Buy Time Research Articles

Prime time for veno-arterial extracorporeal membrane oxygenation in 24-7 interventional cardiology center?

Prime time for veno-arterial extracorporeal membrane oxygenation in 24-7 interventional cardiology center?

Identifying the Relevant Factors in Newspaper Advertising Effectiveness

This study explores several factors in order to establish which are the most important in driving local newspaper readers to buy, visit shops and look for additional information about products or services promoted by ads. The behavior in the process of buying is a consequence of a complex interplay among cultural, social, personal and psychological dimensions. This pro cess –which occurs prior to the action– has relevant implications and marketing departments should pay attention to it. A series of hypotheses based on how advertising appeals to consumers and how it affects decision ma king at the time of buying are tested using a survey administered to a sample of 1,333 respondents in Chile. A discriminant analysis is also performed to find out why some newspapers readers are driven to buy goods or servi ces, visit a shop or search for more information. The results show that the appeal of the deal advertised is the single most important factor in explaining subsequent consumer behavior.

Does oocyte banking for anticipated gamete exhaustion influence future relational and reproductive choices? A follow-up of bankers and non-bankers.

What is the nature of the relational status, reproductive choices and possible regret of a pioneer cohort of women that either considered or actually performed oocyte banking for anticipated gamete exhaustion (AGE)? Only half of the women who banked oocytes anticipate using them in the future but the experience with oocyte banking is overwhelmingly positive, with the majority of AGE bankers preferring to have it performed at a younger age. Most women who choose to cryopreserve oocytes for the prevention of age-related fertility decline are single and are hoping to buy time in their search for a suitable partner. The question of why some candidates actually embark on such treatment while others eventually prefer not to freeze remains unclear. There are no follow-up data available either on post-freezing changes in relational status, or on attitude towards the undergone treatment and the reproductive outcome. A retrospective cohort study was performed with 140 women who visited the outpatient clinic between 2009 and 2011. All women (mean age 36.7 ± SD 2.62) considered oocyte preservation for age-related infertility. At least 1 year after their initial visit (range 12-45 months), women were contacted by phone to participate in a standardized questionnaire developed to evaluate their actual relational and reproductive situation, their attitude towards banking and future reproductive plan. Eighty-six women (61.4%) completed at least one cryopreservation cycle. The non-bankers included 54 women who either preferred no treatment (n = 51) or attempted stimulation but cancelled because of poor response (n = 3). The response rate among bankers was 75.4% (65/86) while 55.8% (29/52) of the non-bankers were reached for interview. Among bankers, 50.8% of women think they will use the oocytes at some point, while 29.2% indicated that they currently consider the use of frozen oocytes less likely than anticipated at time of oocyte retrieval. However, although 95.4% would decide to do it again, the majority (76.0%) would prefer to do it at a younger age. Among bankers, 96.1% would recommend the treatment to others. Women who banked accept a higher maximum age for motherhood when compared with non-bankers (43.6 versus 42.5 years; P < 0.05). Almost all bankers and 89.6% of the non-bankers still have a desire for a child. Bankers and non-bankers did not differ in terms of experiencing steady relations (47.7 versus 55.2%), attempting conception (35.4 versus 44.8%) and not conceiving within 1 year (17.4 versus 15.4%). The study has a limited follow-up of 1-3 years and therefore does not provide information on the reproductive outcome of the cryopreserved oocytes. Although most women appear to be realistic about their chances of pregnancy, the outcome of such treatment could affect the attitude of women towards the treatment. Furthermore, the findings of non-bankers cannot be generalized to the general population because the control group of non-bankers in this study actually visited a centre as a potential candidate for banking. Bankers and non-bankers have a surprising congruent relational status and reproductive choices, indicating that freezing oocytes does not appear to influence the life choices of the women. The study provides insights into the important psychological aspect of reassurance associated with preventive oocyte banking, expressed by high satisfaction after banking in combination with a decreased intention of ever using the eggs.

Energy and urban regeneration: who decides and what about?

