Improving Health Care Access for Older Alaskans: What Are the Options?

This report focuses on the problem older Alaskans who rely on Medicare face getting access to primary care, and discusses some of the options policymakers are considering to resolve the problem. But older Americans across the country also report difficulty getting the primary care they need. The discussion here sheds light on the problem and potential solutions nationwide. Most Americans 65 and older use Medicare as their primary health insurance. Medicare is federal health insurance for people 65 and older, people under 65 with certain disabilities, and people of any age with end-stage renal disease—but this report looks only at access issues for Medicare beneficiaries 65 and older. Doctors don’t have to participate in the Medicare program. But those who do participate have to accept, as full payment, what Medicare pays for specific services. Many primary-care doctors say Medicare doesn’t pay them enough to cover their costs—so growing numbers are declining to see new Medicare patients. Among primary-care doctors nationwide, 61% accept new Medicare patients.1 National surveys sponsored by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission have found that 17% of Medicare patients in the U.S. had “a big problem” finding family doctors in 2007—up from 13% in 2005.2 In Alaska, a 2008 survey by the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) found that just over half of Alaska’s primary-care doctors were willing to treat new Medicare patients.3 The situation was worse in Anchorage, where 40% of all older Alaskans live. Only 17% of primary-care doctors in Anchorage were willing to treat new Medicare patients as of 2008 (Figure 1).4The Harold E. Pomeroy Public Policy Research EndowmentIntroduction / How Medicare Works / Closed Doors / Older Anchorage Residents and Primary Care / Options for Changing Access to Primary Care: What is Alaska Considering? / Conclusions / Appendi

UA Research Summary No. 14

In the past few years, Alaskans have been hearing reports that some primary-care doctors won’t see new Medicare patients. Medicare pays these doctors only about two-thirds of what private insurance pays—and that’s after a sizable increase in 2009. But most Americans 65 or older have to use Medicare as their main insurance, even if they also have private insurance. Just how widespread is the problem of Alaska’s primary-care doctors turning away Medicare patients? ISER surveyed hundreds of doctors to find out—and learned that so far there’s a major problem in Anchorage, a noticeable problem in the Mat-Su Borough and Fairbanks, and almost no problem in other areas.University of Alaska Foundation

Interaction-mediated surface state instability in disordered three-dimensional topological superconductors with spin SU(2) symmetry

We show that arbitrarily weak interparticle interactions destabilize the surface states of 3D topological superconductors with spin SU(2) invariance (symmetry class CI), in the presence of non-magnetic disorder. The conduit for the instability is disorder-induced wavefunction multifractality. We argue that time-reversal symmetry breaks spontaneously at the surface, so that topologically-protected states do not exist for this class. The interaction-stabilized surface phase is expected to exhibit ferromagnetic order, or to reside in an insulating plateau of the spin quantum Hall effect.Comment: v2: 5+3 pages, 1 figure; expanded introduction, added background on topological superconductors and multifractality, technical details relegated to sup info (published version

Identifying Cover Songs Using Information-Theoretic Measures of Similarity

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. For more information, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/This paper investigates methods for quantifying similarity between audio signals, specifically for the task of cover song detection. We consider an information-theoretic approach, where we compute pairwise measures of predictability between time series. We compare discrete-valued approaches operating on quantized audio features, to continuous-valued approaches. In the discrete case, we propose a method for computing the normalized compression distance, where we account for correlation between time series. In the continuous case, we propose to compute information-based measures of similarity as statistics of the prediction error between time series. We evaluate our methods on two cover song identification tasks using a data set comprised of 300 Jazz standards and using the Million Song Dataset. For both datasets, we observe that continuous-valued approaches outperform discrete-valued approaches. We consider approaches to estimating the normalized compression distance (NCD) based on string compression and prediction, where we observe that our proposed normalized compression distance with alignment (NCDA) improves average performance over NCD, for sequential compression algorithms. Finally, we demonstrate that continuous-valued distances may be combined to improve performance with respect to baseline approaches. Using a large-scale filter-and-refine approach, we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance for cover song identification using the Million Song Dataset.The work of P. Foster was supported by an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Doctoral Training Account studentship

Employers' policies for third age employment – the case for action and the rational for reaction

This paper reports on findings from a study which explores employers’ perceptions of the careers of those in third age employment and the extent to which these organisations have in place policies and practices to manage older worker careers. Drawing on interviews with UK HR managers and advisory bodies, the study finds that there was an absence of formal policies which addressed the career needs of older works despite employers being aware of the issue associated with an aging workforce. Instead employers responded to career related requests from older workers on an ad hoc basis as they felt that specific policies for this group of people would potentially create legal issues for the organisation. Employers also believed that the aged workforce had little impact on their business and as a result did not engage in collective dialogue with older workers about their requirements and instead made assumptions about their career needs

An exploratory investigation of aberrant consumer behaviour in Libya: a sociocultural approach

Studies concerning aberrant consumer behaviour (ACB) are dominated by research conducted in the West. By examining the impact social and cultural factors have on the management and understanding of ACB in Libya, a Muslim country, this paper extends knowledge by exploring this issue in a different setting. Materials were collected by conducting in-depth interviews with 26 sellers in Libya and ACB was explored in three different contexts: grocery stores, computer stores and hotels. The study finds that the sellers use alternative marketplace behaviours to manage ACB to that described in the literature, namely informal, community based approaches which reflect accepted societal and cultural norms. Furthermore, the study finds that not all activities reported to be ACB in the literature are perceived to be misbehaviour by the Libyan sellers

Arabic social and cultural influences on aberrant consumer behaviour: an exploratory study of Libyan marketers

This paper examines the effect of Arabic social and cultural factors on adopting aberrant consumer behaviour (ACB) in Libya. The data was collected by conducting personal interviews with 26 marketers in Libya. The findings indicate that the Arabic social and cultural environment enforces some limitations on ACB control and prevention practices. These limitations have provided an opportunity for some Libyan consumers to engage in ACB. However, this paper goes on to explore some unique alternative ACB controlling and preventative practices used by Libyan marketers which are considered socially acceptable

Does software piracy always represent consumer misbehaviour?

This study aims to explore whether or not software piracy is perceived as consumer misbehaviour in Libya. Both qualitative and quantitative methods have been used; data were collected by interviewing 10 marketers and through a questionnaire surveying 219 Libyan consumers. The study found that almost all of the software in the Libyan market is copied in ways that would be considered illegal in Western societies but the marketers interviewed did not consider this as misbehaviour. Instead, some of them were actively encouraging consumers to adopt this pattern of behaviour. Also, nearly half (49.4%) of the sample had positive attitudes toward software piracy and 43% had an intention to conduct this behaviour. Furthermore, only 34% of consumers thought that software piracy is illegal, despite laws existing that protect intellectual property rights

Action Selection for Interaction Management: Opportunities and Lessons for Automated Planning

The central problem in automated planning---action selection---is also a primary topic in the dialogue systems research community, however, the nature of research in that community is significantly different from that of planning, with a focus on end-to-end systems and user evaluations. In particular, numerous toolkits are available for developing speech-based dialogue systems that include not only a method for representing states and actions, but also a mechanism for reasoning and selecting the actions, often combined with a technical framework designed to simplify the task of creating end-to-end systems. We contrast this situation with that of automated planning, and argue that the dialogue systems community could benefit from some of the directions adopted by the planning community, and that there also exist opportunities and lessons for automated planning