Altruistic acts involve the actor donating fitness to beneficiaries at net cost to itself. In contrast, parasitic acts involve the actor extracting benefit from others at net cost to the donors. Both behaviours may have the same direct net-cost transferral of fitness from donor to beneficiary; the key difference between parasitism and altruism is thus who drives the interaction. Identifying the...

The cost-effectiveness of various end-stage renal disease (ESRD) treatments was compared using two different cost measures. The first measure, gross social costs, excluded output gains due to treatment, whereas the second measure, net social costs, included output gains from both market and nonmarket activities. The cost-effectiveness criterion was the cost-per-life year gained or the implicit ...

The net energetic cost of terrestrial locomotion by the snake Coluber constrictor, moving by lateral undulation, is equivalent to the net energetic cost of running by limbed animals (arthropods, lizards, birds, and mammals) of similar size. In contrast to lateral undulation and limbed locomotion, concertina locomotion by Coluber is more energetically expensive. The findings do not support the w...

Cost-benefit analysis is only applicable if the variances of both costs and benefits are finite. In the case of climate change, the variances of the net present marginal costs and benefits of greenhouse gas emission reduction need to be finite. Finiteness is hard, if not impossible to prove. The opposite is easier to establish as one only needs to show that there is one, not impossible represen...

the value of wetlands is receiving increasing attention and the cost–benefit analyses (cba) is essential to evaluate the long-term effects of wetland rehabilitation projects. in order to guarantee the water quality of the south-to-north water diversion project of china (east route), the government of shandong province started a huge lakeshore wetland rehabilitation project in 2008. the cba appr...

Coccidioidomycosis, a systemic fungal infection, affects Americans living in the Southwest. We evaluated the cost- effectiveness of a potential vaccine against Coccidioides immitis. Using a decision model we developed, we estimate that among children, vaccination would saved 1.9 quality-adjusted life days (QALD) and $33 per person. Among adults, screening followed by vaccination would save 0.5 ...

background the vacuum assisted closure (vac) therapy has revolutionized the modern wound care. we developed a new concept of ‘vac at home’ in order to decrease the hospital cost. methods the study was conducted in a private hospital from january 2009 to december 2010. only those patients were included among whom the wounds were not complicated by concomitant injury and the patients were otherwi...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the economic impact of the routine US childhood immunization schedule: diphtheria and tetanus toxoids and acellular pertussis; tetanus and diphtheria toxoids; Haemophilus influenzae type b conjugate; inactivated poliovirus; measles, mumps, and rubella; hepatitis B; and varicella vaccines. DESIGN Decision tree-based analysis was conducted using population-based vaccinatio...

In industries machine maintenance is used in order to avoid untimely machine fails as well as to improve production effectiveness. This research regards a permutation flow shop scheduling problem with aging and learning effects considering maintenance process. In this study, it is assumed that each machine may be subject to at most one maintenance activity during the planning horizon. The objec...