INTRODUCTION Section 6002 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as the Sunshine Act, requires that manufacturers report payments or other transfers of value made to physicians and teaching hospitals [1,2]. The tracking of such payments goes into effect on August 1, 2013, and the new rules could affect radiologists. In this column, I pose and answer several questions rega...

Observational data of sunshine duration since 1930 from the Met Office National Climate Information Centre (NCIC; Perry and Hollis 2005) reveal that winter 2014/15 was the sunniest in the United Kingdom (Fig. 10.1a). The common perception of drab British winters is seemingly challenged by the increasing trend of 2.4 ± 0.7 sunshine hrs decade−1 (mean ± standard deviation) during 1930–2015 (Fig. ...

The expected frequency of runs of extreme days is modelled with a seasonal autoregressive representation using two site-specific scalar parameters—autocorrelation and an index of seasonality. Extreme days for a meteorological variable such as temperature, evaporation, sunshine and wind run are defined as days when the variable in question exceeds an arbitrary upper threshold or fails to exceed ...

As of August 1, 2013, the Sunshine Act mandates that any transaction between a physician (or teaching hospital) and the pharmaceutical or device industries more than $10 in value must be publicly disclosed. Physician and industry leaders have sounded alarms about the impact of this extreme level of transparency; physicians are nervous, for they fear information published online will tarnish the...

Daily sunshine duration is commonly reported at weather stations. Beyond the basic duration report, more information is available from scorched cards of Campbell-Stokes sunshine recorders, such as the estimation of direct-beam solar irradiance. Sunshine cards therefore potentially provide information on sky state, as inferred from solar-radiation data. Some sites have been operational since the...