Funding the rising cost of U.S health care Assignment

Funding the rising cost of U.S health care - Assignment Example The healthcare delivery system of the US has been voluntarily involved in response to the considerations regarding the accessibility, quality, along with cost of the health insurance services (Jones & Bartlett Publishers LLC, 2008). However, the continuous rising of healthcare costs has long been witnessed by the demographic groups can be regarded as a phenomenal concern of the country. Accessibility to the healthcare services has long been recognized as a key issue in the US healthcare system. Both the government and non-government insurance agencies are recognized to focus on developing their offerings in order to accomplish a significant growth for their institutions. The consolidation amidst the health insurance service providers in the nation, have been raising issues associated with accessibility due to their unabatedly increasing price and availability of quality based service facilities (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2014). The following figure details about the overall health in surance coverage of the total US population. With regard to the above statistics, it is affirmed that the healthcare sector of the US has been undergoing an unsustainable condition due to the rising cost of healthcare services provided by both public and private health insurance institutions (U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2013; Shi, 2012). Medicare services provided by the institutions are likely to involve higher pricing strategies that often raise major issues for the population with minimum or considerably less income level. The Census Bureau in the year 2011 reported that more than 36% of US households living below poverty line were not insured. With reference to the total spending on healthcare and its insurance beneficiaries, the US spends approximately USD 2 trillion every year that can be apparently identified to be higher than other countries of the world (Wilper et al., 2009). The

Ethical Dilemma on Same Sex Parenting Assignment

Ethical Dilemma on Same Sex Parenting - Assignment Example There are diverse parties involved in defining the morality of same-sex marriage. Proponents of the practice highlight that it embraces moral. Based on opponents’ standpoint, same-sex parenting practice presents complex choices to different parties. Consequently, the parties involved are compelled to adopt societal norms as a justification for solving the ethical dilemma. The parties involved in same-sex parenting morality debate include policy makers, nurses, and parents. Policy makers have a central role in formulating relevant laws pertaining to the rights and role of same-sex parents. Nurses present different standpoint on the debate as to whether to adopt same-sex parenting. Parents have challenges supporting or criticizing same-sex parenting as a practice. Three principles ANA codes of ethics are applicable to the question of same-sex parenting as an ethical dilemma: the principle of social networking, the principle on social networking and principle for pay for quality, and principle on nursing documentation. The principle for social networking ensures nurses protect the privacy and confidentiality of their patients while using social networks including the media. It principle ensures nurses do not interfere with the freedom of same-sex parents to adopt children. It forbids nurses from disclosing confidential information pertaining to same-sex parenting. The principle of pay for quality relates to same-sex parenting as a practice creates an ethical. It compels nurses to offer quality services to sex parents; quality of service should be commensurate with the pay. Based on the principle, nurses must offer quality services to same-sex parents. Similarly, the nursing documentation principle is applicable to same-sex parenting ethical dilemma. Nursing documentation principle requires nurses to keep accurate and clear medical records for same-sex parents.  

Prevention of childhood obesity 5-10years old Research Proposal

Prevention of childhood obesity 5-10years old - Research Proposal Example re in constant contact with their children and if anything have the greatest influence pertaining to what their children feed on; hence can uphold sustainable health measures in the family that are then adopted by the children. Additionally this study will also be useful to the larger community especially organizations that are concerned with the manufacturing and processing of food, nutritionists and the members of the National Health Service. Obesity in children is one of the greatest public health challenges in the 21st century. Contextually, in the UK there has been a great concern pertaining to childhood obesity that has led the government into applying stricter nutrient standards especially with respect to foods supplied in schools (Voon et.al, 2014). This makes this study quite relevant showing how unhealthy eating has posed a great challenge to children’s health in the country; â€Å" marketing of unhealthy foods was banned on other channels during, before and after programs aimed at children aged between 4 and 15† (p. 172). This is an attempt to reduce the exposure of children to unhealthy foods; as the prevalence of obesity in the UK is said to have tripled in the last two decades pushing it to epidemic proportions (Branca et. Al, 2007). The statistics show the high rate at which health has been deteriorating and weight increasing among young children in the UK; making healthy eating and weight among young children an area of great concern to date in the country. It is for this reason that the government has taken it upon itself to implement strict policies that are meant to secure the health of the children in the long run; the government is only trying to combat this epidemic as it is. Obesity is viewed as a major health alarm as once a child becomes obese in his or her prime years then there is a chance that this child will remain obese even in adulthood (Branca et. Al, 2007). With obesity both short-term and long-term conditions become a

