BACKGROUND The soluble transferrin receptor (sTfR) is established as a test for iron deficiency (ID). In chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), sTfR is not reliable for screening for ID as the latter is strongly dependent on tumor burden. METHODS We investigated whether the influence of the tumor load can be excluded or minimized using the sTfR/log ferritin ratio (TfR-F-Index) and the C-reactive...

One of the advantages of estimating a conduct parameter game, compared with the Lerner index, is that the knowledge of cost shifters is suffi cient to get the “implied marginal cost”estimates. Stochastic frontier literature suffers from the same problem that it requires a detailed data set in order to estimate cost effi ciencies of the firms. This paper develops a model to estimate firm specifi...

MOTIVATION Discrimination statistics describe the ability of a survival model to assign higher risks to individuals who experience earlier events: examples are Harrell's C-index and Royston and Sauerbrei's D, which we call the D-index. Prognostic covariates whose distributions are controlled by the study design (e.g. age and sex) influence discrimination and can make it difficult to compare mod...

Die Notwendigkeit eines formalen Umfelds, das die Sprachlernenden unterstützt, ist immer häufiger Gegenstand von Debatten im Bereich der modernen Fremdsprachen, da es für Entwicklung autonomer Lerner Bedeutung ist. Daher soll in dieser Studie Rolle institutionalisierter Räume, insbesondere Selbstlernzentren, Prozess Autonomiebildung und ihre Beziehung zum Fremdsprachenlernprozess beleuchtet wer...

A new moisture adjusted vegetation index (MAVI) is proposed using the red, near infrared, and shortwave infrared (SWIR) reflectance in band-ratio form in this paper. The effectiveness of MAVI in retrieving leaf area index (LAI) is investigated using Landsat-5 data and field LAI measurements in two forest and two grassland areas. The ability of MAVI to retrieve forest LAI under different backgro...