This article deals with the global setting for energy policy, possible response options, the range of economic and other instruments open to policy–makers, the links between urban renewal and the rational use of energy and the policy trade–offs to be made, and the next steps to be taken. We must recognise that the environmental implications of policies we adopt now run decades ahead. Adoption of 'good sense' measures immediately will help buy time for new approaches to be sought and evaluated. The costs of 'getting it wrong' may not simply be financial, but threaten the very future of human existence.

Population biology: fur seals signal their own decline.

Data on three generations of Antarctic fur seals suggest that climate change is reducing the survival of less-fit individuals with low genetic variation, but that overall seal numbers are falling. See Letter p.462 Antarctic fur seals (Arctocephalus gazella) were hunted almost to extinction by the early twentieth century but numbers began to recover when sealing operations stopped, and thanks to an abundant food supply they have survived in large numbers. But fur seals are particularly vulnerable to climate change as they inhabit a region with fast-changing temperatures, and their relatively long generation time limits their ability to adapt evolutionarily. An analysis of three decades of data from South Georgia shows that the seals are in decline again, with female numbers down by some 30% between 2003 and 2012. Harsh conditions have, however, selected for higher genetic heterozygosity among females. While this is not in itself an evolutionary response, as environmental conditions continue to worsen, heterozygote advantage could help maintain genetic variation, potentially buying time to allow the species to respond via adaptation.

Short-Lived Climate Pollution

Although carbon dioxide emissions are by far the most important mediator of anthropogenic climate disruption, a number of shorter-lived substances with atmospheric lifetimes of under a few decades also contribute significantly to the radiative forcing that drives climate change. In recent years, the argument that early and aggressive mitigation of the emission of these substances or their precursors forms an essential part of any climate protection strategy has gained a considerable following. There is often an implication that such control can in some way make up for the current inaction on carbon dioxide emissions. The prime targets for mitigation, known collectively as short-lived climate pollution (SLCP), are methane, hydrofluo-rocarbons, black carbon, and ozone. A re-examination of the issues shows that the benefits of early SLCP mitigation have been greatly exaggerated, largely because of inadequacies in the methodologies used to compare the climate effects of short-lived substances with those of CO2, which causes nearly irreversible climate change persisting millennia after emissions cease. Eventual mitigation of SLCP can make a useful contribution to climate protection, but there is little to be gained by implementing SLCP mitigation before stringent carbon dioxide controls are in place and have caused annual emissions to approach zero. Any earlier implementation of SLCP mitigation that substitutes to any significant extent for carbon dioxide mitigation will lead to a climate irreversibly warmer than will a strategy with delayed SLCP mitigation. SLCP mitigation does not buy time for implementation of stringent controls on CO2 emissions.

REDD-plus and China's contribution

The United Nations' program Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) seeks to reduce emissions resulting from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries. The program's overarching goal is to curb rising CO2 levels and combat global climate change, and it focuses in particular on nations in or near the tropics that possess abundant rainforest resources. REDD-plus upgrades the program to include additional emphases on the roles of conservation, sustainable management of forests, and enhancement of forest carbon stocks. China has one of the world's richest forest resources and, through its afforestation and reforestation efforts, also possesses the world's largest reserve of planted forests. Currently, most of China's forests are young and/or mid-aged, and, as a result, China is positioned to make significant contributions to REDD-plus through sustainable forest management that enhanced forest carbon stocks. Though REDD-plus does not represent a comprehensive solution to global climate change, it can help stabilize rising temperatures and buy time for researchers to devise solutions that target the greenhouse effect.

Retailer's inventory system in a two-level trade credit financing with selling price discount and partial order cancellations

In today's fast marketing over the Internet or online, many retailers want to trade at the same time and change their marketing strategy to attract more customers. Some of the customers may decide to cancel their orders partially with a retailer due to various reasons such as increase in customer's waiting time, loss of customer's goodwill on retailer's business, and attractive promotional schemes offered by other retailers. Even though there is a lag in trading and order cancellation, this paper attempts to develop the retailer's inventory model with the effect of order cancellations during advance sales period. The retailer announces a price discount program during advance sales period to promote his sales and also offers trade credit financing during the sales periods. The retailer availing trade credit period from his supplier offers a permissible delay period to his customers. The customer who gets an item is allowed to pay on or before the permissible delay period which is accounted from the buying time rather than from the start period of inventory sales. This accounts for significant changes in the calculations of interest payable and interest earned by the retailer. The retailer's total cost is minimized so as to find out the optimal replenishment cycle time and price discount policies through a solution procedure. The results derived in mathematical theorems are implemented in numerical examples, and sensitivity analyses on several inventory parameters are obtained.