Ethical Decision Making by Individuals Essay Example for Free

Ethical Decision Making by Individuals Essay Existing theoretical models of individual ethical decision making in organizations place little or no emphasis on characteristics of the ethical issue itself. This article (a) proposes an issue-contingent model containing a new set of variables called moral intensity: (b) using concepts, theory, and evidence derived largely from social psychology, argues that moral intensity influences every component of moral decision making and behavior: (c) offers four research propositions, and (d) discusses implications of the theory. Conclusions and Implications Existing theoretical models have ignored the effect of characteristics of the moral issue itself on ethical decision making and behavior in organizations. Taken at face value, these models suggest that individuals will decide and behave in the same manner regardless of the nature of the moral issue involved. An employee of a drug manufacturer would view the release of a dangerous drug by his or her firm with the same alarm (or lack of alarm) that he or she viewed the theft of a few diskettes from the company supply cabinet by a fellow employee. The issue-contingent model proposed here explicitly rejects this view and suggests that the moral intensity of the issue itself has a significant effect on moral decision making and behavior at all stages of the process. If this model is found to have empirical support, the testing of other models would be significantly affected. Controlling for issue traits would become an integral part of a meaningful test of Trevinos (1986) person-situation interactionist model, for example; the relative importance of personal factors and situational factors might vary considerably, from issue to issue. Similarly, issue charucteristics could alter the balance of teleological and deontological considerations in the moral evaluation stage of Hunt and Vitells (1986) general theory model of marketing ethics. Perhaps the most important potential impact of an empirical finding that ethical decision making and behavior are issue contingent involves the applicability of the models themselves. Moral intensity is expected to play a major role in the recognition of moral issues and, hence, in the actual engagement of moral decision-making processes instead of, or in addition to, other decision-making schemata. Simply stated, the details of moral decision-making and behavior processes become irrelevant if the person does not recognize that he or she is dealing with a moral issue. Future models of ethical decision making should include some consideration of the effect of the moral agents failure to recognize the moral issue. Moral intensity is also relevant to the general applicability of Kohlbergs (1976) theory of cognitive moral development. If moral development is issue contingent, as this article and some emerging empirical evidence suggest, then Kohlbergs theory would have to be substantially revised, and much of the research based on it would have to be reappraised. Future research based on his developmental theory would have to control for traits of the moral issues involved. From a practical point of view, issue contingency is important to normative judgments of moral decisions and of the people who make them. Many of the elements of moral intensity (magnitude of consequences, probability of effect, temporal immediacy, and concentration of effect) are directly related to judgments of the importance of moral issues. If these elements of moral intensity are found to be positively linked to moral behavior, it can be concluded that people generally behave better when the moral issue is important than they do when it is unimportant. Regardless of a persons views regarding the overall moral tenor of society or its alleged decline in recent years, he or she could easily be encouraged by the finding that peoples best moral behavior is inspired by issues of substantial importance.

