ABSTRACT
Organisms have evolved sensory mechanisms to extract pertinent information from their environment, enabling them to assess their situation and act accordingly. For social organisms travelling in groups, like the fish in a school or the birds in a flock, sharing information can further improve their situational awareness and reaction times. Data on the benefits and costs of social coordination, however, have largely allowed our understanding of why collective behaviours have evolved to outpace our mechanistic knowledge of how they arise. Recent studies have begun to correct this imbalance through fine-scale analyses of group movement data. One approach that has received renewed attention is the use of information theoretic (IT) tools like mutual information, transfer entropy and causation entropy, which can help identify causal interactions in the type of complex, dynamical patterns often on display when organisms act collectively. Yet, there is a communications gap between studies focused on the ecological constraints and solutions of collective action with those demonstrating the promise of IT tools in this arena. We attempt to bridge this divide through a series of ecologically motivated examples designed to illustrate the benefits and challenges of using IT tools to extract deeper insights into the interaction patterns governing group-level dynamics. We summarize some of the approaches taken thus far to circumvent existing challenges in this area and we conclude with an optimistic, yet cautionary perspective.
Subject(s)
Communication , Information Theory , Animals , Birds , Entropy , FishesSubject(s)
Medical Errors/prevention & control , Safety Management/organization & administration , Humans , Mandatory Reporting , National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, U.S., Health and Medicine Division , Patient Advocacy , Politics , Quality Assurance, Health Care , United StatesSubject(s)
Medicaid/legislation & jurisprudence , Medicare Part A/legislation & jurisprudence , Budgets/legislation & jurisprudence , Diagnosis-Related Groups/legislation & jurisprudence , Health Care Reform , Humans , Medicaid/economics , Medicaid/organization & administration , Medicare Part A/economics , Medicare Part A/organization & administration , Prospective Payment System , United StatesABSTRACT
Medicare cuts are getting most of the attention as Congress crafts a deficit elimination plan. But Medicaid negotiations pose similarly difficult issues, and perhaps some good news.
Subject(s)
Budgets/legislation & jurisprudence , Medicaid/legislation & jurisprudence , State Health Plans/legislation & jurisprudence , Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, U.S. , Cost Control/legislation & jurisprudence , Negotiating , Policy Making , Politics , United StatesABSTRACT
With each passing year, Medicare's financial stability gets worse and the policy options become more daunting. Congress and the White House appear incapable of administering tough medicine. Could a new independent body do any better?
