INTRODUCTION We analyse the factors that are associated with the diagnostic yield of needle brain biopsy. MATERIAL AND METHODS We present a retrospective series of 124 consecutive biopsies in a 30-month period. Patients' demographics (age, gender), lesion topography (side, location, depth), lesion characteristics (histology, volume, radiological enhancement), type of biopsy procedure (freehan...

0. INTRODUCTION 1) One of the most characteristic features of German word order seems to be a contrast between fixed ordering rules concerning the order of verbal elements and a much more variable ordering of their corresponding nominal arguments. As a consequence German word order seems to yield a large number of phenomena that may be classified as 'unbounded' or 'long-distance dependencies', ...

We present a generalisation of first-order unification to the practically important case of equations between terms involving binding operations. A substitution of terms for variables solves such an equation if it makes the equated terms α-equivalent, i.e. equal up to renaming bound names. For the applications we have in mind, we must consider the simple, textual form of substitution in which n...

We investigate different notions of nominal words, that is, words that my contain letters from an alphabet as well as names and name-binders. In a first section we construct them from first principles. In a second section we take the point of view that—as in the classical case—words over an alphabet S form a free monoid over S. We define different notions of nominal monoids and reveal nominal w...

O ne of the more important challenges facing policymakers is that of assessing inflation expectations. Goodfriend (1997) points out that one can interpret the meaning of a given interest rate policy action primarily in terms of its impact on the real rate of interest. However, evaluating this impact requires not only that one understands the various links between the nominal rate and expected i...

Two approaches for dealing with the problem of poor coverage probabilities of certain standard confidence intervals are proposed. The first is a recommendation that the actual coverage be estimated irectly from the data and its value reported in addition to the nominal level. This is achieved through a combination of computer simulation and density estimation. The asymptotic validity of the pro...