Medical tourism: reverse subsidy for the elite

The medical tourism sector in India has attracted global attention, given its phenomenal growth in the past decade. India is second only to Thailand in the number of medical tourists that it attracts every year. Estimates indicate that the medical tourism market in India could grow from $310 million in 2005 to $2 billion by 2012. These figures are significant when contrasted with India's overall health care expenditure - $10 billion in the public sector and $50 billion in the private sector. Factors that have contributed to this growth include the relative proficiency in English among health care providers and the cost effectiveness of medical procedures in India. Generally, most procedures in Indian hospitals cost a quarter (or less) of what they would cost in developed countries. The expansion of medical tourism has also been fueled by the growth of the private medical sector in India, a consequence of the neglect of public health by the government. India has one of the poorest records in the world regarding public financing and provisioning of health care. A growing driver of medical tourism is the attraction of facilities in India that offer access to assisted reproductive care technologies. Ironically, this is in sharp contrast with the acute neglect of the health care needs of Indian women. The Indian government is vigorously promoting medical tourism by providing tax concessions and by creating an environment enabling it to thrive. However, there is a distinct disjunction between the neglect of the health care needs of ordinary Indians and public policy that today subsidizes the health care of wealthy foreigners.     

Post-reform India’s automotive-iconic-cement assemblages: uneven globality,territorial spectacle and iconic exhibition value

India’s post-liberalisation landscape has unexpectedly been populated by monumental iconic statues. These statues, co-emergent with an automobile and construction boom and an attendant resignification and revaluing of land, are a productive site for rethinking the role of spectacle in neoliberal globalisation from the locus of post-liberalisation India. Against theories that characterise spectacle as primarily virtual and deterritorialised, they illuminate how spectacle is enmeshed in the imaginaries, spatial politics, material processes and heterogeneous temporalities of uneven development. Their religious aspect also calls for a re-examination of Benjamin’s distinction between cult value and exhibition value.     

Comparison of confidence intervals of traffic intensity forM/E k/1 queueing systems

This paper compares the width of confidence intervals for the traffic intensity inM/E _k/1 queueing systems with three methods-Lilliefors' method, a second method based on the number of arrivals during the service period, and a third method using censored observations, in which only those service periods with no arrivals are observed. It is shown that the width of confidence intervals, based on the number of arrivals during the service period, is narrower than for other methods.     

Demographic aspects of lactation and postpartum amenorrhea

Interrelations between lactation and post-partum amenorrhea are studied from the reports of about 5,000 married women included in a 1966 Follow-up Survey of Acceptors of an Intrauterine Device (IUD) in Taiwan. The length of post-partum amenorrhea and of breastfeeding are positively associated. On an average, breastfeeding delayed the resumption of menstruation by about 7 months. The association between lactation and amenorrhea is not accounted for by differences in mother’s age, parity, education and her place of residence. A multiple regression analysis suggests that (1) age affects amenorrhea both directly and through lactation, (2) parity has no independent effect on either lactation or amenorrhea, and (3) education and place of residence affect amenorrhea mainly through the cultural variations in the practice of breastfeeding.     

Centrality Asymmetry and Partner Complementarity as Influences on Alliance Dissolution

Research on interfirm alliances indicates that partner firms’ asymmetry in network centrality increases the likelihood of alliance dissolution because it gives rise to a power imbalance and opportunism in the partnership. We contend that this view of centrality asymmetry does not consider the binding force that network resource complementarity can provide in an alliance, which motivates partners to ally for the long term. We propose that centrality asymmetry can have both divisive and cohesive forces in an alliance, which – when considered together – lead to a prediction that centrality asymmetry has a U‐shaped relationship with alliance dissolution. Moderate levels of asymmetry lead to lower rates of dissolution than high and low levels of asymmetry. The degree of cooperation between partners and the degree of external competition reduce the effects of centrality asymmetry on alliance dissolution because they mitigate power imbalances while encouraging partners to strengthen the alliance to withstand competitive challenges.     

The impact of lean practices on operational performance – an empirical investigation of Indian process industries

In deciding to adopt lean manufacturing, it is imperative to investigate where and how lean practices are most needed to influence manufacturing and business performance. Such an investigation becomes indispensable when lean thinking is to be considered in a production arrangement different to the conventional, repetitive, high-volume, stable-demand and discrete-manufacturing environment. This study provides explanations of how performance is improved through the adoption of lean practices in process industries. This is a relatively under-researched area compared to the performance effects associated with the introduction and implementation of lean principles in traditional, discrete manufacturing. Based on a survey of Indian process industries, this study attempts to develop an empirical relationship between lean practices and performance improvement through the use of multivariate statistical analysis. The findings have led to the conclusion that lean practices are positively associated with timely deliveries, productivity, first-pass yield, elimination of waste, reduction in inventory, reduction in costs, reduction in defects and improved demand management. However, within a process-industry context, lean practices related to pull production were found to have a marginal impact on performance improvement. A detailed discussion of the findings along with their theoretical and managerial implications is provided in the paper.     

3D object recognition: Representation and matching

Three-dimensional object recognition entails a number of fundamental problems in computer vision: representation of a 3D object, identification of the object from its image, estimation of its position and orientation, and registration of multiple views of the object for automatic model construction. This paper surveys three of those topics, namely representation, matching, and pose estimation. It also presents an overview of the free-form surface matching problem, and describes COSMOS, our framework for representing and recognizing free-form objects. The COSMOS system recognizes arbitrarily curved 3D rigid objects from a single view using dense surface data. We present both the theoretical aspects and the experimental results of a prototype recognition system based on COSMOS.     

Estimation in M/Er /1 queueing systems

In this paper, the maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters for the M/E_r /1 queueing model are derived when the queue size at each departure point is observed. A numerical example is generated by simulating a finite Markov chain to illustrate the methodology for estimating the parameters with variable Erlang service time distribution. The problem of hypothesis testing and simultaneous Confidence regions of the parameter is also investigated.0     

On the asymptotic distribution of a simple unit root test for trending and breaking series

In this paper, we derive the asymptotic distribution of Popp's (2008) innovational outlier unit root test for trending series with a break. The results of Zivot and Andrews (1992) are applied to provide the limiting results of these new test statistics. We tabulate their asymptotic and finite sample critical values, and illustrate the use of the new statistics with an application to the unemployment rate series for 23 OECD countries.     

Random field models in image analysis*

Image models are useful in quantitatively specifying natural constraints and general assumptions about the physical world and the imaging process. This review paper explains how Gibbs and Markov random field models provide a unifying theme for many contemporary problems in image analysis. Random field models permit the introduction of spatial context into pixel labeling problems, such as segmentation and restoration. Random field models also describe textured images and lead to algorithms for generating textured images, classifying textures and segmenting textured images. In spite of some impressive model-based image restoration and texture segmentation results reported in the literature, a number of fundamental issues remain unexplored, such as the specification of MRF models, modeling noise processes, performance evaluation, parameter estimation, the phase transition phenomenon and the comparative analysis of alternative procedures. The literature of random field models is filled with great promise, but a better mathematical understanding of these issues is needed as well as efficient algorithms for applications. These issues need to be resolved before random field models will be widely accepted as general tools in the image-processing community.