An international interlaboratory proficiency testing program for the measurement of antifungal drugs was initiated in 2007. This first round was limited to azole antifungals: fluconazole, itraconazole and hydroxyitraconazole, voriconazole, and posaconazole. The results demonstrate the need for and utility of an ongoing proficiency testing program to further improve the analytical methods for ro...

A model for evaluating the effectiveness of automatic recording of television programs by digital personal video recorders (PVRs) is presented. The model is used to evaluate the tradeoff between manual management of recording programs to a PVR archive and automatic management of recording. We show that a tradeoff exists between manual management in which the utility of a program is perfectly kn...

An international interlaboratory quality control program for measurement of antiretroviral drugs was initiated. The first round was confined to protease inhibitors and showed large variability in the performance of participating laboratories. The results demonstrate the need for and utility of an ongoing quality control program in this area of bioanalysis.

A. Standardization of data definition and documentation. B. Improvement of physical access to data items. C. Reduction of data redundancy. D. Independence between the way data is stored and the application program which accesses the data. E. Simplification of writing application programs. F. Reduction in the need for program maintenance. G. Consolidation of updating, retrieval, reporting and ut...

OBJECTIVE To estimate from a societal perspective the cost-utility of a multidisciplinary job retention vocational rehabilitation program compared with usual care in patients with chronic rheumatic diseases at risk of job loss. METHODS Patients (n = 121) were randomly assigned to either the vocational rehabilitation program or usual outpatient care initiated by the treating rheumatologist. Fo...

BACKGROUND In July 2000, the province of Ontario, Canada, initiated a universal influenza immunization program (UIIP) to provide free seasonal influenza vaccines for the entire population. This is the first large-scale program of its kind worldwide. The objective of this study was to conduct an economic appraisal of Ontario's UIIP compared to a targeted influenza immunization program (TIIP). ...

We report a surprising link between optimal portfolios generated by a special type of variational preferences called divergence preferences (cf. [8]) and optimal portfolios generated by classical expected utility. As a special case we connect optimization of truncated quadratic utility (cf. [2]) to the optimal monotone mean-variance portfolios (cf. [9]), thus simplifying the computation of the ...

The procurement decision problem of divisible goods is investigated, and an optimization decision method for procuring a kind of divisible goods (such as coal, oil, electricity, gas, etc.) is presented based on multi-attribute auction. Firstly, the procurement decision problem of divisible goods is converted into a multi-attribute auction of divisible goods. Correspondingly, several important a...