Hybrid Machine Learning Technique for Forecasting Dhaka Stock Market Timing Decisions

Forecasting stock market has been a difficult job for applied researchers owing to nature of facts which is very noisy and time varying. However, this hypothesis has been featured by several empirical experiential studies and a number of researchers have efficiently applied machine learning techniques to forecast stock market. This paper studied stock prediction for the use of investors. It is always true that investors typically obtain loss because of uncertain investment purposes and unsighted assets. This paper proposes a rough set model, a neural network model, and a hybrid neural network and rough set model to find optimal buy and sell of a share on Dhaka stock exchange. Investigational findings demonstrate that our proposed hybrid model has higher precision than the single rough set model and the neural network model. We believe this paper findings will help stock investors to decide about optimal buy and/or sell time on Dhaka stock exchange.

Evaluation of encapsulated liver cell spheroids in a fluidised-bed bioartificial liver for treatment of ischaemic acute liver failure in pigs in a translational setting.

Liver failure is an increasing problem. Donor-organ shortage results in patients dying before receiving a transplant. Since the liver can regenerate, alternative therapies providing temporary liver-support are sought. A bioartificial-liver would temporarily substitute function in liver failure buying time for liver regeneration/organ-procurement. Our aim: to develop a prototype bioartificial-liver-machine (BAL) comprising a human liver-derived cell-line, cultured to phenotypic competence and deliverable in a clinical setting to sites distant from its preparation. The objective of this study was to determine whether its use would improve functional parameters of liver failure in pigs with acute liver failure, to provide proof-of-principle. HepG2cells encapsulated in alginate-beads, proliferated in a fluidised-bed-bioreactor providing a biomass of 4–6×1010cells, were transported from preparation-laboratory to point-of-use operating theatre (6000miles) under perfluorodecalin at ambient temperature. Irreversible ischaemic liver failure was induced in anaesthetised pigs, after portal-systemic-shunt, by hepatic-artery-ligation. Biochemical parameters, intracranial pressure, and functional-clotting were measured in animals connected in an extracorporeal bioartificial-liver circuit. Efficacy was demonstrated comparing outcomes between animals connected to a circuit containing alginate-encapsulated cells (Cell-bead BAL), and those connected to circuit containing alginate capsules without cells (Empty-bead BAL). Cells of the biomass met regulatory standards for sterility and provenance. All animals developed progressive liver-failure after ischaemia induction. Efficacy of BAL was demonstrated since animals connected to a functional biomass (+ cells) had significantly smaller rises in intracranial pressure, lower ammonia levels, more bilirubin conjugation, improved acidosis and clotting restoration compared to animals connected to the circuit without cells. In the +cell group, human proteins accumulated in pigs' plasma. Delivery of biomass using a short-term cold-chain enabled transport and use without loss of function over 3days. Thus, a fluidised-bed bioreactor containing alginate-encapsulated HepG2cell-spheroids improved important parameters of acute liver failure in pigs. The system can readily be up-scaled and transported to point-of-use justifying development at clinical scale.

‘It's not like you just had a heart attack’: decision‐making about active surveillance by men with localized prostate cancer

Growing recognition that active surveillance (AS) is a reasonable management option for many men diagnosed with localized prostate cancer led us to describe patients' conceptualizations of AS and reasons for their treatment decisions. Men were patients of a multidisciplinary prostate cancer clinic at a large tertiary cancer center where patients are routinely briefed on treatment options, including AS. We conducted a thematic analysis of interviews with 15 men who had chosen AS and 15 men who received radiation or surgery. Men who chose AS described it as an organized process with a rigorous and reassuring protocol of periodic testing, with potential for subsequent and timely decision-making about treatment. AS was seen as prolonging their current good health and function with treatment still possible later. Rationales for choosing AS included trusting their physician's monitoring, 'buying time' without experiencing adverse effects of treatment, waiting for better treatments, and seeing their cancer as very low risk. Men recognized the need to justify their choice to others because it seemed contrary to the impulse to immediately treat cancer. Descriptions of AS by men who chose surgery or radiation were less specific about the testing regimen. Getting rid of the cancer and having a cure were paramount for them. Men fully informed of their treatment options for localized prostate cancer have a comprehensive understanding of the purpose of AS. Slowing the decision-making process may enhance the acceptability of AS.

