The personnel cost savings we observed were achieved primarily by using fewer people and downgrading positions. Contrary to expectations, substituting capital for labor or lower wage and benefit costs did not appear to be important sources of personnel cost savings in the competitions we examined. To accomplish work with fewer people, both contractors and government managers employed a wide var...

W analyze how a government allocates its resources between attacking to downgrade a terrorist’s resources and defending against a terrorist attack. Analogously, the terrorist allocates its resources between attacking a government’s asset and defending its own resources. A two-stage game is considered where the government moves first and the terrorist moves second. We show that (a) when the terr...

We investigated whether the application of the downgrade criteria to supplemental screening ultrasound (US) for women with negative mammography but dense breasts can reduce the rate of Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS) categories 3 to 4a without a loss of cancer detection.This retrospective study was approved by the Institutional Review Board, and the need to obtain informed co...

This study examines the proposition that political business cycle theory is relevant to private foreign lenders to developing countries. We find that: credit rating agencies downgrade developing country ratings more often in election years, and do so by approximately one rating level; bond spreads are higher in the 60 days before an election compared to spreads in the 60 days after an election;...

There are very few resources available to the timber industry that will enable the accurate identification of major tree species within Papua New Guinea. The unnecessary destruction of rare and otherwise valuable tree species has, in part, resulted from the inability to distinguish these species from the preferred timber species. Furthermore, the mixture of unwanted timber with that from prefer...

the previous studies show that a high percentage of traffic accidents take place in two-lane rural highways and most of which happen at horizontal curves. meanwhile the horizontal alignment is often subject to hard topographic conditions where because of economic aspects designers are forced to design horizontal curves at grades. vertical angle of longitudinal slope reduces the normal force of ...

The problem of finding your way through a relatively unknown collection of digital documents can be daunting. Such collections sometimes have few categories and little hierarchy, or they have so much hierarchy that valuable relations between documents can easily become obscured. We describe here how our work in the area of termrecognition and sentence-based summarization can be used to filter t...