Premiums and benefits associated with traditional life insurance contracts are usually specified as fixed amounts in policy conditions. However, reserve-dependent surrender values and reserve-dependent expenses are common in insurance practice. The famous Cantelli theorem in life insurance ensures that under appropriate assumptions surrendering can be ignored in reserve calculations provided th...

The concept of reserve in neuroscience maintains that there are aspects of brain structure and function that can buffer the effects of neuropathology such that the greater the reserve, the more severe the pathology must be to cause functional impairment. This article provides a concise overview of structural and functional approaches to reserve and shows how reserve may be conceived as the sum ...

Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) is being presented as a miracle-drug for the treatment of women responding poorly to gonadotrophin stimulation, while the debate on its actual effectiveness is still ongoing. We would like to present how insufficient the current evidence of acceptable quality is to warrant a conclusion that DHEA supplementation is an effective treatment for women with diminished ov...

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a lifelong progressive neurologic disease typically diagnosed between ages 20 and 40 years: a time when persons are striving to accomplish normative goals of young adulthood (e.g., establishing a career).More than half ofMS patients suffer cognitive decline [for review, see Ref. (1)] especiallymemory problems and cognitive inefficiency (e.g., slowed processing speed, ...

Aggregation of reserve networks is generally considered desirable for biological and economic reasons: aggregation reduces negative edge effects and facilitates metapopulation dynamics, which plausibly leads to improved persistence of species. Economically, aggregated networks are less expensive to manage than fragmented ones. Therefore, many reserve-design methods use qualitative heuristics, s...

Since 2001, the US military has increasingly relied on National Guard and reserve component forces to meet operational demands. Differences in preparation and military engagement experiences between active component and reserve component forces have long suggested that the psychiatric consequences of military engagement differ by component. We conducted a systematic review of prevalence and new...

We conducted 80 auctions on eBay. Forty of these auctions were for various popular music CDs while the remaining 40 auctions were for video games for Microsoft’s Xbox gaming console. The revenue equivalence theorem states that any auction form having the same effective reserve price yields the same expected revenue. The effective reserve price on eBay consists of three components: the opening b...

It is generally perceived that biodiversity is better protected from human activities after an area is designated as a protected area. However, we found that this common perception was not true in Wolong Nature Reserve (southwestern China), which was established in 1975 as a "flagship" protected area for the world-renowned endangered giant pandas. Analyses of remote sensing data from pre- and p...