The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been involved in the development of standards for microanalysis since the middle of the 1960s. Certification of "traceable" standards that can be sold to other laboratories is time-consuming and costly, especially when the extent of microheterogeneity within each specimen becomes part of the uncertainty assigned to the certified valu...

Recently there has been growing interest in providing fine-grained metering and control of living environments using low power devices. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), which consist of spatially distributed self-configurable sensors, perfectly meet the requirement. Since running real experiments is costly and time consuming, simulation is essential to study WSNs, being the common way to test n...

Little is known about the health problems of the fastest-growing segment of the population. Three major community-based studies present prevalence information on physical and mental disabilities among the oldest old. These data also illustrate the limitations of interpretations in cross-sectional studies, and emphasize the value of prospective investigations of populations aged 85 and older. Al...

Article history: Received 19 September 2016 Accepted 19 September 2016 Available online 20 September 2016 and convenient way for early detection of human disease. However, many approaches to identify HCC biomarkers are based on NGS (next generation sequencing) technology (Li and Mao, 2013), which is costly and time-consuming. In a study published in this issue of EBioMedicine, Watanabe et al. (...

High-resolution rainfall data sequences serve as inputs for a range of applications in planning, design and management of small (mostly urban) water resources systems. These applications include continuous flow simulation, rain water tank design, and the evaluation of alternate policies for assessment of environmental impacts. However, high-resolution rainfall data are often not available, sinc...

Quality assurance in semen analysis is now a standard procedure in most andrology laboratories. This communication is now questioning its value in any clinical situation and as a consequence asks whether the effort and the expense of such a process is really worthwhile. It concludes that semen analysis needs only to be performed competently without the need for costly and time-consuming forms o...

Genetic evaluation of dairy animals requires rather large datasets, possibly larger than what is feasible to observe directly through chemical analyses for milk composition and quality traits because they are costly and time consuming. An alternative and more convenient method – use of infrared (IR) spectra – has been proposed (Goulden, 1964). Fourier transformed Infrared (FTIR) spectrometry is...

A screening instrument is costly if it socially wasteful and productive otherwise. principal screens an agent with multidimensional private information quasilinear preferences that are additively separable across two components: a one-dimensional component component. Can the improve upon simple mechanisms by also using instruments? We show has between components positively correlated in suitabl...