Contractual Employment Protection and the Scarring Risk of Unemployment * Risk-averse job seekers fearing the scarring effect of unemployment meet vacancies offering contractual employment protection (CEP) in form of guaranteed employment (GEC) or severance pay contracts (SPC). A GEC fully eliminates both the income risk and the scarring risk of unemployment. SPC diversify the income risk, but ...

BACKGROUND Anesthetic administration is increasingly guided by electroencephalography (EEG)-based monitoring, such as the bispectral index (BIS). However, during cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB), factors other than the administered hypnotic agents may influence EEG signals, and their effects on BIS values are unknown. METHODS This report is a secondary analysis of data from a prospective, control...

Measurement based software process improvement is nowadays a mandatory activity. This implies continuous process monitoring in order to predict its behavior, highlight its performance variations and, if necessary, quickly react to them. Process variations are due to common causes or assignable ones. The former are part of the process itself while the latter are due to exceptional events that re...

In this paper, a method is proposed to generate pitch-contours for Mandarin speech synthesis. In this method, an HMM (hidden Markov model) is used to model the prosodic states implicitly stayed and a syllable’s pitch-contour is treated as an observation generated from a prosodic state. Such an HMM is called a syllable pitch-contour HMM (SPC-HMM). For training the SPC-HMM, we developed a feasibl...

Patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) on hemodialysis have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Circulating endothelial progenitor cells (EPC) contribute to vascular regeneration and repair, thereby protecting against CVD. However, circulating smooth muscle progenitor cells (SPC) may contribute to adverse vascular remodeling. We hypothesized that an imbalance occurs between...

The objective of this paper is to develop a framework that integrates two important concepts: Statistical process control (SPC) and engineering process control (EPC). Most of the literature researches on integrated SPC/EPC systems are focused into continuous process mainly with Algorithmic SPC. The integrated SPC/EPC systems in batch process control have not received the same degree of attentio...

BACKGROUND Advanced cancer patients experience considerable symptoms, problems, and needs. Early referral of these patients to specialised palliative care (SPC) could improve their symptoms and problems.The Danish Palliative Care Trial (DanPaCT) investigates whether patients with metastatic cancer, who report palliative needs in a screening, will benefit from being referred to 'early SPC'. ME...

Although several Cre-loxP-based gene knockout mouse models have been generated for the study of gene function in alveolar epithelia in the lung, their applications are still limited. In this study, we developed a SPC-Cre-ER(T2) mouse model, in which a tamoxifen-inducible Cre recombinase (Cre-ER(T2)) is under the control of the human surfactant protein C (SPC) promoter. The specificity and effic...

OBJECTIVE To develop and implement a methodology for capturing complete haematological malignancy pathway data and use it to identify variations in specialist palliative care (SPC) referrals. METHODS In our established UK population-based patient cohort, 323 patients were diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia, diffuse large B-cell lymphoma or myeloma between May 2005 and April 2008, and died...

PURPOSE The aim of this study was to investigate the differences of expression in glycolysis-related proteins such as Glut-1, carbonic anhydrase (CA) IX, and monocarboxylate transporter (MCT) 4 according to the myoepithelial cell (MEC) and basement membrane (BM) status in solid papillary carcinoma (SPC) of the breast. MATERIALS AND METHODS Immunohistochemical evaluation of Glut-1, CAIX, and M...