Techniques for Understanding Human Walking Motion

Techniques for Understanding Human Walking Motion Introduction Multimedia is a term that collectively describes a variety of media content available in various forms of text, speech, audio, still images, video, animation, graphics, 3D models and combinations of them used to capture real time moments. Over the recent years the technological advances have enabled wide availability and easy access of multimedia content and much research was dedicated to perform automated computational tasks for a wide spectrum of applications such as surveillance, crime investigation, fashion and designing, traditional aerospace, publishing and advertising, medical applications, virtual reality applications to name a few. The volume of multimedia information is so huge now that the improvement in various tasks of representation, analyzing, searching and retrieving process has become the need of the hour. Among all the available types of media, video is one of the prominent forms, widely used for analyzing multimedia content. Several types of videos can be captured by various recording devices but then even the most suitable types of devices used for acquiring videos have to deal with two important problems- sensory gap and semantic gap. The sensory gap being- the difference between the real world and its representation. â€Å"The sensory gap is the gap between the object in the world and the information in a (computational) description derived from a recording of that scene† [Smeulders, A. W. M., Worring, M., Santini, S., Gupta, A., and Jain, R. (2000). Content-based image retrieval at the end of the early years. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 22(12):1349–1380.]. The semantic gap being- the difference between the behavior description by human vision and the computational model used by the human activity/behavior analysis systems. â€Å"The semantic gap is the lack of coincidence between the information that one can extract from the visual data and the inter pretation that the same data have for a user in a given situation† [Smeulders, A. W. M., Worring, M., Santini, S., Gupta, A., and Jain, R. (2000). Content-based image retrieval at the end of the early years. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 22(12):1349–1380.]. Many researchers have proposed to build computational models of the human visual system to represent as close as possible to the reality. A major development was the framework proposed by David Marr at MIT, who used a bottom-up approach to represent scene understanding [D. Marr,† Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information†, Freeman, san Francisco (1982)]. Later, various state-of the-art methods evolved but, the technology that helps people to integrate the content of multimedia, for meaningful expression is still lagging behind. Within the realm of multimedia content analysis, computer vision methods and algorithms have been used as foundation and the coupled relation between multimedia analysis and computer vision is a well-known challenge. Currently, the most popular research performed by various researchers is the human movement analysis. Several types of activities that are performed by humans can be captured by various recording devices and the human motion analysis systems were built with respect to context of applications. The aim of human movement analysis systems is to automatically analyze and transform the input video sequences into semantic interpretation of them. The recognition of human activities has been studied by computer vision for quite some time but is far behind the capabilities of human vision. In human visual system- when a person moving is observed, human’s brain recognizes that person’s action by analyzing the transition of postures adopted or interprets behavior by tr acking the person’s transition of postures and noting the intent of action. This analysis is complex for computer vision systems. Since the human body is non-rigid, deformable, articulated, a person can have a variety of postures over time. The works on human activity analysis have not provided satisfactory results yet. To solve problems relating human movement analysis using videos, the paradigm of data fusion is recommended. Multimedia data fusion is a way to integrate multiple media, their associated features or integrate intermediate decisions to perform an analysis task. According to B.V Dasarathy, â€Å"Combining Multimedia data fusion is a formal framework in which are expressed means and tools for alliance of data originating from different sources for the exploitation of their synergy in order to obtain information whose quality cannot be achieved otherwise.† [Dasarathy, B.V. (2001) information fusion- what, where, why, when, and how? Information fusion, 2, 75-76]. In the existing literature several contributions are made to research on data fusion techniques used in multisensory environments and multimodal fusion with the aim of fusing and aggregating data obtained from multiple sources. Video data has a significant characteristic of multimodal content. Combining the information gat hered from multiple modalities is valid approach to increase accuracy. [ P.K Atrey, M. a Hossain, A.E Saddik and M.S Kankahalli. â€Å"Multimodal fusion for multimedia analysis: A Survey. Multimedia systems 16(6): 345-379, 2010] Multimedia fusion is useful for several tasks such as detection, recognition, identification, tracking and a wide range of applications. This research work presents multimedia analysis in combination with computer vision and data fusion perspectives to understand human walking motion in video sequences. This kind of research is challenging. Motivation From the view point of data fusion this research work is motivated by the observation that all living organisms have the capability to use multiple senses to learn about the environment and then the brain fuses all the information to perform a decision task. Human observer can easily and instantly recognize action. But, the main limitations with the visual sensory of humans are, limited range of visual perception, limitations and compromises of human brain. Whereas, automatic systems can work 24 hours a day and 7 days a week allowing accurate event detection and their cost is lower to maintain. On the other hand, from the view point of computer vision, algorithms and techniques are yet to improve performance for analyzing humans walking found in videos. Computer vision systems are far behind the capabilities of human vision and have to deal with two important problems- sensory gap and semantic gap. The sensory gap being- the difference between the real world and its representation and the semantic gap being- the difference between the behavior description by human vision and the computational model used by the human activity/behavior analysis systems. A promising strategy consists in integrating different techniques of data fusion and computer vision in a unified framework to enhance the performance of the tasks associated with analyzing human walking motion and overcoming the drawbacks. 1.3 The Goal The aim of this research work is to conduct a detailed investigation of currently available tools and techniques for understanding human walking motion and develop a generic framework where data fusion and computer vision perspectives are used to analyze human walking actions in context to real life applications. During the process of fusing, correlation of activities and patterns of activities can be detected to predict intent. Finally, performance will be evaluated for true positives, false positives and misclassifications. Summary of contributions Our work in the thesis is focused on the following significant contributions: Design of a unified framework, for combining data fusion and computer vision methodology to improve the performance of automatic analysis of human movements in videos. Tasks of detecting moving humans and related sub-problems in video frames using unsupervised techniques. Efficient technique to handle occlusion in the task of tracking walking humans. New strategy for accomplishing the task of correlation and predictions during detection and tracking of humans. Noticing and Interpreting stances change in walking movements. 1.5 Outline The thesis is organized as follows Chapter 2 –presents background and related literature review on various existing strategies and approaches of data fusion and computer vision while providing motivation for the proposed approaches used for the work in this thesis. Chapter 3 Provides detailed explanation on the unified framework. Show how the frame work helps in accomplishing the tasks of analysis in multimedia content for correlation and prediction along with a comparison of proposed frame work to JDL, Dasarthy data fusion model. Chapter 4 Presents an overview of state-of-the art methods for detection of humans in videos, the proposed novel work, experiments and the evaluations. Chapter 5 Presents an overview of state-of-the art methods for tracking of humans in videos, the proposed novel work, experiments and the evaluations. Chapter 6 Automatic interpretation of changes in stance changes in human walking. Chapter 7 Conclusions, future directions and related open issues are discussed. References: Smeulders, A. W. M., Worring, M., Santini, S., Gupta, A., and Jain, R. (2000).Content-based image retrieval at the end of the early years. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 22(12):1349–1380 D. Marr,† Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information†, Freeman, san Francisco (1982) Dasarathy, B.V. (2001) information fusion- what, where, why, when, and how? Information fusion, 2, 75-76 P.K Atrey, M. a Hossain, A.E Saddik and M.S Kankahalli. â€Å"Multimodal fusion for multimedia analysis: A Survey. Multimedia systems 16(6): 345-379, 2010

