Abstract A study is made of the volume of hospital treatment provided for cases of pneumonia in Finland from 1972 to 1993, employing as a source the National Hospital Discharge Register. The results are used to predict changes in the utilization of hospital resources in this respect up to the year 2020. A total of 452 474 treatment periods and 5 935 615 hospitalization days attributable to pneumonia were recorded for the total population over the given period, of which just under 20% applied to children aged under 15 years, over 30% to persons of working age, 15-64 years, and over 50% to elderly persons aged 65 years and over. The mean duration of hospitalization was reduced from 18.4 days to 14.3 days for males and from 19.6 days to 17.5 days for females over the period in question. The number of treatment periods for pneumonia in children per year relative to population decreased by 28.3%, the greatest reduction being in the group under one year of age, 5.7% for boys and 5.5% for girls. The mean duration of treatment decreased from 9.6 days to 4.1 days for boys and 9.7 days to 4.3 days for girls. The numbers of treatment periods and hospitalization days were consistently greater for men than for women in the working-age population, the difference between the sexes being most pronounced in the age group 15 - 24 years, where the number of treatment periods for men was 7.2 times that for women. Likewise, the number of treatment periods for men began to increase with age from 40 years onwards and that for women from 50 years onwards. The mean treatment time for patients of working-age decreased over the period studied, from 10.5 days to 8.2 days for men and from 9.9 days to 8.2 days for women. The duration of treatment similarly increased with advancing age. The absolute numbers of treatment periods increased by 139% among the elderly population, even when standardized for age, whereas the number of hospitalization days diminished. The clearest increase in treatment periods of all was recorded for men aged over 84 years, 3.16%. The mean duration of treatment increased with age in both sexes, being significantly longer for women than for men in each age group. The forecast for changes in the utilization of hospital services for the treatment of pneumonia up to the year 2020 was examined by methods based on both an age structure model and a time series model. Both predicted an increase of over 50% in the total number of treatment periods for the population as a whole, being of the order of 70% for men and 30% for women. The predicted increase in the age group over 64 years was in excess of 90% with both models. The use of hospital services for the treatment of childhood pneumonia decreased significantly over the period examined here, while the majority of the treatment periods recorded for the working-age population concerned young men or persons aged over 40 years. The most significant increase was seen in treatment periods for persons aged over 64 years, and this figure is also predicted to increase in the future, on account of the frequent use made of hospital services by the elderly in general. Preparations should be made for dealing with this increase in demand by improving treatment methods, developing the treatment system and undertaking preventive measures.

The objective of the study is to investigate and compare the 2010 first year intake students’ profile, for the NMMU Business School MBA programme with their module success rate against success indicators derived from previous literature and the SHL tests results in order to compile a conceptual framework as a guide to analyse the database used. The MBA success indicators, as provided in previous literature, were analysed by addressing the following: The psychometric tests as predictors of success; Age as a predictor of success; Cultural background as a predictor of success; Work experience as a predictor of success; and, Educational background as a predictor of success. The NMMU Business School MBA students’ historical data were used as a database for this study. The module pass rates were collated as part of the database, which included the students’ biographical information. The results of the SHL test battery used as the entrance test for admission could not be obtained as the information is regarded as confidential given that the nature of the assessment data requires certain training qualifications from users; and SHL South Africa was approached to collaborate on this study. SHL South Africa performed the statistical analysis and provided these for interpretation and use in the study. The study revealed that more than half of the NMMU MBA candidates did not complete the programme in the minimum prescribed period, as only 40.5 percent of the candidates completed successfully all modules in this period, and 52 percent of them were in the 30 -39 years-age category. It also revealed that 78.1 percent of those that had successfully completed the programme were males compared with the 21.9 percent of females that completed the course. The study showed that in the 59.5 percent of those that were not successful, 40.4 percent were females compared to 59.6 percent of unsuccessful males in the same sample. Although the pass rates ranged above 75 percent, only one module had the full sample writing the examination, and the lowest core module had 67percent candidates writing the examination. The current entrance process is recommended with improvements to increase the pass rates, throughputs, and to allow for a stricter analysis of the entrance test results.

Thesis (MTech (Business Administration))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2016. / In South Africa there is a fierce competition among Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to attract as many students as possible. This makes most institutions to strive to meet and exceed students (customer) satisfaction. Most institutions strive to meet and exceed customers’ (students) expectations similar to business organisations. It however remains to be investigated if they do succeed in this goal. The purpose of this study was to explore students’ and staff members’ perceptions in regards to customer satisfaction and the level of efficiencies during the registration process at the Business and Management Sciences Faculty at CPUT. This study measures if the registration processes is aligned with students’ needs.

