BACKGROUND Although maternal age at first birth has been rising in many developed countries, its long-term effects on the health of the mothers themselves are unclear. In this study, we investigated the relationship between maternal age at first birth and long-term mortality. METHODS We conducted a cohort study of 20,624 parous Japanese women aged between 40 and 79 years in 1994 and followed ...

Available online 8 November 2008 This study advances research on organizational learning and new product development (NPD) by examining the relationship between exploration and NPD performance while considering the moderating effects of cognitive skills and environmental uncertainty. Drawing on the cognitive perspective, we posited that A-shaped and T-shaped skills enhance NPD performance by ha...

Abstract Background Agriculture produces food for billions of humans and creates livelihoods farmers. However, the current production systems, driven by increasing demand ever-growing human population, are undermining ecological resources, primarily those related to biodiversity. Accordingly, agricultural in tropical rainforest countries has been a trade-off, as regions harbor high biodiversity...

Results from any existing clustering algorithm that are used for segmentation are highly sensitive to features that limit their generalization. Shape is one important attribute of an object. The detection and separation of an object using fuzzy ring-shaped clustering (FKR) and elliptic ring-shaped clustering (FKE) already exists in the literature. Not all real objects however, are ring or ellip...

Understanding the relationships between ecosystem services is important for promoting ecosystem service management and sustainable development. The relationships between ecosystem services have commonly been characterized as tradeoffs and synergies. Here, we report that a third type of relationship also exists, in which one ecosystem service constrains the other. Selecting the grassland and agr...

Using a moral hazard model, this study examines the relationship between environmental uncertainty and the adoption of decentralized IT governance. We show that this relationship is determined by a trade-off between the need for processing local information and the concern on moral hazard. The trade-off results in an inverted-U-shaped relationship between environmental uncertainty and decentral...