Contributions in Merlin

Zielsetzung: Auf der einen Seite erwarten die Öffentlichkeit und der Gesetzgeber[1] von den Schweizer Krankenversicherern, dass sie die Leistungserbringer[2] nach ihrer Wirtschaftlichkeit unterscheiden können. Auf der anderen Seite wird es mit dem steigenden Wettbewerbsdruck für den einzelnen Versicherer immer überlebensnotwendiger, die Wirtschaftlichkeitsbeurteilung möglichst gut zu beherrschen. Aus diesem Grund wurde der vorliegende Ärzteindex entwickelt. Methodik: Der Ärzteindex beruht auf Individualdaten aus jeweils drei Behandlungsjahren, mit denen Arzt-Patienten-Beziehungen beschrieben werden. Mithilfe einer linearen, multiplen Regression wird aus diesen Arzt-Patienten-Beziehungen ein Modell erstellt, welches die Erwarteten-Kosten von Patienten bei ihren Ärzten berechnet. Durch die Division der Effektiven-Kosten der Patienten eines Arztes mit den Erwarteten-Kosten kann die relative Wirtschaftlichkeit des Arztes bestimmt werden. Die Stärke des Ärzteindexes liegt darin, dass er durch die verwendeten Individualdaten die spezifische Morbidität der Patienten eines jeden Arztes berücksichtigt. Ergebnisse: Bisher wurde der Ärzteindex erfolgreich für drei Fachrichtungen von Ärzten entwickelt. Für die Allgemeinmediziner erreicht er einen Erklärungsgehalt (Korrigiertes R 2) von 67 %, bei den allgemein inneren Medizinern einen Erklärungsgehalt von 69 % und bei den Pädiatern 32 %. Unseres Wissens gibt es heute kein anderes Modell für die Schweiz, welches die Wirtschaftlichkeit von Ärzten besser erklären kann. Schlussfolgerung: Die vorliegende Arbeit zeigt, dass es statistisch möglich ist, eine differenzierte, morbiditätsorientierte und damit auch faire Beurteilung unterschiedlicher Behandlungsstile von Ärzten vorzunehmen. Es ist das einzige Modell in der Schweiz, welches Pharmaceutical Cost Groups, d. h., Gruppen von chronisch kranken Personen, die aufgrund des Medikamentenbezugs identifiziert werden können, in die Bewertung einfließen lässt. Mit dem Modell ist die Hoffnung verbunden, dass es zu einer Versachlichung der Diskussion zwischen Ärzten und Krankenversicherern beiträgt.

To monitor the environment for social threat humans must build affective evaluations of others. These evaluations are malleable and to a high degree shaped by responses engendered by specific social encounters. The precise neuronal mechanism by which these evaluations are constructed is poorly understood. We tested a hypothesis that conjoint activity in amygdala and fusiform gyrus would correlate with acquisition of social stimulus value. We tested this using a reinforcement learning algorithm, Q-learning, that assigned values to faces as a function of a history of pairing, or not pairing, with aversive shocks. Behaviourally, we observed a correlation between conditioning induced changes in skin conductance response (SCR) and subjective ratings for likeability of faces. Activity in both amygdala and fusiform gyrus (FG) correlated with the output of the reinforcement learning algorithm parameterized by these ratings. In amygdala, this effect was greater for averted than direct gaze faces. Furthermore, learning-related activity change in these regions correlated with SCR and subjective ratings. We conclude that amygdala and fusiform encode affective value in a manner that closely approximates a standard computational solution to learning.

People spend a lot of time commuting and often find it a burden. According to economics, the burden of commuting is chosen when compensated either on the labor or on the housing market so that individuals’ utility is equalized. However, in a direct test of this strong notion of equilibrium, we find that people with longer commuting time report systematically lower subjective well-being. Additional empirical analyses do not find institutional explanations of the empirical results that commuters systematically incur losses. We discuss several possibilities of an extended model of human behavior able to explain this ‘commuting paradox’.

While software developers have various power tools at their disposal that make the writing of computer programs more efficient, authors of texts do not have the support of such power tools. Text processors still operate on the level of characters and strings rather than on the level of word forms and grammatical constructions. This forces authors to constantly switch between low-level, character oriented, editing operations and high-level, conceptual, verbalisation processes. We suggest the development of language-aware text editing tools that simplify certain frequent, yet complex editing operations by defining them on the level of linguistic units. Pluralizing an entire noun phrase plus the verb forms governed by it would be an ambitious example, swapping the elements of a conjunctive construction a more modest one. We describe a pilot implementation for German where these operations are seamlessly integrated with the standard functions of an existing open-source editor. The operations can be invoked on demand and do not intrude on the authoring process. Changes can be performed locally or globally, thus simplifying the writing process considerably, and making the resulting texts more consistent.