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本論文研究探討了在IEEE 802.11無線區域網路下支援服務品質的負載控制方法。我們所提出的ELB方法用動態的調整AP之間的網路負載分佈以達到負載平衡的目標。我們根據每個客戶端的統計特性進行負載平衡，並以允入控制來避免流量雍塞的情況發生。透過將使用者區分為三個等級，並控制每個使用者的使用頻寬來達到維持服務品質的目的。而進行漫遊的使用者，在我們的機制下，經由在新的AP上的頻寬預先保留，也可以維持一定的服務品質。除此之外，我們的ELB不需要修改任何的硬體機制，就可以運作在現存的802.11b無線區域網路中。最後，我們也對我們的機制做了模擬與實作，並量測、比較了我們的機制的表現。結果指出我們的結果可以有效的平衡AP間的負載，讓頻寬達到更大的使用效率，也能維持令人滿意的服務品質。 / This thesis presents and evaluates a mechanism for the load control with QoS supported in IEEE 802.11b Wireless LANs. Our mechanism named Enhanced Load Balance (ELB) dynamically adapts load distribution over APs to achieve load balance. The ELB mechanism balances the load by STAs’ statistical traffic load. This mechanism also performs admission control to avoid congestion. The ELB mechanism maintains QoS by classifying STAs into three classes and control the traffic flow of every STA. The roaming STAs can get enough bandwidth to maintain the QoS in the new AP by the bandwidth reservation mechanism of ELB. ELB can be used on top of the standard 802.11b access mechanism without requiring any modification or additional hardware. The performance of the IEEE 802.11 protocol with or without the ELB mechanism is investigated in the paper via simulation and implementation. The results indicate that our mechanism can balance the load effectively and the bandwidth can be fully utilized. Therefore, QoS can also be maintained.

“Our society is quickly reaching a point where notions of right and wrong have become so binary as to virtually eliminate all areas of grey. One result of increased regulatory and enforcement pressure is the suppression flexibility and creativity.” Kenneth S. Phillips Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) HedgeMark International, LLC An Affiliate of BNY Mellon

Liu, Jian. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 86-91). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction of Matching Mechanisms --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Background for College Admissions Problem --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Background for Internet Advertising Market --- p.3 / Chapter 2 --- Application I: College Admissions Problem Revisited --- p.6 / Chapter 2.1 --- Three Basic Mechanisms --- p.6 / Chapter 2.1.1 --- Boston Mechanism --- p.7 / Chapter 2.1.2 --- Gale-Shapley Student Optimal Mechanism --- p.9 / Chapter 2.1.3 --- Top Trading Cycles Mechanism --- p.11 / Chapter 2.2 --- College Admissions Mechanisms Around the World --- p.12 / Chapter 2.2.1 --- Serial Dictatorship in Turkey --- p.13 / Chapter 2.2.2 --- JUPAS in Hong'Kong SAR --- p.14 / Chapter 2.2.3 --- College Admissions in Mainland China --- p.16 / Chapter 2.3 --- Generalized Model for College Admissions: JUPAS Revisited --- p.19 / Chapter 2.4 --- Extension to Marriage Problem --- p.23 / Chapter 2.5 --- Strategy Analysis in Extended Marriage Problem --- p.27 / Chapter 2.6 --- Strategy Analysis in JUPAS --- p.30 / Chapter 2.7 --- Efficiency Investigation via Simulation --- p.33 / Chapter 2.7.1 --- Efficiency Definition --- p.33 / Chapter 2.7.2 --- Simulation Design --- p.36 / Chapter 2.7.3 --- Simulation Results --- p.38 / Chapter 3 --- Application II: Search Engines Market Model --- p.42 / Chapter 3.1 --- The Monopoly Market Model --- p.42 / Chapter 3.1.1 --- The Ex Ante Case --- p.43 / Chapter 3.1.2 --- The Ex Post Case --- p.45 / Chapter 3.1.3 --- Formulated As An Optimization Problem --- p.51 / Chapter 3.2 --- The Duopoly Market Model --- p.54 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Competition for End Users in Stage I --- p.54 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- Competition for Advertisers in Stage II and III --- p.57 / Chapter 3.2.3 --- Comparison of Competition and Monopoly --- p.65 / Chapter 3.3 --- Numerical Results and Observations --- p.70 / Chapter 3.3.1 --- Baseline Setting --- p.71 / Chapter 3.3.2 --- Effect of Supplies --- p.74 / Chapter 3.3.3 --- Effect of Discount Factors --- p.75 / Chapter 4 --- Related Work --- p.78 / Chapter 5 --- Summary and Future Directions --- p.83 / Bibliography --- p.86

