Recent studies in animal models indicate that recombinant human erythropoietin (rhEPO) is very effective in enhancing neurological recovery after spinal cord injury (SCI). We aimed to evaluate the effect of rhEPO plus methylprednisolone sodium succinate (MPSS) compared to MPSS alone to improve neurological function of patients after SCI in a randomized clinical trial. During a 15-month period 3...

This paper discusses alternative methods for determining returns to scale in DEA. The methods for estimating returns to scale in DEA, as developed by Banker (1984), Banker, Charnes and Cooper (1984) and Banker and Thrall (1992), are proved to be conceptually equivalent to the two-stage methods of F~ire, Grosskopf and Lovell (1985) when their assumptions apply. Here the emphasis is on the CCR mo...

This paper describes MPSS, a new proactive secret sharing protocol that provides mobility. Rather than requiring that the group of shareholders remain the same in every epoch, MPSS allows the membership of the group to change arbitrarily in each epoch. Mobility provides a needed methodology for a system administrator to use to determine group membership: identify a set of “fresh” nodes, and mov...

Inflammation plays a major pathological role in spinal cord injury (SCI). Although antiinflammatory treatment using the glucocorticoid methyprednisolone sodium succinate (MPSS) improved outcomes in several multicenter clinical trials, additional clinical experience suggests that MPSS is only modestly beneficial in SCI and poses a risk for serious complications. Recent work has shown that erythr...

This paper assesses the impacts of public-private partnerships on major Brazilian public ports. It is proposed that these kinds of arrangements with private terminal operators could help achieving higher levels of scale efficiency by enhancing coordination processes, providing more adequate information technologies, and higher connectivity with other transportation modes. Methodology relies on ...

Dentinal tubules occupy a substantial proportion of total dentin volume, especially of inner dentin. Resin-based sealer cements are known to penetrate deeply into dentinal tubules, but their ability to influence root strength is controversial. In this study, the contribution of dentinal tubules to shear strength and the influence of a resin-based sealer on shear strength were evaluated. Coronal...

A central computational problem for analyzing and model checking various classes of infinite-state recursive probabilistic systems (including quasi-birth-death processes, multi-type branching processes, stochastic context-free grammars, probabilistic pushdown automata and recursive Markov chains) is the computation of termination probabilities, and computing these probabilities in turn boils do...