The empirical association between high hospital procedure volume and lower mortality rates has led to recommendations for the regionalization of complex surgical procedures. While regionalization may improve outcomes, it also reduces market competition, which has been found to lower prices and improve health care quality. This study estimates the potential net benefits of regionalizing the Whip...

We undertook a long term project, DIRECT, to obtain the direct distances to two important galaxies in the cosmological distance ladder – M31 and M33, using detached eclipsing binaries (DEBs) and Cepheids. While rare and difficult to detect, detached eclipsing binaries provide us with the potential to determine these distances with an accuracy better than 5%. The massive photometry obtained in o...