BACKGROUND The Fukushima nuclear disaster has generated worldwide concern on the risk of exposure to nuclear radiations. In Europe, health authorities had to issue statements about the lack of usefulness of iodine based preventive treatments within their borders. However a lack of confidence in official messages has developed in various European countries due to recent perceived failures in man...

Since 15 November 2012, the South Korean government amended law to make some medicines available at 24-hour convenient stores that had previously been sold pharmacies only. The aim of this study was evaluate impact legislation on drug poisoning in youth patients, who may be affected by increased access. This retrospectively analyzed data registered Emergency Department-based Injury In-depth Sur...

this study empirically examines whether managers manipulate reported income through the timing of sales of long-lived assets and investments. several empirical implications of the income-smoothing and debt-equity hypothesis in the context of asset sales were tested. the findings are consistent with the timing of asset sales by managers so that the recognized accounting income from these sales s...

We apply Slow Feature Analysis (SFA) to image sequences generated from natural images using a range of spatial transformations. An analysis of the resulting receptive fields shows that they have a rich spectrum of invariances and share many properties with complex and hypercomplex cells of the primary visual cortex. Furthermore, the dependence of the solutions on the statistics of the transform...

Government health funding (GHF) is a cosmopolitan problem. It is especially conspicuous in China, where drug sales become a main source of medical institutions' incomes due to limited GHF. This is well known as China's "drug maintain medical institutions (DMMIs)" system which results directly in very high use of antibiotics, injections, and corticosteroids. However, few statistical data existed...

This paper evaluates a more integrated approach of regulation when doing international comparisons and represents the first cross-country study in the South American region in which quality and weather variables have been included in the analysis. A total of 82 electricity distribution firms operating in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Peru have been analysed for the period 1998-2008. Stochastic f...

Kalanda, chief executive officer of Opportunity Bank in Malawi, sat in his office reviewing strategic plans for 2008.1 The commercial microfinance bank had doubled in size once again in 2007, and now had more than 150,000 customers.2 In a country where 80 percent of the people live in rural areas with little infrastructure, Opportunity Bank knew that traditional models of microfinance would not...

Despite the few studies on the illegal earnings of drug sellers, the motivating factors that cause some social actors to enter the illicit drug market as sellers remains unknown. Using pooled data from the Arrestee and Drug Abuse Monitoring Program (ADAM), I investigate how household size and composition affect illegal wages earned from illicit drug sales. My findings support existing studies o...

BACKGROUND This study examined associations between perceived neighborhood illicit drug selling, peer illicit drug disapproval and illicit drug use among a large nationally representative sample of U.S. high school seniors. METHODS Data come from Monitoring the Future (2007-2011), an annual cross-sectional survey of U.S. high school seniors. Students reported neighborhood illicit drug selling...