Over the last few years a theoretical treatment for the weak decays of heavy-flavour hadrons has been developed that is genuinely based on QCD. Its methodology is described as it applies to total lifetimes, and the underlying theoretical issues are discussed. Theoretical expectations are compared with present data. One discrepancy emerges: the beauty baryon lifetime appears to be significantly ...

Adult height is associated with testicular cancer risk. We studied to what extent this association is explained by parental height, childhood height and age at puberty. We conducted a case-control study on germ-cell testicular cancer patients diagnosed in 1997-2008 and resident in the Province of Turin. Information was collected using mailed questionnaires in 2008-2011. Specifically, we asked f...

We develop a perpetual youth model to investigate how longevity affects economic growth and welfare. Life expectancy is determined by individuals’ investments in healthcare. We find that improvements in the healthcare technology always increase the steady state growth rate. Although the effect is small, even for large increases in longevity, welfare gains may be substantial depending on the typ...

Editorial – Cohabitation, marriage and separation: contrasts in Europe • Premarital cohabitation: more common in the north than in the south p. 2 • Cohabitation leads less often to marriage p. 2 • Fewer men and women are marryingp. 2 • Unions are more short-lived p. 3 • Several unions in a lifetime: a general trend? p. 4 • Box: Study population p. 4 C O N TE N TS are not marrying at all. Unions...

In today's fiercely competitive products market, product warranty has started playing an important role. The warranty period offered by the manufacturer/dealer has been progressively increasing since the beginning of the 20th Century. Currently, a large number of products are being sold with long-term warranty policies in the form of extended warranty, warranty for used products, service contra...

The SPIN extension presented in this article is meant as a way to facilitate the modeling and verification of object-oriented programs. It provides means for the formal representation of some run-time mechanisms intensively used in OO software, such as dynamic object creation and deletion, virtual function calls, etc. This article presents a number of language extensions along with their implem...

Generally, sigmoid curves are used to describe the growth of animals over their lifetime. However, because growth rates often differ over an animal's lifetime a single curve may not accurately capture the growth. Broken-stick models constrained to pass through a common point have been proposed to describe the different growth phases, but these are often unsatisfactory because essentially there ...

Three-parameter lognormal distribution has been demonstrated for applications in electromigration data analysis, especially for Cu interconnect structures with insufficient redundancy. Examples are given on estimating parameter values from experimental data using the maximum likelihood method. Detailed analyses are presented on confidence bound estimations of the parameters and their propagatio...