The high endemicity of hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection and liver disease in Sardinia led us to assess the occurrence of HBV DNA in 1,411 sera of two selected groups of hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg)-negative blood donors: 793 with abnormal serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT) and 618 with normal serum ALT values (determined during routine testing of their blood donation). HBV DNA sequenc...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Certain diseases such as multiple endocrine neoplasia (MEN) 2A, MEN 2B, familial and sporadic medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC) and renal dysgenesis are related to abnormalities of the RET protein. Our aim was to evaluate the frequency of RET mutation in 10 Saudi families with MEN type 2A and familial MTC. DESIGN AND SETTING A cross-sectional prospective study of pat...

Culturing experiments were performed with the benthic foraminifer Ammonia aomo riensis from Flensburg Fjord, western Baltic Sea. The experiments simulated a projected rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. We exposed specimens to 5 seawater pCO2 levels ranging from 618 μatm (pH 7.9) to 3130 μatm (pH 7.2) for 6 wk. Growth rates and mortality differed significantly among pCO2 treatments. The hig...

Loosely associated material (LAM) was isolated by gentle extraction procedures from the cell surface of Lactococcus lactis subsp. cremoris E8 and its phage-resistant variant strain 398. LAM from both strains was chemically characterized, and its role in the adsorption of three small isometric bacteriophages, phi 618, phi 833, and phi 852, to the cell surface of the two strains was investigated....

Consider a game with a finite set of players. A coalition is a nonempty subset of the set of players. A coalitional game with transferable payoff consists of (1) a finite set of players, N (2) a function v : S ⊆ N −→ R. The value of the function for a given S, v(S) is known as the worth of the coalition S. v(S) is the total payoff that is available for division among the members of the coalitio...

The term ”global games” was introduced by Carlson and Van Damme in their classic 1993 Econometrica paper to describe a type of Bayesian game. In this type of game, the players’ payoffs for a given strategy profile also depends on the realization of a fundamental ”state of the economy”, which is unobserved.The fundamental has a prior distribution which is common knowledge. At the start of the pl...

1.1 Definitions The individual strategy set Ai is finite with mi elements, {ai . . .a mi i }, indexed a ki i . A mixed strategy for player i, αi is a probability distribution over Ai, with αi(ai i ) as the probability of choosing a ki i . Thus ∑i ki=1 αi(a ki i ) = 1. The space of all mixed strategies for player i is denoted ∆Ai. Let a ∈ A = (a1 1 ,a k2 2 , . . .a kN N ) be a profile of pure st...