Severity of illness: red herring or horse of different color? Part 2.

In this continuation of his article, the author defines severity and acuity of illness and discusses approaches to the measurement of the two factors. He provides some background on severity of illness measures that are in current use and prepares for a discussion of the uses of these measures.     

Inklusion in die Moderne – Zum systemischen Verständnis des ‚Sozialen‘ in der Sozialen Marktwirtschaft

Social inclusion is the market’s blind spot: the number of members of a society that are included in a society through the economy and under what conditions is irrelevant to the logic and functionality of an economic system. It is not, however, possible to lead a reasonably meaningful life—a requisite in our modern age—without any material basis. Accordingly, political measures should be called for when people’s autonomous way of life is threatened by a lack of inclusion in the market and society. Such a political, normative-based, inclusion-seeking solution has already been laid out in the initial concept of the social market economy. This paper aims at showing how the fundamental concern of the social market economy with social issues can be brought up to date within the idea of built-in inclusion thanks to a modern approach to the theory of justice.     

Communal values and economic success: A comparison of israeli collective settlements

The association between economic success and adherence to communal values in Israeli kibbutz communes is analyzed over a thirty year period. Adherence to four communal objectives, as independent variables, is considered: Settling the land and absorbing settlers, farming as a way of life, refraining from financial speculation and minimizing consumption. Economic performance was used as the criterion variable. The findings show that the federation of religious kibbutzim (plural of kibbutz) adhered most closely to the social objectives and achieved better economic/financial performance than other kubbutz federations. The economic success of the religious kibbutzim is attributed to a religious rational ethic that was developed during their formative years and maintained consistently over time.     

Severity of illness: red herring or horse of different color? Part 3.

In this final article in a three-part series, the author discusses the various issues that surround the use of severity-of-illness measures. Particular attention is paid to the use of such measures to assess the performance of providers in the area of quality.     

Local Optimality and Its Application on Independent Sets for k-claw Free Graphs

Given a graph G = (V,E), we define the locally optimal independent sets asfollows. Let S be an independent set and T be a subset of V such that S T = and (S) T, where (S) is defined as the neighbor set of S. A minimum dominating set of S in T is defined as T_D(S) T such that every vertex of S is adjacent to a vertex inTD(S) and TD(S) has minimum cardinality. An independent setI is called r-locally optimal if it is maximal and there exists noindependent set S V\I with |ID (S)| r such that|S| >|I (S)|.In this paper, we demonstrate that for k-claw free graphs ther-locally optimal independent sets is found in polynomial timeand the worst case is bounded by , where I and I* are a locally optimal and an optimal independent set,respectively. This improves the best published bound by Hochbaum (1983) bynearly a factor of two. The bound is proved by LP duality and complementaryslackness. We provide an efficientO(|V|^r+3) algorithm to find an independent set which is notnecessarily r-locally optimal but is guarantteed with the above bound. Wealso present an algorithm to find a r-locally optimal independent set inO(|V|^r(k-1)+3) time.