This article traces the pattern of conflict, collaboration, and compromise among trade unions, employers, political parties, executive branches, and economic research institutes in Germany, all of which have different stances regarding the introduction of a general statutory minimum wage there. This article examines the degree of political intervention in collective bargaining autonomy. First, ...

OBJECTIVES This study assessed the validity of a widely-accepted administrative data surveillance methodology for identifying individuals with diabetes relative to three laboratory data reference standard definitions for diabetes. METHODS We used a combination of linked regional data (hospital discharge abstracts and physician data) and laboratory data to test the validity of administrative d...

The goal of metabolomics data pre-processing is to eliminate systematic variation, such that biologically-related metabolite signatures are detected by statistical pattern recognition. Although several methods have been developed to tackle the issue of batch-to-batch variation, each method has its advantages and disadvantages. In this study, we used a reference sample as a normalization standar...

This Table is a compilation of experimental measurements of static magnetic dipole and electric quadrupole moments of ground states and excited states of atomic nuclei throughout the periodic table. To aid identification of the states, their excitation energy, half-life, spin and parity are given, along with a brief indication of the method and any reference standard used in the particular meas...

OBJECTIVE Our purpose was to develop an accurate automated 3D liver segmentation scheme for measuring liver volumes on MRI. SUBJECTS AND METHODS Our scheme for MRI liver volumetry consisted of three main stages. First, the preprocessing stage was applied to T1-weighted MRI of the liver in the portal venous phase to reduce noise and produce the boundary-enhanced image. This boundary-enhanced i...

Theodolites are one of a wide range of geodetic measuring instruments used in the geodesy, surveying and civil engineering industry. They are used to perform accurate angle measurements in both horizontal and vertical planes. Testing and calibration of these instruments is quite a complicated task, especially their vertical angles. Calibration of horizontal angles can be performed relatively ea...

The objective of this study was to compare serial readings from an in-pharmacy automated blood pressure (BP) kiosk to mean daytime ambulatory BP. A total of 100 community-dwelling adults with hypertension underwent (1) three baseline automated office readings; (2) three in-pharmacy readings on each of four visits (12 total) using the PharmaSmart PS-2000 kiosk; and (3) 24-hour ambulatory BP moni...

Reference standards are used to calibrate similar assay systems against an international reference protocol and to provide a template for the preparation of secondary and/or working standards. Three reference standards are recommended for the indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay: a strong positive standard, a weak positive standard and a negative serum standard. The negative standard shou...

Before a new test is introduced in clinical practice, its accuracy should be assessed. In the past decade, researchers have put an increased emphasis on exploring differences in test sensitivity and specificity between patient subgroups. If the reference standard is imperfect and the prevalence of the target condition differs among subgroups, apparent differences in test sensitivity and specifi...

We compared two collection devices, IsoCode and FTA, with whole blood for the diagnosis of malaria by PCR (n = 100). Using whole blood as the reference standard, both devices were sensitive for the detection of single-species malaria infections by PCR (> or =96%). However, the detection of mixed infections was suboptimal (IsoCode was 42% sensitive, and FTA was 63% sensitive).