of hospital’s private information and inability to enforce hard budget constraint. The paper shows that soft budget is a pre-condition for the existence of patient selection. Our paper adds an important dimension to the existing literature which considers asymmetry of information as the only cause for this market failure. The understanding of the mechanisms leading to patient selection makes it possible for the regulator to design measures to reduce such undesirable effect.