OBJECTIVE To examine the relationship between hospital volume and mortality for nonsurgical patients receiving mechanical ventilation. DATA SOURCES Pennsylvania state discharge records from July 1, 2004, to June 30, 2006, linked to the Pennsylvania Department of Health death records and the 2000 United States Census. STUDY DESIGN We categorized all general acute care hospitals in Pennsylvan...

OBJECTIVES Evaluate the ability of the American and British Geriatrics Society fall prevention guideline's screening algorithm to identify and stratify future fall risk in community-dwelling older adults. METHODS Prospective cohort of community-dwelling older adults (n = 117) aged 65 to 90 years. Fall history, balance, and gait measured during a comprehensive geriatric assessment at baseline....

Production coordination is a common phenomenon in supply chains. Unlike the existing literature, we examine the production coordination problem from the perspective of asymmetric information: how a manufacturer (leading firm) coordinates the relationships with its subsidiary firm(s) and, subsequently, how market returns influence the leading firm's expected utilities, agency cost and the subsid...

Despite a decline in recent decades, cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains the major cause of death and disability in Australia. To improve primary prevention of CVD, many clinical guidelines recommend using cardiovascular absolute risk (CVAR) assessment to guide risk factor management. Cardiovascular absolute risk assessment predicts the overall risk of a cardiovascular event over a given time ...

The object of the investigation is to study reducible $M$-ideals in Banach spaces. It is shown that if the number of $M$-ideals in a Banach space $X$ is $n(<infty)$, then the number of reducible $M$-ideals does not exceed of $frac{(n-2)(n-3)}{2}$. Moreover, given a compact metric space $X$, we obtain a general form of a reducible $M$-ideal in the space $C(X)$ of continuous functions on $X$. The...

Abstract. Maximum likelihood (ML) estimation based on bivariate record data is considered as the general inference problem. Assume that the process of observing k records is repeated m times, independently. The asymptotic properties including consistency and asymptotic normality of the Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimates of parameters of the underlying distribution is then established, when m is ...

Many multivariate data analysis techniques for an m× n matrix Y are related to the model Y = M + E, where Y is an m × n matrix of full rank and M is an unobserved mean matrix of rank K < (m ∧ n). Typically the rank of M is estimated in a heuristic way and then the least-squares estimate of M is obtained via the singular value decomposition of Y, yielding an estimate that can have a very high va...

Abstract. Let M be a closed linear subspace of a normed linear space X. For a given f ∈ X denote by PM f the set of best approximations to f from M . The operator PM is termed the metric projection onto M . In this paper we are interested in the stability of the metric projection PM relative to perturbations of the subspace M . We mainly consider the case where X = Lp, p ∈ [1,∞]. We consider a ...

A procedure to estimate the mechanical and diffusive properties of cement pastes, mortars concretes made with a novel CEM II/C-M (S-LL) binder that has been developed within European EnDurCrete project, is presented in this paper. The objective set up strategy able determine materials composition at different scales various configurations, provide reliable estimates properties. phase assemblage...