INTRODUCTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 Material and methods. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180 Variation in yields for Ben Davis apple trees. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...

Competitive bidding to derive Medicare fees promises several advantages over administered fee systems. The authors show how incentives for cost savings, quality, and access can be incorporated into bidding schemes, and they report on a study of the clinical laboratory industry conducted in preparation for a bidding demonstration. The laboratory industry is marked by variable concentration acros...

The positive relationship between habitat heterogeneity and species richness is a cornerstone of ecology. Recently, it was suggested that this relationship should be unimodal rather than linear due to a tradeoff between environmental heterogeneity and population sizes. Increased environmental heterogeneity will decrease effective habitat sizes, which in turn will increase the rate of local spec...

The human body is formed by trillions of individual cells. These cells work together with remarkable precision, first forming an adult organism out of a single fertilized egg, and then keeping the organism alive and functional for decades. To achieve this precision, one would assume that each individual cell reacts in a reliable, reproducible way to a given input, faithfully executing the requi...

Finding and accessing suitable information in the open and distributed environments of current Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) is a crucial task. Catalogues provide searchable repositories of information descriptions, but the mechanisms to support the tasks of discovery and retrieval are still insufficient. Problems of semantic heterogeneity caused by synonyms and homonyms can arise during ...

BACKGROUND Essential tremor (ET) is often familial and phenotypic features may be shared within families. Cranial (neck, voice, and jaw) tremor is an important feature of ET. We examined whether cranial tremor aggregates in ET families, after controlling for other factors (age, tremor severity, and duration). METHODS Among ET probands and relatives enrolled in a genetic study at Columbia Univ...

0

background and objectives: the increase of infections caused by nontuberculous mycobacteria (ntm) is receiving increasing attention worldwide. mycobacterium fortuitum is encountered with increasing frequency in clinical laboratories of iran. materials and methods: sequence variation of 48 m. fortuitum clinical isolates, were investigated by sequence analysis of the 16s-23s internal transcribed ...