The trading on the mutual funds by gene expression programming with Sortino ratio

The aim of this paper is to combine several techniques together to provide one systematic method for guiding the investment in mutual funds. Many researches focus on the prediction of a single asset time series, or focus on portfolio management to diversify the investment risk, but they do not generate explicit trading rules. Only a few researches combine these two concepts together, but they adjust trading rules manually. Our method combines the techniques for generating observable and profitable trading rules, managing portfolio and allocating capital. First, the buying timing and selling timing are decided by the trading rules generated by gene expression programming. The trading rules are suitable for the constantly changing market. Second, the funds with higher Sortino ratios are selected into the portfolio. Third, there are two models for capital allocation, one allocates the capital equally (EQ) and the other allocates the capital with the mean variance (MV) model. Also, we perform superior predictive ability test to ensure that our method can earn positive returns without data snooping. To evaluate the return performance of our method, we simulate the investment on mutual funds from January 1999 to September 2012. The training duration is from 1999/1/1 to 2003/12/31, while the testing duration is from 2004/1/1 to 2012/9/11. The best annualized return of our method with EQ and MV capital allocation models are 12.08% and 12.85%, respectively. The latter also lowers the investment risk. To compare with the method proposed by Tsai et al., we also perform testing from January 2004 to December 2008. The experimental results show that our method can earn annualized return 9.07% and 11.27%, which are better than the annualized return 6.89% of Tsai et al.

Multidirectional Product Support System for Decision Making in Textile Industry using Collaborative Filtering Methods

In the information technology ground people are using various tools and software for their official use and for their personal reasons. Nowadays people are worrying to choose data accessing tools and software's at the time of buying and selling the products and they are also worrying about various constraints such as cost, life time of the product, color and size of the product etc. In this paper we generated the solutions to the existing unsolved problems. Here we proposed the algorithm Multidirectional Rank Prediction (MDRP) decision making algorithm in order to take an effective decision at all the levels of data extraction, using the above technique and we analyzed the results at various datasets, finally the results were observed and compared with the existing methods such as PCC and VSS. The result accuracy was higher than the existing rank prediction methods. Collaborative techniques are used to filtering the noise data and give product recommendation to novice users. Collaborative filtering may involve in large data sets. Collaborative technique is used to predict user's interests on particular product or more than one product. In this Proposal Selling and buying are the two conventional activities for each seller and customer. One who sells the products is aims to gain the maximum earnings, and the customer has to get trustworthy product and it is extendable to intermediate level. These scenarios are identified and people who are used products are worried to discover the best product and in addition they suffer and face difficulty to draw the features of the item such as color, product size, availability and durability of the item. To prevail over these situations identified a problem learning multidirectional asymmetric similarity collaborative filtering via matrix factorization technique. The Collaborative filtering technique is a conventional recommender system which was used by different peoples in different circumstances, and data was extracted by this conventional method to various purposes. Still data extraction is a foremost problem in various disciplines, to handle seriously this problem and provide remedy to this issue. Solving any problem using any one the available technique is a common method, but the difficulty is to identify a best method or technique for long- term solution to the existing problem. In the exiting problem is providing the solution not up to the expected level of the customers. Customers are suffering sparsity and scalability problems. Most of the commercial recommender systems are associated with large data sets. The user-item matrix used for collaborative filtering could be tremendously large and sparse, which carries out the challenges in the performances of the recommendation. 1.1 Data Sparsity Problem One classic problem in data sparsity is the cold start problem. As collaborative filtering methods recommend items based on users' past preferences, new users must need to rate sufficient number of items to enable the system to capture their likings exactly and to provide reliable recommendations. Similarly, users when rating the new items also face the same problem. When new items are added to system, they need to be rated by large number of users before they could be recommended to users who have similar tastes with the ones rated them. The new item problem does not limit the content-based recommendation, because the recommendation of an item is based on its discrete set of descriptive qualities rather than its ratings. 1.2 Scalability Problem The Secondly Scalability is another problem in our traditional CF algorithms will face serious scalability problems. If the customer data set, no of items are high a normal CF algorithm time complexity was too large and many online version systems have to respond immediately and provide recommendations of their purchases and ratings history, which demands a higher scalability of the Collaborative filtering system.

