Universal health care was on the national political agenda for nearly a hundred years until a comprehensive (but not universal) health care reform bill supported by President Obama passed in 2010. The most common explanation for the failure of past reform efforts is that special interests were continually able to block reform by lobbying lawmakers. Yet, beginning in the 1970s, accelerating with the failure of the Clinton health care plan, and continuing through the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, health policy reform was alive and well at the state level. Interest Groups and Health Care Reform across the United States assesses the impact of interest groups to determine if collectively they are capable of shaping policy in their own interests or whether they influence policy only at the margins. What can this tell us about the true power of interest groups in this policy arena? The fact that state governments took action in health policy in spite of opposing interests, where the national government could not, offers a compelling puzzle that will be of special interest to scholars and students of public policy, health policy, and state politics.

This volume summarizes the origins and development of the organization ecology approach to the study of interest representation and lobbying, and outlines an agenda for future research. Multiple authors from different countries and from different perspectives contribute their analysis of this research program.

This book provides new research on principal component analysis (PCA). Chapter One introduces typical PCA applications of transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomic data. Chapter Two studies the factor analysis of an outcome measurement survey for science, technology and society. Chapter Three examines the application of PCA to performance enhancement of hyperspectral radiative transfer computations.

A highly informative, accessible poster depicting life in Ancient Egypt. A picture of the Nile serves as the backdrop to a timeline of Ancient Egypt, and photos of artefacts including the Rosetta Stone and the painted bust of Queen Nefertiti provide exciting evidence of the period. The poster also features a map of Egypt and information organised into the topics: the Nile; farming and food; clothes and make-up; writing; everyday life; dynasties; temples, tombs and pyramids; mummies; gods and goddesses.