We estimate the economic impacts of having your home damaged or destroyed by a natural disaster. Regressions with individual, area and time fixed-effects, indicate that experiencing disaster has no impact on employment income, but substantial financial hardship risk aversion. Impacts are particularly large for smaller isolated disasters, which attract little government support. Conversely, resi...

Performances of iterative blind deconvolution methods for motion-blurred images are usually reduced depending on the accuracy of the required initial guess of the blur. We examine this dependency, and a two-stage restoration procedure is proposed: First we perform a direct technique with a single straight-forward process to produce a rough initial estimate of the blur, and then an iterative tec...

abstract background: monitoring internal exposure of individuals handling significant amounts of iodine-125 (i-125) for iodination is of great importance. these individuals are potentially exposed to external contamination, and internal contamination through inhalation, ingestion and intact skin absorption, to i-125. considering radiological toxicity of this radionuclide its monitoring in the w...

BACKGROUND Mass media exposure has been associated with an increased risk of eating pathology. It is unknown whether indirect media exposure--such as the proliferation of media exposure in an individual's social network--is also associated with eating disorders. AIMS To test hypotheses that both individual (direct) and social network (indirect) mass media exposures were associated with eating...

Article history: Received 23 October 2008 Received in revised form 5 March 2009 Accepted 10 March 2009 Available online 18 March 2009 PACS: 63 63.20.-e 63.20.dk

We use causal graphs and a partly hypothetical example from the Physicians' Health Study to explain why a common standard method for quantifying direct effects (i.e. stratifying on the intermediate variable) may be flawed. Estimating direct effects without bias requires that two assumptions hold, namely the absence of unmeasured confounding for (1) exposure and outcome, and (2) the intermediate...