Fee-For-Service (FFS) contracts, first introduced in 2004, dramatically changed the way the pharmaceutical distribution supply chains are designed, managed, and operated. Investment buying (IB), forward buying in anticipation of drug price increases, used to be the way the distributors made most of their profits! FFS contracts limit the amount of inventory distributors can carry at any time (by...

New York City Firefighters (FDNY-FFs) were exposed to particulate matter and combustion/pyrolysis products during and after the World Trade Center (WTC) collapse. Ten months after the collapse, induced sputum (IS) samples were obtained from 39 highly exposed FDNY-FFs (caught in the dust cloud during the collapse on 11 September 2001) and compared to controls to determine whether a unique patter...

To determine the clinical significance of BCL-2 expression in Hodgkin-Reed-Sternberg (HRS) cells of classical Hodgkin disease (cHD), we correlated its expression with presenting clinical and laboratory features and failure-free survival (FFS). Eligible patients were untreated and negative for HIV-1; they had biopsyproven cHD. BCL-2 expression was determined immunohistochemically in available pr...

Pairings on elliptic curves over finite fields are crucial for constructing various cryptographic schemes. The ηT pairing on supersingular curves over GF(3) is particularly popular since it is efficiently implementable. Taking into account the Menezes-Okamoto-Vanstone (MOV) attack, the discrete logarithm problem (DLP) in GF(3) becomes a concern for the security of cryptosystems using ηT pairing...

Distributional patterns in linear word sequences are informative about lexical categories in natural languages. However, it is unclear what patterns human learners use to categorize words. The current study exposed adults to sentences in two artificial languages. The Frames group heard sentences in which target words were embedded in frequent frames (FFs)—frequently co-occurring words that imme...

We describe an Escherichia coli genetic screen that yields mutations affecting two different cellular processes: disulfide bond formation and membrane protein assembly. The mutants defective in disulfide bond formation include additional classes of dsbA and dsbB mutations. The membrane protein assembly defective mutants contain a mutation in the secA operon and three mutations in the ffs gene, ...

The indoor radio source search using received signal strength (RSS) is difficult due to the multipath effects. Robots driven by the RSS gradient-based searching methods are always stuck by local basins which are the areas around local maxima. In this paper, we propose a force field searching (FFS) algorithm which is cost efficient in environments with RSS local basins. The FFS algorithm fuses t...

CONTEXT Few studies have compared patterns of care in health maintenance organization (HMO) and fee-for-service (FFS) settings. OBJECTIVE To examine breast cancer stage at diagnosis and, for those at an early stage, treatment patterns for elderly women in HMO and FFS settings. DESIGN Cancer registry data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program linked to Medicare ...

The basic building blocks of data-path structures are Flipflops. Indeed, data processed by combinational circuits are stored and the operations at a given clock frequency[1] are synchronized in FFs. Speed and energy of FFs affect the overall performance of a data path [2], [3] significantly because of multistage structure, high clock switching activity and increasing portion of clock period occ...

Injured adult tendons do not exhibit optimal healing through a regenerative process, whereas fetal tendons can heal in a regenerative fashion without scar formation. Hence, we compared FFs (mouse fetal fibroblasts) and AFs (mouse adult fibroblasts) as seed cells for the fabrication of scaffold-free engineered tendons. Our results demonstrated that FFs had more potential for tendon tissue engine...