Forest ecosystems in eastern Canada are particularly sensitive to climate change and may shift from carbon sinks to carbon sources in the coming decades. Understanding how forest biomass responded to past climate change is thus of crucial interest, but past biomass reconstruction still represents a challenge. Here we used transfer functions based on modern pollen assemblages and remotely sensed...

This study investigates change over time in the level of hiring discrimination in US labor markets. We perform a meta-analysis of every available field experiment of hiring discrimination against African Americans or Latinos (n = 28). Together, these studies represent 55,842 applications submitted for 26,326 positions. We focus on trends since 1989 (n = 24 studies), when field experiments becam...

SUMMARY: Wehave already shown that brainMR imaging of healthy individuals frequently reveals either unilateral or bilateral Hh, which is considered a hallmark of hippocampal sclerosis.We performed a follow-up (5-year interval) clinical and advanced imaging study of these individuals to address whether Hhmay havemasked occult brain atrophy or contributed to a later onset of epilepsy. Subjects wi...

Following the successful stories in the airline industry, many primary-care clinics have adopted overbooking to deal with their prevalent patient no-show problem. However, there has been very limited research, to the best of our knowledge, that analyzes the impact of overbooking on the major causes/factors of patient no-show and its implications. While overbooking has little impact on many rand...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE CYP2D6, a member of the cytochrome P450 superfamily, is responsible for the metabolism of about 25% of the commonly prescribed drugs. Its activity ranges from complete deficiency to excessive activity, potentially causing toxicity of medication or therapeutic failure with recommended drug dosages. This study aimed to describe the CYP2D6 diversity at the global level. ...

This paper develops a framework and proposes heuristic dynamic policies for scheduling patient appointments taking into account the fact that patients may cancel or not show up for their appointments. In a simulation study that considers a model clinic, which is created using data obtained from an actual clinic, we find that the heuristics proposed outperform all the other benchmark policies, p...

Many service systems that work with appointments, particularly those in healthcare, suffer from high no-show rates. While there are many reasons why patients become no-shows, empirical studies found that the probability of a patient being a no-show typically increases with the patient’s appointment delay, i.e., the time between the call for the appointment and the appointment date. This paper i...

Noncompliance is a common challenge in the analysis and interpretation of prevention trials. The authors describe new formulations of the problem based on D. B. Rubin's (1974, 1978) causal model. The formulations help clarify assumptions underlying estimation procedures and yield more efficient methods of estimation. The authors apply the methods to a trial of a job training intervention in whi...

BACKGROUND In almost all healthcare systems, no-shows (scheduled appointments missed without any notice from patients) have a negative impact on waiting lists, costs and resource utilization, impairing the quality and quantity of cares that could be provided, as well as the revenues from the corresponding activity. Overbooking is a tool healthcare providers can resort to reduce the impact of no...