Managing Local Coastal Stressors to Reduce the Ecological Effects of Ocean Acidification and Warming

Anthropogenic activities have increased the number of stressors acting on ecosystems. When multiple stressors act simultaneously, there is a greater probability of additive, synergistic and antagonistic effects occurring among them. Where additive and synergistic effects occur, managers may yield disproportionately large benefits where they first act upon synergies. Stressors act, however, at different spatial and temporal scales. Global stressors (e.g., ocean acidification and warming) tend to change slowly over long periods of time, although their intensity and effects are contingent on local conditions. On the other hand, local stressors tend to change rapidly over shorter, more defined spatial and temporal scales. Hence, local stressors can be subject to a greater degree of control through local management (e.g., eutrophication and overfishing) while global stressors are characterized by an intrinsic inertia whose effects last for decades, if not centuries. Although the reduction of carbon emissions is an international priority for managing global stressors, it requires international agreements and management applications that take considerable time to develop. Managers, however, may ‘buy time’ by acting on stressors whose governance is local (e.g., reducing nutrient input) and are known to synergize with global stressors (e.g., enriched CO2). Such local actions may potentially disrupt synergies with the more slowly changing global stressors that can only be reduced over longer time scales.

What the Intensive Care Doctor Needs to Know about Blast-Related Lung Injury

Explosions are currently the primary cause of military combat injuries. A minority of civilian trauma is also caused by explosions. People hurt by explosion are likely to present with complex injuries. The aim of the article is to explain the mechanism underlying these injuries and the associated physiology to help the intensive care clinician manage these casualties properly. The generic term ‘blast injury’ is applied to a collection of injuries caused by explosion. Components of blast injuries have precise definitions relating to the elements of the explosion that caused the injuries: primary blast injury is due to a shock wave, secondary blast injury is caused by fragments and debris colliding with the victim and tertiary blast injury is due to the casualty being thrown against solid objects. Primary blast injury results in damage principally in gas-containing organs, eg the lungs (blast lung) and can lead to impaired pulmonary gas transfer and hypoxaemia. Secondary blast injuries are often penetrating and can lead to haemorrhage while tertiary blast injuries are often blunt and involve substantial tissue damage. Survivors of explosions in confined spaces are more likely to exhibit primary blast injury than those injured in open spaces. The current military approach to immediate management is to apply the C ABC principle (arrest catastrophic haemorrhage first and then deal with airway, breathing and circulation) to achieve Damage Control Resuscitation. Early administration of blood products (plasma as well as red cells) is advocated for those suffering significant haemorrhage. Initial resuscitation is hypotensive to minimise risk of dislodging nascent clots. However, if evacuation is protracted (longer than one hour) then consideration should be given to improving blood flow / oxygen delivery by adopting a revised normotensive blood pressure target to reverse the deleterious consequences of the hypotensive shock state. Animal studies have shown that titrating FiO2 to a target SaO2 of 95% can improve survival and ‘buy time’ during hypotensive resuscitation. Ventilator strategies should use a lung-protective approach with permissive hypercapnia if necessary. Blast casualties are often a challenging group of patients needing expert, tailored, care. Outcome can be good especially in young, otherwise fit, casualties with more than 96% surviving to ICU discharge, although this figure may be lower with a mixed civilian group.

