Cost and value in medical education:the role of discounting

Medical education is an expensive activity.It is also a very long-term activity.Medical education interventions today will have impact up for 40 years into the future as today＇s medical students continue to practice over a long career.The expense of medical education has led to a new interest in how to ensure maximum returns for educational investment.The new discipline of cost and value in medical education is clearly in its infancy with relatively few papers so far reporting rigorous results on the cost effectiveness or cost benefit or cost utility ratios of education interventions.

Evaluating Added Benefits from Combined Cattle Manure and Fertilizer Application in a Maize Cropping System

A field experiment was conducted at Kpongu in the Upper West region of Ghana to determine the added benefits in grain yield of maize derived from the concurrent use of manure and mineral fertilizer, and their cost effectiveness. Factorial combinations of cattle manure and mineral fertilizer each at 0, 50 and 100% of their recommended rates were evaluated in both the field and the laboratory studies. The treatments were applied in a randomized complete block design with three replications on the field. The same treatments were applied in the incubation study in a completely randomized design. The use of 100% NPK （Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium） ＋ 5 t manure gave the highest grain yield of 4,678 kg·ha^-1. Synergistic interactions resulting in added benefits in grain yield were observed in all the combined nutrient inputs except 50% NPK ＋ 2.5 t manure which accrued an added disadvantage of 44 kg·ha^-1. Economic analysis proved that 100% NPK ＋ 2.5 t manure and 50% NPK ＋ 5 t manure were the most economically viable combined treatments in terms of grain yield. Based on the results from this study, resource poor farmers in the Upper West region of Ghana may reduce mineral fertilizer recommended rates by 50% and supplement it with 5 t quality （N 〉2.5%） cattle manure without compromising yield and profit.

Outsourcing Service Departments

In a manufacturing company, certain departments can be characterized as production departments and others as service departments. This paper expands and simplifies the results by the author and his co-author （Lowenthal ＆ Malek, 2005; 2013）, by explaining in a simple way how to obtain the fair-price per unit to pay to external suppliers that replace service departments. The paper also proves that replacing several service departments at once produces exactly the same fair-price per unit if they were replaced sequentially.

A novel OFS–TLBO–SVR hybrid model for optimal budget allocation of government schemes to maximize GVA at factor cost

Support Vector Regression (SVR) has already been proved to be one of the mostreferred and used machine learning technique in various fields. In this study, wehave addressed a predictive-cum-prescriptive analysis for finalizing fundallocations by the Government at center to the schemes under Central Plan andto the schemes under States and Union Territories Plan, with a goal to maximizeGross Value Added (GVA) at factor cost. Here, we have proposed a hybridmachine learning model comprising of OFS (Orthogonal Forward Selection),TLBO (Teaching Learning Based Optimization) and SVR for the prediction ofGVA at factor cost. In this model, referred as OFS–TLBO–SVR hybrid model,SVR is at the core of prediction mechanism, OFS is for identifying the relevantfeatures, and TLBO is to support in optimizing the free parameters of SVR andagain TLBO is used for optimizing the governable attributes of data.

PREDICTIVE STUDY ON THE ECONOMIC VALUE OF RADIO SPECTRUM IN CHINA

Increasing popularity of spectrum-based services brings the striking contradictions between the limited spectrum resource and its increasing demands.This paper puts forward an approach to forecast the future spectrum demand and its economic value,so as to offer a scientific basis for spectrum regulators to resolve this contradiction effectively and make a long-term spectrum-use plan.Specifically,this paper analyzes the driving factors of spectrum demand firstly,based on which a forecasting model is constructed to predict the spectrum demand and its deficit/surplus in the next few years.Then,a forecasting model to measure the economic value of spectrum is proposed based on marginal opportunity cost theory,and the indifference curve is introduced to show the economic value generated by additional spectrum.Additionally,an empirical study is conducted to forecast the spectrum demand and its economic value for China in the next 10 years according to the proposed method.The results of this study show that spectrum deficit is a trend in future and releasing additional spectrum will bring China huge economic benefits.