Variation in Bariatric Surgery Costs and Complication Rates in the Military Health System.

Introduction: Within the Military Health System (MHS), facilities have struggled to meet minimum recommended volume thresholds for certain procedures. Understanding variations in complication rates and cost can help policymakers tailor policy to target improvement. Our objective was to quantify the variation in bariatric surgery complication rates and costs across a sample of military hospitals.

User-oriented independent analysis of the toxic load model's ability to predict the effects of time-varying toxic inhalation exposures.

Toxic industrial chemicals and chemical warfare agents present an acute inhalation hazard to exposed populations. The hazardous materials consequence assessment modeling community requires toxicity models to estimate these hazards. One popular phenomenological toxicity model is the toxic load model.

Comments and reflections on ITS and STEM education and training.

This article provides brief comments and reflections on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) and their use in providing STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education and training as described in the four articles prepared for this special issue concerning the ONR (Office of Naval Research) STEM Grand Challenge. General points raised include the need for individualization in education and training and the need for STEM instruction in all sectors of the economy, especially the extensive education and training requirements of national defense. Other comments concern the role of ITS as an instructional approach in providing STEM education and training in general and in comparison with other computer-assisted approaches.

A new methodology for estimating nuclear casualties as a function of time.

The Human Response Injury Profile (HRIP) nuclear methodology provides an estimate of casualties occurring as a consequence of nuclear attacks against military targets for planning purposes. The approach develops user-defined, time-based casualty and fatality estimates based on progressions of underlying symptoms and their severity changes over time. This paper provides a description of the HRIP nuclear methodology and its development, including inputs, human response and the casualty estimation process.

Relationships between Borda voting and Zermelo ranking.

There are many situations wherein a group of individuals (e.g., voters, experts, sports writers) must produce an ordered list of 'best' alternatives selected from a given group of alternatives (e.

Education and training technology in the military.

The United States Department of Defense (DOD) has contributed to the development of various education and training technologies, two of which are computer-assisted instruction and simulation-based instruction. DOD investment in computer-assisted instruction has continued from the 1950s to the present. Its contributions have ranged from drill and practice to computers capable of generating instructional interactions on demand and in real time.

Congruent epidemic models for unstructured and structured populations: analytical reconstruction of a 2003 SARS outbreak.

Both the threat of bioterrorism and the natural emergence of contagious diseases underscore the importance of quantitatively understanding disease transmission in structured human populations. Over the last few years, researchers have advanced the mathematical theory of scale-free networks and used such theoretical advancements in pilot epidemic models. Scale-free contact networks are particularly interesting in the realm of mathematical epidemiology, primarily because these networks may allow meaningfully structured populations to be incorporated in epidemic models at moderate or intermediate levels of complexity.