BACKGROUND One of the national mortality databases in the U.S. is the Beneficiary Identification and Record Locator Subsystem (BIRLS) Death File that contains death dates of those who have received any benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The completeness of this database was shown to vary widely from cohort to cohort in previous studies. Three other sources of death dates are...

In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: a b s t r a c t South America lost more genera in the Quaternary megafaunal extinction than any other continent, but how it ...

We address the NP-hard problem of scheduling n independent jobs with release dates, due dates, and family setup times on a single machine to minimize the maximum lateness. This problem arises from the constant tug-of-war going on in manufacturing between efficient production and delivery performance, between maximizing machine utilization by batching similar jobs and maximizing customers’ satis...

The single machine total weighted tardiness with release dates problem is known to be strongly NP-hard. With a new lower bounding scheme and a new upper bounding scheme, we get an efficient branch and bound algorithm. In the paper, we first introduce the history of the problem and its computational complexity. Second, the lower bounding schemes and the upper bounding schemes are described in de...

This chapter deals with the control of discrete-event systems which admit linear models in dioids (or idempotent semirings), introduced in the previous chapter (see also the books [1, 19]). These systems are characterized by synchronization and delay phenomena. Their modeling is focused on the evaluation of the occurrence dates of events. The outputs correspond to the occurrence dates of events...

Background and Objectives: Snacks are important parts of diabetes patients’ diet. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effects of moderate amounts of dates and raisins, as nutritious snacks, on blood glucose, and to compare these effects with sugar in patients with type 2 diabetes. Materials and Methods: This crossover clinical trial was performed on 15 patients with type 2 diabete...

In volume 295 of Antiquity M. Gkiasta et al. (2003) discussed the results of two sets of analysis carried out on a " new " database of radiocarbon dates: one for the whole of Europe examining the spread of the Neolithic, and one regional approach looking at the relation between Mesolithic and Neolithic dates. Although we are convinced of the potential of both approaches, we do have some major c...