Children's hospitals: specialty hospitals that treat children specially

Any reader who has children will agree that they make special patients, whether at home or in the hospital. These patients have unique requirements for love and compassionate care, and children's hospitals deliver on their promises. The well-run children's hospitals researched for this article have converted their material management operational challenges to opportunities. They have built thoughtful material management strategic plans, reorganized their support services to provide customer service to end users, and they have centered their materiel management efforts around service and quality improvement.     

Design and development of inventory knowledge discovery system

Inventory management (IM) performance is affected by the forecasting accuracy of both demand and supply. In this paper, an inventory knowledge discovery system (IKDS) is designed and developed to forecast and acquire knowledge among variables for demand forecasting. In IKDS, the TREes PArroting Networks (TREPAN) algorithm is used to extract knowledge from trained networks in the form of decision trees which can be used to understand previously unknown relationships between the input variables so as to improve the forecasting performance for IM. The experimental results show that the forecasting accuracy using TREPAN is superior to traditional methods like moving average and autoregressive integrated moving average. In addition, the knowledge extracted from IKDS is represented in a comprehensible way and can be used to facilitate human decision-making.     

Conflict of interest and the credibility of underwriter analyst recommendations

Brokerage analysts frequently comment on and sometimes recommendcompanies that their firms have recently taken public. We showthat stocks that underwriter analysts recommend perform morepoorly than 'buy' recommendations by unaffiliated brokers priorto, at the time of, and subsequent to the recommendation date.We conclude that the recommendations by underwriter analystsshow significant evidence of bias. We show also that the marketdoes not recognize the full extent of this bias. The resultssuggest a potential conflict of interest inherent in the differentfunctions that investment bankers perform.