Finland introduced a personal identification number system in 1964, and since then practically all admini-strative registers have included this unique identification code. Currently Finland has strict data protection laws, which prohibit the collection of sensitive health and social information. Health data that includes identifiers can be gathered by obtaining informed consent from the patients or clients, or under special legislation. An important exemption of this general principle, however, is the collection and use of such data for statistical and scientific purposes, for example in epidemiological studies. Thus, these registers can be used as a basis when trying to improve health, welfare, health services, and social welfare services. This article describes the health and social welfare register system and data protection legislation in Finland, and gives some examples on epidemiological register studies. This article also presents methods for promoting

file system clusters data that is sequentially accessed and provides two block sizes to allow fast access to large files while not wasting large amounts of space for small files. File access rates of up to ten times faster than the traditional UNIX file system are experienced. Long needed enhancements

. A new sequential data assimilation method is discussed. It is based on forecasting the error statistics using Monte Carlo methods, a better alternative than solving the traditional and computationally extremely demanding approximate error covariance equation used in the extended Kalman filter

This article presents a measure of semantic similarityinanis-a taxonomy based on the notion of shared information content. Experimental evaluation against a benchmark set of human similarity judgments demonstrates that the measure performs better than the traditional edge-counting approach

outcomes. We show that overconfidence implies negative long-lag autocorrelations, excess volatility, and, when managerial actions are correlated with stock mispricing, public-event-based return predictability. Biased self-attribution adds positive short-lag autocorrela-tions ~“momentum”!, short

this study's methods, analyses, and results differed from the previous ones. By 1971, hundreds of studies within the operant tradition (Skin-ner, 1953) had established that extrinsic rewards can control be-havior. When administered closely subsequent to a behavior, re-wards were reliably found

material that, unlike traditional cryptographic keys, is (1) not reproducible precisely and (2) not distributed uniformly. We propose two primitives: a fuzzy extractor reliably extracts nearly uniform randomness R from its input; the extraction is error-tolerant in the sense that R will be the same even

It does not mean an honest or reliable character but one that provides the illusion of life and thus permits the audience s suspension of disbelief The idea of believability has long been studied and explored in literature theater lm radio drama and other media Traditional character animators

closely on the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), measures neither household income nor consumption expenditures. As a proxy for long-run household wealth we construct a linear index from a set of asset indicators using principal components analysis to derive the weights. This “asset index ” is robust

sensor networks to be deployed in an ad hoc fashion, with individual nodes remaining largely inactive for long periods of time, but then becoming suddenly active when something is detected. These characteristics of sensor networks and applications motivate a MAC that is different from traditional