Background: Pay-for-performance (P4P) has been widely used in healthcare, but there are few experiences of hospital-based P4P at scale. The evidence of impact from these has been mixed, and there has been increased recognition of the importance of different contexts, designs, incentives and other factors. In 2014, the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health integrated a P4P model for determining hospit

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is characterized by an aberrant repair response with uncontrolled turnover of extracellular matrix involving mesenchymal cell phenotypes, where lung resident mesenchymal stem cells (LRMSC) have been supposed to have an important role. However, the contribution of LRMSC in lung fibrosis is not fully understood, and the role of LRMSC in IPF remains to be elucidate

We consider entropy conservative and dissipative discretizations of nonlinear conservation laws with implicit time discretizations and investigate the influence of iterative methods used to solve the arising nonlinear equations. We show that Newton's method can turn an entropy dissipative scheme into an anti-dissipative one, even when the iteration error is smaller than the time integration error.

Conservation and consistency are fundamental properties of discretizations of systems of hyperbolic conservation laws. Here, these concepts are extended to the realm of iterative methods by formally defining locally conservative and flux consistent iterations. These concepts are of both theoretical and practical importance: Based on recent work by the authors, it is shown that pseudo-time iteratio

A stencil-adaptive SBP-SAT finite difference scheme is shown to display superconvergent behavior. Applied to the linear advection equation, it has a convergence rate O(Δx^4) in contrast to a conventional scheme, which converges at a rate O(Δx^3).

In the late 1970s, the Swedish economy faced a profit squeeze which threatened to hamper investments and hence the creation of jobs. This engendered a massive debate in the media and among economists and policymakers. This paper investigates the discussion of “the politics of profits”, the policy measures directed towards manipulating the distribution between capital income and labour income in th

This paper uses a new database of 1,891 probate inventories from rural southern Sweden from the 1670s to the 1860s to investigate the development of wealth and productive capacity in the Swedish countryside in this period. We show that while real wages fell in the 1700s, material living standards — as measured by the contents of probate inventories — improved, indicating greater labour inputs. Thi

While whole-rock Lu-Hf isotope analysis remains one of the only ways to obtain initial Hf isotope signatures of old mafic rocks, Hf isotope analyses of more robust accessory zircon in intermediate to silicic rocks have largely replaced whole-rock analyses during the last decade. This has led to a discrepancy in the amount of existing data from mafic and felsic lithologies. However, especially in m

There has been much progress in the field of nanofluidics, and novel applications, such as single-cell analysis, have been achieved. In such cases, controlling the location of the gas/liquid interface is vital and partial hydrophobic modification is frequently used to pin the position of this interface. However, because the fluid manipulating pressure in such devices is comparable to the Laplace p

In recent years, there has been rapidly growing interest in Innovation Districts (ID) in urban policy and practice. IDs are touted as catalysts for innovation and economic development involving a wide range of stakeholders often in under-performing neighbourhoods or precincts. Despite the appeal, critique is forming around their linear understanding of innovation, the narrow focus of economic goal

In recent years, shared micro-mobility services (e.g., bikes, e-bikes, and e-scooters) have been popularized at a rapid pace worldwide, which provide more choices for people’s short and medium-distance travel. Accurately modeling the choice of these shared micro-mobility services is important for their regulation and management. However, little attention has been paid to modeling their choice, esp

In post-quantum cryptography (PQC), Learning With Errors (LWE) is one of the dominant underlying mathematical problems. For example, in NIST’s PQC standardization process, the Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) protocol chosen for standardization was Kyber, an LWE-based scheme. Recently the dual attack surpassed the primal attack in terms of concrete complexity for solving the underlying LWE proble

We study the density of solutions to Diophantine inequalities involving non-singular ternary forms, or equivalently, the density of rational points close to non-singular plane algebraic curves.

Cellobiose dehydrogenase (CDH) is a bioelectrocatalyst that enables direct electron transfer (DET) in biosensors and biofuel cells. The application of this bidomain hemoflavoenzyme for physiological glucose measurements is limited by its acidic pH optimum and slow interdomain electron transfer (IET) at pH 7.5. The reason for this rate-limiting electron transfer step is electrostatic repulsion at t

Nonradical-based advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) catalyzed by defective carbonaceous materials have exhibited great superiorities in trace antibiotics removal from natural water matrices. However, the complicated, extensive and highly-energy consumed synthesis methods are seriously hindering its development and application. Herein an in-situ electrochemical synthesis technology was developed a

Misuse resilience is an important security criterion in the evaluation of the NIST Post-quantum cryptography standardization process. In this paper, we propose new key mismatch attacks against Kyber and Saber, NIST's selected scheme for encryption and one of the finalists in the third round of the NIST competition, respectively. Our novel idea is to recover partial information of multiple secret e