Distributed collaborations within networked enterprises and e-science have been changing radically over the last years. Enterprises and e-science environments demand increased flexibility, interconnectivity, and autonomy of involved systems as well as new coordination and interaction styles for collaboration among people. The latest trends in distributed and mobile collaboration technologies allow people to work across organizational boundaries and to collaborate among/in organizations and communities. The ability to access the organization's distributed knowledge base and to cooperate with co-workers is still a requirement, but new paradigms such as service-oriented computing and Grid computing increase pervasiveness, and mobility enable new scenarios and lead to higher complexity of systems. Independently of the business and e-science domains, individual ""collaboration"" has become a hot issue. Virtual communities have enjoyed a tremendous popularity recently and are starting to require functionalities for collaboration in the broadest sense similar to those in business and e-science environments. The wide-spread availability of mobile devices makes support for mobility an arising topic in this domain as well. Many questions to fully enable such scenarios are the subject of ongoing research and are attracting more attention still. For example: How to enable users to retain their ability to cooperate while not being in their home environment? What is the role of context and location in determining how cooperation can be carried out? How can resources be described semantically in a meaningful way to more efficiently exploit the limited resources in mobile environments by supporting better ways of providing data relevant to the user, enabling improved interoperability with the environment and with other mobile users, and deciding when and how to process data? How to provide support for ad-hoc cooperation in situations where the dedicated infrastructure is absent or cannot be used? How will service-oriented computing and Grid computing change collaborative software? How to support software in diverse, small devices such as PDAs and smartphones to access heterogeneous, large-scale resources, such as in the Grid, for large scale collaboration and teamwork, such as in disaster scenarios. How to provide interoperable collaboration services? Which is the shared vocabulary to be used to achieve a common understanding at the semantic level when the collaboration takes place over community or enterprise boundaries?

Previous implementations of a Semantic Clipboard have well demonstrated the usefulness of integrating Semantic Web technologies with the traditional clipboard paradigm, enabling data transfer between applications without the loss of semantics that is usually the byproduct of such operations. However, the implementations up to this point have been stand-alone prototypes only. In this thesis, we take the Semantic Clipboard to its next logical progression. We present our approach of integrating the Semantic Clipboard and its accompanying services into an existing desktop environment, specifically the K Desktop Environment. In addition to implementing the core functionality, we demonstrate how existing applications can be modified to leverage the funtionality of the Semantic Clipboard.

The significance of image processing in the area of robotics has been constantly growing over the course of time. The main reason for this is the fact, that with a camera more information can be gained, compared to other sensory systems. This work takes a focus on the above mentioned aspects and tries to combine these two areas. In order for a robot to find its way completely autonomously in unknown surroundings, the construction of a internal map is of large importance. In this work an algorithm for reconstruction of a three-dimensional structured space using a stereocamera and a laser beam is presented. For this purpose the principle of Laser-Triangulation and Stereoprocessing is used. To be able to recognise the laser line on the camera screen for big distances, a procedure which is based on the subtraction of pictures is introduced. Every point of view is captured twice, once without the laser beam and the second time with the laser beam on. The resulting difference of these two images is the laser beam. In order to measure out the complete room, several Scans are required. Therefore the robot must be able to move autonomously through the room, while avoiding all obstacles. To enable the robot to avoid the mentioned obstacle it is equipped with a additional horizontal laser, controlled by an Algorithm, which will be introduced in this work. In order to gather the topological position of the robot, a few features in the camera screen are extracted and tracked over several sequences using SURF and KLT. To achieve a satisfactory result from erroneous data the RANSAC-Algorithm is used.

In der Finanzkrise, die sich aus dem Umgang mit Werten des amerikanischen Immobilienmarktes ergeben hat, spielen sogenannt faire Bewertungen der Vermögenstitel und die dadurch notwendig gewordenen Abschreibungen eine zentrale Rolle. Der Autor des folgenden Beitrags geht der Frage nach, wie weit die moderne Rechnungslegung mit der Bewertung zum Fair Value sinnvoll ist und die Auswirkungen fatal sein können.

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