The singular ability of immunoglobulin genes to hypermutate their variable regions, while permitting the generation of high-affinity antibodies against foreign antigens, poses a problem in terms of maintenance of immunological self-tolerance. Immunoglobulin gene hypermutation driven by a foreign antigen has the potential to generate antibodies that cross-react with self-components. Consequently...

In this paper, the Bayes factor is considered as a replacement verification criterion to the likelihood-ratio test in the context of GMM-based speaker verification. An advantage of this Bayesian method is that it allows for the incorporation of prior information and uncertainty of parameter estimates into the scoring process, complementing the Bayesian adaptation used in training. A development...

Jegadeesh and Titman (1993) document individual stock momentum: strategies that buy stocks that have performed relatively well in the past and sell stocks that have performed relatively poorly in the past generate significant positive returns over the 3to 12-month horizon. This finding, obtained using data from the U.S. market, also holds for a number of international markets [e.g., Haugen and ...

Prognostic factors are essential for patient management and counseling. Most cancer patients receive treatment based on the presence or absence of several risk factors. The most prominent example of this is tumor, node, metastasis staging, but many diseases are moving beyond the simple one-sizefits-all stage classification and using stylized prognostic factors. A notable difficulty in the devel...

Physicians are key personnel in a sector which is important due to its size as well as the quality of service it provides. We estimate the labor supply of physicians employed at hospitals in Norway, using personnel register data merged with other public records. A dynamic labor supply equation is estimated using a sample of 1303 male physicians observed over the period 1993-1997. The methods of...

M any Middle-East countries, like Iran, have dynamic banking industries and have observed merger and acquisitions (M&A) waves. M&A waves are usually defined in the developed world context and some of their main drivers were identified as: market timing, environment's shocks, merger manias, government regulation and regulatory, and technological changes. It has been discussed that merger waves ...

The veterinary drugs residues are also important pollutants found in milk, since veterinary drugs are commonly used in cattle management. Considering the role of milk in human nutrition and its wide consumption throughout the world, it is very important to ensure the milk quality. A quantitative structure–retention relationship (QSRR) was developed using the partial least square (PLS), Kernel P...

Existing studies of the effects of college quality on earnings typically rely on a single proxy variable for college quality. This study questions the wisdom of this approach given that a single proxy likely measures college quality with substantial error. We begin by considering the parameter of interest and its relation to the parameter estimated in the literature; this analysis reveals the p...