Substantial variation, excess zeros, skew and extreme outliers make fitting and predicting health care expenditures rather difficult. This paper presents a Bayesian model that uses the first year of the fourteenth panel (2009-2010) of the nationally representative Medical Expenditures Panel Survey (MEPS) to predict health care expenditures for individuals in the second year. The merits of a Bay...

After mentioning the sources from which the different manuscripts were obtained and giving a short description of each, Professor Albertotti summarises the main features of the operation as performed by Celsus, Benvenuto and Bartisch. The first named operated in the beginning of the Christian era, Bartisch at the end of the sixteenth century, and Benvenuto in the thirteenth or fourteenth, centu...

Mycotic aneurysm of the descending aorta is usually described as rare. We present two recent cases of mycotic aneurysm of the descending aorta complicated with hemoptysis. Urgent tube graft replacements were successfully performed under cardiopulmonary bypass support. Bacterial causes of the aneurysms were methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in the first case and Staphylococcus aureus i...

S OF TALKS in the order in which they are presented

It has long been recognized since the early studies in Japan by Yamagiwa and Ichikawa with coal tar-induced carcinogenesis that exposure to environmental and dietary chemicals are likely to be responsible for the vast majority of human cancers. A large number of enzymes participate in both activation and inactivation pathways of carcinogen metabolism. These enzymes mainly function in xenobiotic...

Two things are striking about this medieval definition. The first is that it is very close to the modern conception of formal consequence one finds in Bolzano and Tarski3. The second is that although Buridan and the other fourteenth-century logicians state these distinctions with a great deal of precision, they say almost nothing about the point of the distinctions. Why are these distinctions d...

In Clark v. Arizona, the U.S. Supreme Court was faced with two main questions: Does Arizona's insanity defense statute, with its abridged M'Naughten standard, violate the Fourteenth Amendment? And does Arizona case law, with its complete prohibition on the use of mental disease or defect evidence to combat required mens rea elements of a crime, violate due process? In a six-three decision, the ...