A key prediction of standard models of economic growth is that the output-capital ratio is constant along the economy’s balanced growth path. Using data for 16 OECD countries over 135 years we examine whether the output-capital ratio reverts to a constant in the long run using univariate and panel stationarity tests with structural breaks. Univariate unit root tests with one and two breaks in t...

BACKGROUND The NCIC Clinical Trials Group conducted the BR.21 trial, a randomized placebo-controlled trial of erlotinib (an epidermal growth factor receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitor) in patients with previously treated advanced non-small cell lung cancer. This trial accrued patients between August 14, 2001, and January 31, 2003, and found that overall survival and quality of life were improved...

Reproducibility and comparability of bronchial challenge tests depends critically on accurate assessment of nebulizer output. Evaporation during nebulization means that simple weighing is inaccurate, overestimating the delivered dose of active ingredient. We wanted to quantify this effect in the context of intermittent nebulization, using a dosimeter as used in bronchial provocation tests. Outp...

In a clinical trial, we have previously shown that a telephone intervention can significantly increase participation in dilated fundus examination (DFE) screening among low-income adults with diabetes. Here the costs and cost-effectiveness ratio of this intervention are calculated. Intervention effectiveness was estimated as the difference in DFE utilization between the telephone intervention a...

The concept of in-air output ratio (Sc) was introduced to characterize how the incident photon fluence per monitor unit (or unit time for a Co-60 unit) varies with collimator settings. 2 This quantity is also called inair output factor, collimator-scatter factor, and headscatter factor. 6 The latter two names were somewhat misleading since they emphasized a single component of the output ratio....

The genomes of the nematodes Caenorhabditis elegans and Caenorhabditis briggsae both contain approximately 100,000 introns, of which >6,000 are unique to one or the other species. To study the origins of new introns, we used a conservative method involving phylogenetic comparisons to animal orthologs and nematode paralogs to identify cases where an intron content difference between C. elegans a...

We consider ways of enabling systems to apply previously learned information to novel situations so as to minimize the need for retraining. We show that theoretical limitations exist on the amount of information that can be transported from previous learning, and that robustness to changing environments depends on a delicate balance between the relations to be learned and the causal structure o...

In the past decade, the United States healthcare system has begun to use mediation to facilitate communication between patients and physicians after an adverse medical event, to ease tensions among members of care-giving teams, to resolve medical malpractice claims, and to help family members and medical professionals make awesome and wrenching decisions at the end of life. Implementation of th...

By controlling the output coupling ratio, we demonstrate a novel wavelength-tunable L-band Erbium-doped fiber laser (EDFL) with a maximum tuning range up to 58 nm (from 1567 to 1625 nm) by controlling its output coupling ratio between 1% and 99%. The L-band EDFL is configured by using a bi-directionally dual-wavelength pumped EDFA in close-loop with an output coupler of tunable coupling ratio a...