Background: Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) pose a significant burden to healthcare providers with frequent exacerbations necessitating hospital admission. Randomised controlled data exist supporting the use of acute non-invasive ventilation (NIV) in patients with exacerbations of COPD with mild to moderate acidosis. The use of NIV is also described in chronic stable ...

Objective: To assess the cost effectiveness of a community based exercise programme as a population wide public health intervention for older adults. Design: Pragmatic, cluster randomised community intervention trial. Setting: 12 general practices in Sheffield; four randomly selected as intervention populations, and eight as control populations. Participants: All those aged 65 and over in the l...

Hedonic property value models are often used to place a value on localized amenities and disamenities. In practice, however, results may be affected by (i) omitted variable bias and (ii) whether homebuyers and sellers are aware of, and respond to, the assumed environmental measure. In this paper we undertake an alternative stated preference (SP) approach that eliminates the potential for unobse...

This paper examines the long-term impacts of early childhood exposure to air pollution on adult outcomes using U.S. administrative data. We exploit changes in air pollution driven by the 1970 Clean Air Act to analyze the difference in outcomes between cohorts born in counties before and after large improvements in air pollution relative to those same cohorts born in counties that had no improve...

It is shown that the discrete time convolution of two absolutely summable nowhere zero sequences may be identically equal to zero. DEVELOPMENT Consider two absolutely summable sequences a = {a,,: n E Z } and b = { b,,: n E Z } of real numbers. Further, assume that the sequences a and b are nowhere zero. Does it follow that the discrete time convolution a * b is nowhere zero? Does it follow that...

The responsiveness to information is thought to be one channel through which education affects health outcomes. This paper tests this hypothesis by examining the effectiveness of an information campaign that aims at preventing the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Uganda. Previous studies in the epidemiological literature have generally concluded that, in Africa, there was either a positive or no associatio...

ion appears also in the music experience. Ordinary listener is not able to identify the key of the music piece but this does not affect the music experience much since only the ratios of the pitches of notes of the melody matter. People with ”absolute ear” can however recognize the absolute key of the music piece and regard pieces in different keys as different ones. In the standard scale used ...