*Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences (IRAS), Utrecht University, Utrecht, NL-3508 TD The Netherlands; †Hubrecht Laboratory, Netherlands Institute for Developmental Biology, Utrecht, 3584 CT The Netherlands; ‡Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, NL-1081 HV The Netherlands; §Department of Environmental Chemistry, Stockholm University, Stockholm, S-101 06 Sweden; ...

There is uncertainty about whether biological and anthropometric measures that are clinical risk factors for disease are universally associated with chronological age, or whether these correlations vary depending on the social and economic context. The answer to this question has implications for the malleability of biological aging. To examine this issue, we use population-based data on indivi...

One pervasive belief about scholarly citations that underlies several studies appearing in the IS literature is that the number of citations to a paper reflects the quality of the study. For example, a paper that receives 200 citations is perceived as having higher quality than another study that receives 50 citations. While most experts acknowledge that there are other factors that drive citat...

A long-standing conjecture is that winner-take-all games such as patent races lead to the survival of risk-takers and the extinction of risk-averters. In many species a winner-take-all game determines the males' right to reproduce, and the same argument suggests that males will evolve to be risk-takers. Psychological and sociological evidence buttresses the argument that males are more risk-tak...

In this thesis, we study the behavior of bankrupt stocks. Bankrupt stock is a special case of the Hard-to-Borrow stocks. Besides the general nice feature of the Hard-to-borrow feedback for the buy-in demand, the bankrupt stocks could exclude the diffusive effects. This nice property would modify the Marco Avellaneda and Mike Lipkin’s jump-diffusion model for the Hard-to-Borrow stocks into the p...

Botulinum neurotoxin C1 (BoNt C1) and its corresponding gene were detected in seven aquatic habitats covering a range of low (LR) to high risk (HR) avian botulism outbreak areas during a study period of 10 months. Toxin and gene in sediment and avian faecal samples were analysed before (in situ) and after cultivation (in vitro) by a newly adapted ELISA, the common mouse bioassay and by a recent...

The decade since the Reserve Bank of Australia’s 1996 Conference on ‘The Future of the Financial System’ has been a period of remarkable strength for banking systems in advanced industrial countries, particularly Australia. Banking institutions have enjoyed strong growth in business volumes, high asset quality and record profi tability and they have proven their resilience in the face of episod...

Lignans and their in vivo metabolites, especially enterolactone (ENL), have attracted substantial interest as potential chemopreventive agents for prostate cancer. Preclinical and clinical interventions performed with lignan-rich flaxseed that use surrogate biomarkers as endpoints suggest that lignans may attenuate prostate carcinogenesis in individuals with increased risk or with diagnosed can...