CONTEXT The National Kidney Disease Education Program recommends calculating glomerular filtration rate from serum creatinine concentration. Accurate creatinine measurements are necessary for this calculation. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the state of the art in measuring serum creatinine, as well as the ability of a proficiency testing program to measure bias for individual laboratories and method ...

Purpose The unique dynamics of family firms (FFs) shape the management financial crises. Religious and secular reasons, as a defining characteristic this type firm, provide reference system for key decisions. This paper aims to explore under-researched topic differences in FFs' crisis between religious decision-makers (FDMs), considering secularization developed countries. Design/methodology/ap...

We provide results from a study of two separate sectors within the cotton-growing region of southern Mali. In one sector, farmers have engaged in a farmer field school (FFS) training programme since 2003--the other not. One goal of the training was the adoption of alternatives to the use of hazardous insecticides, through integrated pest management (IPM) methods. Over an 8-year period, analysis...

Germinal center (GC) and non-GC phenotypes are predictors of outcome in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) and can be used to stratify chemotherapy-treated patients into low- and high-risk groups. To determine how combination of rituximab with chemotherapy influences GC-associated clinical outcome, GC and non-GC phenotypes were identified immunohistochemically from samples of 90 de novo DLBC...

Fitting Z-pole data from ALEPH and SLD, and TPC data at a lower c.m.s. energy, we fix the boundary condition for NLO parton→hadron (hadron= π, K, ∑ h h ) fragmentation functions (FFs) at the low resolution scale of the radiative parton model of Glück, Reya and Vogt (GRV). Perturbative LO↔NLO stability is investigated. The emphasis of the fit is on information on the fragmentation process for in...

Please cite this article in press as: J. Mai et al. Traffic sampled from the network backbone using uniform packet sampling is commonly utilized to detect heavy hitters, estimate flow level statistics, as well as identify anomalies like DDoS attacks and worm scans. Previous work has shown however that this technique introduces flow bias and truncation which yields inaccurate flow statistics and...

I propose a model for the formation of slow-massive-wide (SMW) jets by accretion disks around compact objects. This study is motivated by claims for the existence of SMW jets in some astrophysical objects such as in planetary nebulae (PNs) and in some active galactic nuclei in galaxies and in cooling flow clusters. In this model the energy still comes from accretion onto a compact object. The a...

The use of natural gas continues to grow with increased discovery and production of unconventional shale resources. At the same time, the natural gas industry faces continued scrutiny for methane emissions from across the supply chain, due to methane's relatively high global warming potential (25-84x that of carbon dioxide, according to the Energy Information Administration). Currently, a varie...

CONTEXT Explicit information about the quality of coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery has been available for nearly a decade in New York State; however, the extent to which managed care insurance plans direct enrollees to the lowest-mortality CABG surgery hospitals remains unknown. OBJECTIVE To compare the proportion of patients with managed care insurance and fee-for-service (FFS) in...