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Recent anti‐fraud enforcement policies across the US health‐care system have led to widespread speculation about the effectiveness of increased penalties for overcharging practices adopted by health‐care service organizations. Severe penalties, including imprisonment, suggest that fraudulent billing, and related misclassification of services provided to patients, would be greatly reduced or eliminated as a result of increased government investigation and reprisal. This study sought to measure the extent to which health information managers reported being influenced by superiors to manipulate coding and classification of patient data. Findings from a nationwide survey of managers suggest that such practices are still pervasive, despite recent counter‐fraud legislation and highly visible prosecution of fraudulent behaviors. Examining variation in influences exerted from both within and external to specific service delivery settings, results suggest that pressure to alter classification codes occurred both within and external to the provider setting. We also examine how optimization influences vary across demographic, practice setting, and market characteristics, and find significant variation in influence across practice settings and market types. Implications for reimbursement programs and evidence‐based health care are discussed.

Group technology has become an important and viable approach to manufacturing systems, and provides significant benefits in inventory management, production process flow, throughput efficiency, tooling, and purchasing. It focuses on classification systems as the main approach, as opposed to production flow analysis. Many firms try to use a code such as a GT code as a means of both classifying and identifying components. This article points to some of the pitfalls that accompany this practice, and advocates the use of independent systems—one for identification and others for classification; thus, separating these two functions.

To find a successful human action recognition system (HAR) for the unmanned environments.

This paper describes the key technology of an efficient HAR system. In this paper, the advancements for three key steps of the HAR system are presented to improve the accuracy of the existing HAR systems. The key steps are feature extraction, feature descriptor and action classification, which are implemented and analyzed. The usage of the implemented HAR system in the self-driving car is summarized. Finally, the results of the HAR system and other existing action recognition systems are compared.

This paper exhibits the proposed modification and improvements in the HAR system, namely the skeleton-based spatiotemporal interest points (STIP) feature and the improved discriminative sparse descriptor for the identified feature and the linear action classification.

The experiments are carried out on captured benchmark data sets and need to be analyzed in a real-time environment.

The middleware support between the proposed HAR system and the self-driven car system provides several other challenging opportunities in research.

The authors’ work provides the way to go a step ahead in machine vision especially in self-driving cars.

The method for extracting the new feature and constructing an improved discriminative sparse feature descriptor has been introduced.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of the Adult Attachment Projective Picture System (AAP) as a measure of attachment state of mind in adults with intellectual disabilities. The AAP is a free response picture system method of assessing patterns of adult attachment with established validity and reliability in community and clinical samples.

The paper reports on five cases of adults with intellectual disabilities who were administered the AAP as part of routine clinical work. The AAP administration procedure was modified to take account of the participants’ intellectual disabilities.

It was possible to code and classify each AAP using the established coding and classification system. The authors coded four cases blind to each other ' s classification; they agreed on classifications for three cases and reached consensus on the fourth. The AAP analysis showed strong correspondence with case history material.

The AAP demonstrates the potential to assess attachment state of mind in adults with intellectual disabilities and is the first developmental measure of attachment status that has shown potential in this population. The paper discusses clinical application of the AAP and directions for future research.

Presents the similarity coefficient method for group technology to alleviate the part family formation problem in flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). Part families are formed in FMS in order to take advantage of part similarities in design and manufacture. Parts coding and classification analysis (PCA) has constituted the bulk of part family formation techniques in practice. Using shape‐based features for grouping is very labour intensive at the coding and classification stages. As a means of alleviating the latter problem, presents an approach for converting the weighted codes of the PCA to similarity coefficient measures. Uses a clustering algorithm to identify the part families. Presents a numerical example that compares the single and average linkage clustering technologies. An experimental investigation of the two methods showed that the average linkage clustering (ALC) performs better than the single linkage clustering (SLC) technology in minimizing intercellular materials handling costs.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the classification and coding system developed for the rapid prototyping (RP) industry.

The similarities among RP part geometries and processes are identified and related for the development of rapid prototyping coding system (RPCS).

RPCS forms a base for developing “prototyping philosophy” to take advantage of parts similarities in determination of optimal build orientation and optimization of part building cost.

Most of the examples are limited to parts built by fused deposition modelling process. But, the concept is applicable to any existing RP process.

RPCS implementation is suitable in industries where variety of RP parts are in use.

This is the first attempt towards development of a formal coding system for the RP industry.

A BODY known as the Local Government Personnel and Management Services Group has been moved to issue a short paper commenting on the Bains Report issued by the Bains Committee to which the Group submitted evidence.

In this article the properties of relational database management systems (DBMSs) are discussed. It is shown how they can be used as an effective tool for performing the function of primary‐key‐coding schemes for classifying product families in the application of group technology. The attributes of the relational DBMS are demonstrated and compared to traditional coding schemes.

This paper reports the results of an exploratory study of inter‐coder reliability of annual report social and environmental disclosures content analysis. Using the sentence‐based coding instruments and decision rules from Hackston and Milne (1996), this study reports the co‐agreement levels reached by three coders over five rounds of testing 49 annual reports. The study also provides a commentary on the implications of formal reliability analysis for past and future social and environmental disclosures content analyses, and the complexities of formal reliability measurement. The overall findings suggest that the coded output from inexperienced coders using the Hackston and Milne approach with little or no prior training can be relied on for aggregate total disclosures analysis. For more detailed sub‐category analysis, however, the findings suggest a period of training for the less experienced coders with at least 20 reports appears necessary before their coded output could be relied on.

Organisations either keep spares for their own use, or‐for‐sale to other organisations. In either case, the ultimate need is to be able to replace worn or defective parts in operational machinery or equipment. In an economic sense, spares are kept to meet the needs of the situation in the cheapest way.