Approximately 25% of those hospitalized with congestive heart failure are readmitted within 30 days after discharge. Because researchers and policy makers consider hospital readmission within 30 days for patients with heart failure to be a quality of care issue, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has imposed financial penalties of up to 3% of a hospital's Medicare revenue for 1 year for excessive readmissions, potentially impacting the financial sustainability of some organizations. The purpose of the study was to address the research gap regarding the outcome quality measure of hospital admissions from the emergency department (ED) and 2 each process and structure variables. The Donabedian conceptual framework was used to assess quality of care through the triad of structure, process, and outcome. The quantitative study comprised analysis of cross-sectional archival data from the 2015 National Hospital Ambulatory Care Survey using cross-tabulations with chi-square followed by multiple logistic regression analysis. Findings showed that process quality measures of being seen in the ED within 72 hours and total laboratory tests obtained in the ED were predictive of lower likelihood of admission. The structure quality measure of insurance was not predictive; however, being seen by provider type consulting physician was predictive of higher likelihood of admission, whereas being seen by a nurse practitioner was predictive of lower likelihood of hospital admission. The implications of this study for social change are helping hospitals maintain financial stability through avoidance of financial penalties for heart failure readmission, supporting access to care for patients by avoiding hospital closures.

Children are the cornerstone of the community as well as the future of society. Child abuse and suicide among the young population is a serious and prevalent problem. Through a number of survey studies undertaken in other countries including Canada, United States, and Australia, researchers demonstrated that child abuse was related to suicidal behavior. However, this association had not been examined in Hong Kong. However, the number of hospital admissions for child abuse in Hong Kong had increased from 15.6 to 61.9 per 100,000 between 1995 and 2015 and 3.7% of child abuse cases had previously recorded suicide attempts. This study aimed to identify the association between child abuse and suicide attempts compared with influenza infection using electronic hospital admission records. From January 1, 1995 to July 31, 2016, patients with admission age < 18 years with the diagnosis of child abuse or influenza infection were included in this study (n = 54,256). The study also retrieved data on suicide attempt hospital admissions after the first hospital admission from the database. The study results demonstrate that the adjusted hazard ratio indicated that at any given point of time, child abuse subjects had 4.79 times higher risk (95% CI 3.88 to 5.92) of attempting suicide compared with influenza infected subjects. The hazard ratio for sexual abuse and physical abuse compared with the influenza infected group was 6.48 (95% CI 4.56 to 9.19) and 4.83 (95% CI 3.67 to 6.34). Study results indicated that there was a significant association between child abuse and suicide attempts in Hong Kong. If confirmed, the study results may inform policy and interventions to reduce child abuse and consequently child suicide attempts.

The current Internet design is based on a best-effort service, which combines high utilization of network resources with architectural simplicity. As a consequence of this design, the Internet is unable to provide guaranteed or predictable quality of service (QoS) to real-time services that have constraints on end-to-end delay, delay jitter and packet loss. To add QoS capabilities to the present Internet, the new functions need to be simple to implement, while allowing high network utilization. In recent years, different methods have been investigated to provide the required QoS. Most of these methods include some form of admission control so that new flows are only admitted to the network if the admission does not decrease the quality of connections that are already in progress below some defined level. To achieve the required simplicity a new family of admission control methods, called end-to-end measurement-based admission control moves the admission decision to the edges of the network. This thesis presents a set of methods for admission control based on measurements of packet loss. The thesis studies how to deploy admission control in an incremental way: First, admission control is included in the audiovisual real-time applications, without any support from the network. Second, admission control is enabled at the transport layer to differentiate between elastic and inelastic flows, by embedding the probing mechanism in UDP and using the inherent congestion control of TCP. Finally, admission control is deployed at the network layer by providing differentiated scheduling in the network for probe and data packets, which then allows the operator to control the blocking probability for the inelastic flows and the average throughput for the elastic flows. The thesis offers a description of the incremental steps to provide QoS on a DiffServ-based Internet. It analyzes the proposed schemes and provides extensive figures of performance based on simulations and on real implementations. It also shows how the admission control can be used in multicast sessions by making the admission decision at the receiver. The thesis provides as well two different mathematical analyses of the network layer admission control, which enable operators to obtain initial configuration parameters for the admission decision, like queue sizes, based on the forecasted or measured traffic volume. The thesis ends by considering a new method for overload control in WLAN cells, closely based on the ideas for admission control presented in the rest of the articles. / QC 20100826