The authors should be congratulated for attempting to shed light on the cost/benefit issue of routine short-term elective ICU admissions following certain types of major surgery. I emphasize the word “attempting” because even the authors admit that their conclusions must be accepted with caution, as they are based on highly subjective data. Their criteria for grading both the problem severity and patient benefit are, by necessity, biased by their specific outlook and the unique circumstances existing in their hospital, which may be significantly different from those in the medical center of any specific reader of this report. Many factors, such as operating room conditions and availability of monitoring equipment, the quality of the various surgical and anesthetic services, the availability and quality of recovery room services, as well as the existing conditions in the surgical wards, all have significant influence on the ultimate decision, in any one hospital, as to the advisability of routine ICU admission after various major surgical procedures. Additionally, of course, factors such as the preoperative condition of the patients (i.e., existing preoperative illnesses) and their intraoperative course, were not considered in this study. Thus, readers of this report should be encouraged to use the authors' protocol for similar studies in their own institutions. Such comparative studies, among hospitals, may help identify weak links in personnel, equipment, geographic structure, or administrative procedures in any one hospital. Projecting from the authors' conclusions, based on the experiences of the Massachusetts General Hospital, to any other hospital, however, may be seriously misleading.
It may be accepted as a maxim that a poorly or improperly designed study involving human subjects — one that could not possibly yield scientific facts (that is, reproducible observations) relevant to the question under study — is by definition unethical.1 If one accepts this maxim one must also accept that the design and analysis of clinical investigations should be as effective as possible either in reducing the number of people at risk or in increasing the strength of the conclusions. Dr. Weinstein (page 1278) discusses many of the technical issues involved in the use of decision theory and statistics . . .
We provide several interactive models that can be used in an intermediate- or graduate-level, natural-resource economics course to numerically solve a host of exhaustible-resource problems, and thereby help to verify the intuition and symbolic solutions typically provided in textbooks. Examples are drawn from Tietenberg (2006).
This file contains a simple GAMS model of the exchange economy, as described in Chapter 22 of Gilbert and Tower (2013) Introduction to Numerical Simulation for Trade Theory and Policy, World Scientific.
Pulmonary disease in mice induced by influenza virus was monitored by measurement of oxygen saturation (SaO2) in blood with a pulse oximeter. The SaO2 declined in inverse proportion to the viral inoculum. The known antiviral agent ribavirin inhibited the SaO2 decline, prevented death, lowered lung consolidation, and reduced the level of recoverable virus. Pulse oximetry is an effective means of monitoring murine influenzal disease and can be used in the study of potential antiviral drugs.
In a dynamic extension of the reciprocal dumping approach, oligopolistic firms producing imperfect substitutes use the carrot and stick strategy to enforce cooperative behavior. When dumping occurs, firms lobby for tariffs as punishment. After a finite punishment period, the non-dumping equilibrium is restored. Conditions are derived on the degrees of substitutability and observability that allow non-dumping under an infinite horizon. The model suggests the degree of substitutability between goods and the market interest rate, affect the likelihood of dumping.
