The marginal effects of acute kidney injury on in-hospital mortality, length of stay (LOS), and costs have not been well described. A consecutive sample of 19,982 adults who were admitted to an urban academic medical center, including 9210 who had two or more serum creatinine (SCr) determinations, was evaluated. The presence and degree of acute kidney injury were assessed using absolute and rel...

The green alga Scenedesmus obliquus can form inducible defensive morphs under grazing threat. Costs and trade-offs of inducible defense are expected to accompany the benefits of defensive morphs, but are hard to detect under nutrient-sufficient experimental conditions. To test the existence of costs associated with inducible defense, we cultured S. obliquus along resource availability gradients...

OBJECTIVES To calculate total costs during the first year after diagnosis in 463 patients with early rheumatoid arthritis (RA) included during 2006-09 (T2) and compare the results with a similar cohort included in 1996-98 (T1). METHOD Clinical and laboratory data were collected regularly in both cohorts, and patients completed biannual questionnaires reporting health care utilization and numb...

The end-of-season stalk NO, test has been used to determine N sufficiency in corn (Zea mays L.). Nitrate concentration is commonly determined with flow-injection analysis (FIA), which is accurate but uses hazardous chemicals and is time-consuming. Use of a simpler method of NO, determination, such as the NO, specific ion electrode (SIE), may save time and costs, and reduce hazards. The objectiv...

In a new hydrometallurgieal process for recovery of lead from lead oxide secondaries, liquid effluence is minimized by jointly treating contaminated was~ting water and leaehant bleed. To enable internal recycling of the leachant bleed and recover pure water, it is necessary to incorporate a concentration unit. In this paper different technologies for concentrating the mixed stream are compared....

In the real world, cities exist because of external economies associated with the geographic concentration of firms within a city. Of course, such a geographic proximity with input providers and consumers, would at first reduce transportation costs. But why cities, information cities, i.e. large agglomerations of people and economic activity emerge in the virtual world? In the Internet, transpo...

This paper reviews competition policies in Chile. It argues that competition policy should strive to reduce entry, fixed and variable costs where that is technically feasible; reduce the costs of reallocating resources across firms and sectors; and foster tough price competition. It also shows that reducing concentration is the wrong policy goal because tougher price competition will increase e...

Entry costs vary dramatically across countries. To assess their impact we construct a model with endogenous entry and operation decisions by …rms and calibrate it to match the U.S. distribution of …rms by size. Higher entry costs lead to greater misallocation of productive factors and lower TFP and output. In the model, countries in the lowest decile of the entry costs distribution have 1.35 to...