An extensive literature is devoted to differences between for-profit and non-profit health-care providers' prices, utilization, and quality. Less is known about for-profit and non-profit managers' compensation and its relationship with financial and quality performance. The aim of this study is to examine whether for-profit and non-profit nursing homes place differential weights on financial an...

Immunogenicity of biopharmaceutical products in multiple sclerosis is a frequent side effect which has a multifactorial etiology. Here we study associations between anti-drug antibody (ADA) occurrence and demographic and clinical factors. Retrospective data from routine ADA test laboratories in Sweden, Denmark, Austria and Germany (Dusseldorf group) and from one research study in Germany (Munic...

C. Marcolli, M. R. Canagaratna, D. R. Worsnop, R. Bahreini, J. A. de Gouw, C. Warneke, P. D. Goldan, W. C. Kuster, E. J. Williams, B. M. Lerner, J. M. Roberts, J. F. Meagher, F. C. Fehsenfeld, M. L. Marchewka, S. B. Bertman, and A. M. Middlebrook Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, Switzerland Aerodyne Research Incorporated, Billerica, MA, USA National Oceanic and Atmosph...

Next generation sequencing has radically changed research in the life sciences, in both academic and corporate laboratories. The potential impact is tremendous, yet a majority of citizens have little or no understanding of the technological and ethical aspects of this widespread adoption. We designed BeerDeCoded as a pretext to discuss the societal issues related to genomic and metagenomic data...

In hospital information systems, laboratory results are stored using specific terminologies which may differ between hospitals. The objective is to create a tool helping to build a mapping between a target terminology (reference dataset) and a new one. Using a training sample consisting of correct and incorrect correspondences between parameters of different hospitals, a match probability score...

Current practice by clinical diagnostic laboratories is to utilize online prediction programs to help determine the significance of novel variants in a given gene sequence. However, these programs vary widely in their methods and ability to correctly predict the pathogenicity of a given sequence change. The performance of 17 publicly available pathogenicity prediction programs was assayed using...

Background: data on cocaine market appear to be inconsistent, as they tend to show declining prices vis a vis a steady or increasing demand and a declining supply. This paper proposes an explanation by providing evidence of an under-estimation of the supply of cocaine. Methods: we put forwa d a conservative estimate of cocaine production in Colombia for year 2008 by means of reported seizures o...

Newly-discovered materials have been central to recent technological advances. They have contributed significantly to breakthroughs in electronics, renewable energy and green buildings, and overall, have promoted the advancement of global human welfare. Yet, only a fraction of all possible materials have been explored. Accelerating the pace of discovery of materials would foster technological i...

The dataset we will be using is a genome-wide association study of gender (Vawter et al., 2004). In this study, samples were taken postmortem from the brains of 10 individuals, 5 men and 5 women. Three samples were taken from different regions of the brain of each individual, and one aliquot of each sample was sent to each of 3 laboratories for analysis. There were two different microarray plat...

Researchers investigating processes stemming from or related to multilingualism often face the challenge of correctly characterizing their multilingual samples in terms of language use, proficiency, dominance, and exposure. This is typically done by using a variety of objective (e.g., normed tests) and/or subjective (e.g., self-reports) measures which tend to vary largely across laboratories an...