Code of Ethics Design and Implementation Essay -- Business Ethics Essa

Introduction Business ethics has become increasingly important in recent years. American’s idea of business had become more negative due to the scandals in the early nineteen nineties. Due to the increasing public outcry, it is more important than ever to have an enforced code of ethics or CofE. Currently, the organization I work for, PBC, does not have a code of ethics. There are many important ideas that need to be implemented in a CofE for my organization to ensure ethical behavior by every employee. I will be developing an ethics plan to be adopted by my organization, and will provide evidence as to why that is in my code of ethics. Organizational Structure The management company I work for is the most decentralized organization out of all the organizations I have worked for in the past. In a decentralized organization the decisions are delegated all the way down to the bottom of the organization (Ferrell, Fraedrich, & Ferrell, 2011). In my company all decisions are left to me, since the only people above me are my owners. Since I work with a decentralized organization, and ethics program is even more important. One author linked the size of the organization to the risk of unethical behavior, and found that the smaller more flexible the company sees both extremes of high ethical behavior and low ethical behavior (Schminke, 2001). When I recently took over the community, the lack of an ethics program became a hurdle I had to overcome. The previous manager did quite a few things that were unethical. Since there is no one supervising my staff and I when it comes to ethical decisions, it is even more important to have a solid ethics program. Within the management company I work for we have both formal and ... .... C., Fraedrich, J., & Ferrell, L. (2011). Business Ethics: Ethical decision making and cases 8th ed. Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning. McNamara, C. (n.d.). Complete Guide to Ethics Management: An Ethics Toolkit for Managers. Retrieved September 1, 2011, from Free Management Library: http://managementhelp.org/businessethics/ethics-guide.htm North Carolina Department of Administration. (2005, July 1). Example of an Organizational Code of Conduct. Retrieved September 1, 2011, from North Carolina Department of Administration http://www.doa.nc.gov/cfw/documents/grants/2010/policy/OrganizationalCodeofConductExample.pdf Schminke, M. (2001). Considering the Business in Business Ethics: An Exploratory Study of the Influence of Organizational Size and Structure on Individual Ethical Predispositions. JOURNAL OF BUSINESS ETHICS , 30 (4), 375-390.

Asthma :: essays research papers fc

Asthma is a respiratory disorder marked by breathing difficulty caused by temporary narrowing of the bronchi, the airways branching from the trachea to the lungs. Attacks usually are brought on by allergic reaction to ANTIGENS such as grass and tree pollens, mold spores, fungi, animal dander, and certain foods but may also be caused by chemical irritants in the atmosphere or by infections of the respiratory tract. Susceptibility to an asthma attack is based on hyperactivity of the bronchial muscles, which constrict on exposure to one or another of these agents. Episodes of asthma vary widely in severity and may last from a few minutes to several days. They may begin at any age but usually occur in childhood. In children, asthma often is associated with eczema, a skin inflammation that may reflect the tendency of the child to develop hypersensitivity reactions. The attacks usually become less frequent and less severe over the years and disappear in about half of all affected children before adulthood. In one form of asthma, called intrinsic asthma, however, the attacks become less frequent and less severe, but recovery between them is less complete. The bronchi in such patients become chronically narrowed, causing a progressive loss of capacity for physical exertion. The prevalence of asthma is only about 1 or 2 percent worldwide but varies greatly from country to country. In the United States, asthma affects about 6.9 percent of children. Typically, an asthma attack begins within minutes after exposure to a triggering agent. Symptoms include a sensation of tightness in the chest, coughing and wheezing, and difficulty in breathing. Persons having attacks usually find it more difficult to exhale then inhale, which causes overinflation of the chest and impaired lung functions. The breathing difficulty is alleviated somewhat by leaning forward and supporting the trunk with the arms on some object. Attacks that last several hours or more, even several days, despite treatment are called status asthmaticus. Patients with this condition develop a rapid pulse as the heart attempts to compensate for the lack of oxygen in the blood by beating faster. They also develop signs of exhaustion and dehydration. On a long-term basis, asthma usually is managed by determining the agent responsible for the attacks so that the patient can avoid it. When avoidance of allergens is not feasible, patients can sometimes be