In practice, Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) vastly outnumber Customs Unions (CUs). Nevertheless, the literature traditionally views CUs as optimal for members because CU members coordinate external tariffs. I show that a dynamic FTA flexibility benefit can help explain the prevalence of FTAs: individual FTA members have the flexibility to form their own future FTAs whereas CU members must jointly...

Reports of fluorescent treponemal antibody (FTA) testing of cerebrospinal fluids have appeared in the literature from time to time (Harris, Bossak, Deacon, and Bunch, 1960; Vaisman and Hamelin, 1961; Niel and Fribourg-Blanc, 1964). It has become accepted practice in our laboratory to perform an FTA test, without absorption with Reiter treponemes, on undiluted cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). As no es...

This paper reports the development of a combined microfluidic system for purification and amplification of DNA from FTA ® paper. Using FTA ® paper eradicates the need to elute nucleic acids from a solid-phase matrix prior to downstream processing, enabling both purification and amplification to be easily performed in a single chamber on the microfluidic device. Following optimization of the met...

Analysis of dependencies between information systems, business processes, and strategic goals is an important part of the discipline of Enterprise Architecture (EA). However, EA models typically provide only visual and qualitative decision support. This paper shows how EA frameworks for dependency analysis can be extended into the realm of quantitative methods by the use of techniques from Faul...

BACKGROUND Self-management is crucial in the daily management of type 2 diabetes. It has been suggested that mHealth may be an important method for enhancing self-management when delivered in combination with health counseling. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to test whether the use of a mobile phone-based self-management system used for 1 year, with or without telephone health coun...

Screening tests-absorbed fluorescent treponemal (FTA-ABS), the Reiter protein complement-fixation (RPCFT), VDRL slide test, automated reagin-and cardiolipin Wassermann reaction-were carried out on 1922 consecutive new patients attending the Whitechapel Clinic over a three-month period.Taking the FTA-ABS test results as an index, the most efficient combination of conventional tests was found to ...

In order to determine whether pregnancy influences the specificity of the fluorescent treponemal antibody absorption (FTA-ABS) and Treponema palidum haemagglutination assay (TPHA) tests, these tests, together with the quantitative fluorescent treponemal antibody (FTA) and Venereal Disease Research Laboratory (VDRL) tests, were carried out simultaneously on 2000 pregnant women who attended for c...

Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) as a Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) method is used to identify basic causes leading to an undesired event, to represent logical relation of these basic causes in leading to the event, and finally to calculate the probability of occurrence of this event. To conduct a quantitative FTA, one needs a fault tree along with failure data of the Basic Events (BEs). Someti...

Much has been written about the biological false positive (BFP) reaction demonstrated by reagin tests applied to sera from patients suffering from leprosy. It is well known that a BFP reaction is in all but a very small minority of cases proved or disproved by recourse to specific tests for treponemal infection, i.e. the Treponema pallidum immobilization (TPI) test and/or the fluorescent trepon...

Bus fleet data have consistently shown that vehicle operating and maintenance costs increase as vehicles age. A fleet manager has to deal with the tradeoff between the lower operating and maintenance costs of newer fleets and their higher initial capital costs as well as the tradeoff between conventional and fuel efficient bus technologies. This study formulates and implements a fleet replaceme...