7,808 research outputs found
Health Care Proxies, Powers of Attorney, and Living Wills: Making Health Care Decisions: A Satellite Program
Table of Contents onlyhttps://digitalcommons.nyls.edu/fac_books/1126/thumbnail.jp
Life Expectancy and Years of Life Lost in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: Findings from the NHANES III Follow-Up Study
RATIONALE: Previous studies have demonstrated that chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) causes increased mortality in the general population. But life expectancy and the years of life lost have not been reported.
OBJECTIVES: To quantify mortality, examine how it varies with age, sex, and other risk factors, and determine how life expectancy is affected.
METHODS: We constructed mortality models using the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, adjusting for age, sex, race, and major medical conditions. We used these to compute life expectancy and the years of life lost.
MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: Pulmonary function testing classified patients as having Global Initiative on Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD) stage 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4 COPD or restriction. COPD is associated with only a modest reduction in life expectancy for never smokers, but with a very large reduction for current and former smokers. At age 65, the reductions in male life expectancy for stage 1, stage 2, and stages 3 or 4 disease in current smokers are 0.3 years, 2.2 years, and 5.8 years. These are in addition to the 3.5 years lost due to smoking. In former smokers the reductions are 1.4 years and 5.6 years for stage 2 and stages 3 or 4 disease, and in never smokers they are 0.7 and 1.3 years.
CONCLUSIONS: Persons with COPD have an increased risk of mortality compared to those who do not, with consequent reduction in life expectancy. The effect is most marked in current smokers, and this is further reason for smokers to quit
Effects of Agricultural Commercialization on Food Crop Input Use and Productivity in Kenya
The objective of this report is to analyze the effects of smallholder commercialization on food crop input use and productivity in rural Kenya. The main research issues were: (1) To examine the determinants of smallholder fertilizer use on food crops, with a focus on the effects of household and regional agricultural commercialization; (2) To examine the determinants of food crop productivity, again with a focus on the effects of commercialization; and (3) To discuss the implications of the findings for policy and additional research necessary to improve the contribution of cash cropping to rural food productivity growth and food security. A main premise of the paper is that the effects of commercialization are not uniform and cannot be generalized. The effects are hypothesized to differ both according to differences in the institutional/contractual arrangements between firms and smallholders, management decisions, and the level of credit and extension support provided to smallholders by the various private and parastatal firms involved in promoting smallholder cash crops.food security, food policy, food crop productivity, food crop input, Crop Production/Industries, Productivity Analysis, Downloads May 2008 - July 2009: 78, Q18,
Effects of Agricultural Commercialization on Food Crop Input Use and Productivity in Kenya
Crop Production/Industries, Downloads July 2008 - July 2009: 23,
Global bifurcation theory for periodic traveling interfacial gravity-capillary waves
We consider the global bifurcation problem for spatially periodic traveling
waves for two-dimensional gravity-capillary vortex sheets. The two fluids have
arbitrary constant, non-negative densities (not both zero), the gravity
parameter can be positive, negative, or zero, and the surface tension parameter
is positive. Thus, included in the parameter set are the cases of pure
capillary water waves and gravity-capillary water waves. Our choice of
coordinates allows for the possibility that the fluid interface is not a graph
over the horizontal. We use a technical reformulation which converts the
traveling wave equations into a system of the form "identity plus compact."
Rabinowitz' global bifurcation theorem is applied and the final conclusion is
the existence of either a closed loop of solutions, or an unbounded set of
nontrivial traveling wave solutions which contains waves which may move
arbitrarily fast, become arbitrarily long, form singularities in the vorticity
or curvature, or whose interfaces self-intersect.Comment: Corrected a typ
NYU-VAGC: a galaxy catalog based on new public surveys
Here we present the New York University Value-Added Galaxy Catalog
(NYU-VAGC), a catalog of local galaxies (mostly below a redshift of about 0.3)
based on a set of publicly-released surveys (including the 2dFGRS, 2MASS, PSCz,
FIRST, and RC3) matched to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 2.
Excluding areas masked by bright stars, the photometric sample covers 3514
square degrees and the spectroscopic sample covers 2627 square degrees (with
about 85% completeness). Earlier, proprietary versions of this catalog have
formed the basis of many SDSS investigations of the power spectrum, correlation
function, and luminosity function of galaxies. We calculate and compile derived
quantities (for example, K-corrections and structural parameters for galaxies).
The SDSS catalog presented here is photometrically recalibrated, reducing
systematic calibration errors across the sky from about 2% to about 1%. We
include an explicit description of the geometry of the catalog, including all
imaging and targeting information as a function of sky position. Finally, we
have performed eyeball quality checks on a large number of objects in the
catalog in order to flag deblending and other errors. This catalog is
complementary to the SDSS Archive Servers, in that NYU-VAGC's calibration,
geometrical description, and conveniently small size are specifically designed
for studying galaxy properties and large-scale structure statistics using the
SDSS spectroscopic catalog.Comment: accepted by AJ; full resolution version available at
http://sdss.physics.nyu.edu/vagc/va_paper.ps; data files available at
http://sdss.physics.nyu.edu/vagc
Determination of the Baryon Density from Large Scale Galaxy Redshift Surveys
We estimate the degree to which the baryon density, , can be
determined from the galaxy power spectrum measured from large scale galaxy
redshift surveys, and in particular, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. A high
baryon density will cause wiggles to appear in the power spectrum, which should
be observable at the current epoch. We assume linear theory on scales and do not include the effects of redshift distortions, evolution,
or biasing. With an optimum estimate of to ,
the uncertainties in are roughly 0.07 and 0.016 in flat
and open () cosmological models, respectively. This result
suggests that it should be possible to test for consistency with big bang
nucleosynthesis estimates of if we live in an open universe.Comment: 23 Pages, 10 Postscript figure
- …