Novel Modes of Mechanical Ventilation

The overarching goal of positive pressure mechanical ventilation is to provide adequate gas exchange support while not causing harm. Indeed, positive pressure mechanical ventilators are only support technologies, not therapeutic technologies. As such they cannot be expected to "cure" disease; they can only "buy time" for other therapies (including the patient's own defenses) to work.Conventional approaches to positive pressure ventilation involve applying ventilatory patterns mimicking normal ones through either masks or artificial airways. This is usually done with modes of support incorporating assist/control breath-triggering mechanisms, gas delivery patterns governed by either a set flow or pressure, and breath cycling based on either a set volume, a set inspiratory time, or a set flow. Often this support includes positive end-expiratory pressure and supplemental oxygen. In recent decades several novel or unconventional approaches to providing mechanical ventilatory support have been introduced. For these to be considered of value, however, it would seem reasonable that they address important clinical challenges and be shown to improve important clinical outcomes (e.g., mortality, duration of ventilation, sedation needs, complications). This article focuses on challenges facing clinicians in providing mechanical ventilatory support and assesses several novel approaches introduced over the last 2 decades in the context of these challenges.

δ Opioid Receptor Antagonists

δ Opioid Receptor Antagonists

Syntactic predictability influences duration

Building on work by Gahl and Garnsey, 2004, this paper demonstrates that speakers “buy time” during the planning of upcoming low-probability syntactic structures by producing prosodic boundaries with longer duration before low-probability than before high-probability structures. Subject extraction cleft sentences (“It was Edward who (t) loved Lucy.”) are more common in corpora than object extraction cleft sentences (“It was Edward who Lucy loved (t).”) [Roland et al. (2007)], and are also easier to process [e.g., Gibson (1998)]. The duration of the clefted constituent (“Edward”) was measured in planned productions of subject- and object-extraction clefts in English. In order to disentangle the probability of each structure from its difficulty level, the probabilities were manipulated within the experiment through training. Participants read aloud: First, two SE and two OE clefts; second, eight SE or eight OE clefts; and finally, another two SE and two OE clefts. Before training, the clefted constituent was longer in OE clefts (mean 407 ms) than in SE clefts (370ms, t = 2.4, p = 0.02). This difference was no longer present after OE training (OE: 385 ms, SE: 397 ms), but was still present after SE training (OE: 448 ms, SE: 388 ms).

Futures and risk: the rise and demise of the hedger-speculator dichotomy

In interpreting futures markets, a well-established dichotomy of hedgers and speculators is at play. Hedgers are unwillingly exposed to risks; speculators take them over hoping for profit. This concept ignores the changing notions and practices of ‘speculation’ and especially ‘hedging’ since the nineteenth century. Originally, hedging meant that merchants ‘buy time’ in ongoing transactions. The concept later pointed to securing projected transactions by producers and processors. In today's risk economy, the term can label at best the intent to decrease exposure to a specific market risk, as part of a constant process of readjusting principally ‘speculative’ market positions by all market participants. Futures markets ultimately increased the average exposure to risk, but they also made the exposure potentially manageable; this entails that the economic process is increasingly developed by expressing expectations about the future through taking market positions, that is, by creating risk.

Looking Like a State: Techniques of Persistent Failure in State Capability for Implementation

In many nations today the state has little capability to carry out even basic functions like security, policing, regulation or core service delivery. Enhancing this capability, especially in fragile states, is a long-term task: countries like Haiti or Liberia will take many decades to reach even a moderate capability country like India, and millennia to reach the capability of Singapore. Short-term programmatic efforts to build administrative capability in these countries are thus unlikely to be able to demonstrate actual success, yet billions of dollars continue to be spent on such activities. What techniques enable states to ‘buy time’ to enable reforms to work, to mask non-accomplishment, or actively to resist or deflect the internal and external pressures for improvement? How do donor and recipient countries manage to engage in the logics of ‘development’ for so long and yet consistently acquire so little administrative capability? We document two such techniques: (a) systemic isomorphic mimicry, wherein the outward forms (appearances, structures) of functional states and organisations elsewhere are adopted to camouflage a persistent lack of function; and (b) premature load bearing, in which indigenous learning, the legitimacy of change and the support of key political constituencies are undercut by the routine placement of highly unrealistic expectations on fledging systems. We conclude with some suggestions for sabotaging these techniques.