ON THE RENTAL PRICE OF CAPITAL AND THE PROFIT RATE: THE PERILS AND PITFALLS OF TOTAL FACTOR PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH

This paper considers the implications of the conceptual difference between the rental price of capital, embedded in the neoclassical cost identity (output equals the cost of labour plus the cost of capital), and used in growth accounting studies; and the profit rate, which can be derived from the national income and product accounts (NIPA). The neoclassical identity is a "virtual" identity in that it depends on a series of assumptions (constant returns to scale and perfectly competitive factor markets). The income side of the NIPA also provides an accounting identity for output as the sum of the wage bill plus the surplus. This identity, however, is a "real" one, in the sense that it does not depend on any assumptions and thus it holds always. It is shown that because the neoclassical cost identity and the income accounting identity according to the NIPA are formally equivalent expressions, estimations of aggregate production functions and growth accounting studies are tautologies. Likewise, the test of the hypothesis of competitive markets using Hall's (1988) framework gives rise to a null hypothesis that cannot be rejected statistically.

CORRECTING FOR BIASES WHEN ESTIMATING PRODUCTION FUNCTIONS: AN ILLUSION OF THE LAWS OF ALGEBRA?

this paper argues that the true cause of the endogeneity bias that allegedly appears when estimating production functions, and which the literature has tried to deal with since the 1940s, is s imply the result of omitted-variable bias due to an incorrect approximation to an accounting identity. As a result we question recent attempts to solve the problem by developing new estimators.

A community pharmacy weight management programme: an evaluation of effectiveness

<p>Background: Community pharmacies may offer an accessible way of delivering weight-management programmes but there have been few trials that use clinically significant weight loss outcomes, objective measures of weight and follow-up to 12 months. We aimed to evaluate weight change among patients who used the Counterweight weight management programme delivered by community pharmacies.</p> <p>Methods: The Counterweight Programme was introduced into community pharmacies in Fife, Scotland in 2009 for patients with a BMI ≥ 30 kg/m2 or a BMI ≥ 28 kg/m2 with a co-morbidity in localities in which Counterweight was not available at GP practices. The aim was to achieve an energy deficit of 500-600 kcal per day. Counterweight specialist dietitians delivered training, support and patient information materials to community pharmacies. Patient weight was measured by pharmacy staff at each weight management session. Weight data recorded at each weight management session were used to estimate weight change and attendance at 3, 6 and 12 months.</p> <p>Results: Between March 2009 and July 2012, 458 patients were enrolled by the community pharmacies. Three-quarters of patients were women, mean age was 54 (SD 7.4) years and mean BMI 36.1 (SD 5.9) kg/m2. Of 314 patients enrolled for at least 12 months, 32 (10.2% on an intention to treat basis) had achieved the target weight loss of ≥5%; this was 41.6% of those who attended at 12 months representing a mean weight loss of 4.1 kg. Using Last Observation Carried Forward, 15.9% achieved the target weight loss within 12 months of enrolling. There was no significant effect of sex, baseline BMI or age on weight loss.</p> <p>Conclusions: The Counterweight pharmacy programme has a similar effectiveness to other primary care based weight management programmes and should be considered as part of a range of services available to a community to manage overweight and obesity.</p&gt

Current challenges in de novo plant genome sequencing and assembly

ABSTRACT: Genome sequencing is now affordable, but assembling plant genomes de novo remains challenging. We assess the state of the art of assembly and review the best practices for the community

The suppression of CMR in Nd(Mn1−xCox)AsO0.95F0.05

This research is supported by the EPSRC (research grant EP/L002493/1). We also acknowledge the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) for provision of beam time at ISIS.Peer reviewedPostprin

Oxford Nanopore sequencing, hybrid error correction, and de novo assembly of a eukaryotic genome

Monitoring the progress of DNA molecules through a membrane pore has been postulated as a method for sequencing DNA for several decades. Recently, a nanopore-based sequencing instrument, the Oxford Nanopore MinION, has become available, and we used this for sequencing the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome. To make use of these data, we developed a novel open-source hybrid error correction algorithm Nanocorr specifically for Oxford Nanopore reads, because existing packages were incapable of assembling the long read lengths (5-50 kbp) at such high error rates (between approximately 5% and 40% error). With this new method, we were able to perform a hybrid error correction of the nanopore reads using complementary MiSeq data and produce a de novo assembly that is highly contiguous and accurate: The contig N50 length is more than ten times greater than an Illumina-only assembly (678 kb versus 59.9 kbp) and has >99.88% consensus identity when compared to the reference. Furthermore, the assembly with the long nanopore reads presents a much more complete representation of the features of the genome and correctly assembles gene cassettes, rRNAs, transposable elements, and other genomic features that were almost entirely absent in the Illumina-only assembly

Validation and assessment of variant calling pipelines for next-generation sequencing

Background: The processing and analysis of the large scale data generated by next-generation sequencing (NGS) experiments is challenging and is a burgeoning area of new methods development. Several new bioinformatics tools have been developed for calling sequence variants from NGS data. Here, we validate the variant calling of these tools and compare their relative accuracy to determine which data processing pipeline is optimal. Results: We developed a unified pipeline for processing NGS data that encompasses four modules: mapping, filtering, realignment and recalibration, and variant calling. We processed 130 subjects from an ongoing whole exome sequencing study through this pipeline. To evaluate the accuracy of each module, we conducted a series of comparisons between the single nucleotide variant (SNV) calls from the NGS data and either gold-standard Sanger sequencing on a total of 700 variants or array genotyping data on a total of 9,935 single-nucleotide polymorphisms. A head to head comparison showed that Genome Analysis Toolkit (GATK) provided more accurate calls than SAMtools (positive predictive value of 92.55% vs. 80.35%, respectively). Realignment of mapped reads and recalibration of base quality scores before SNV calling proved to be crucial to accurate variant calling. GATK HaplotypeCaller algorithm for variant calling outperformed the UnifiedGenotype algorithm. We also showed a relationship between mapping quality, read depth and allele balance, and SNV call accuracy. However, if best practices are used in data processing, then additional filtering based on these metrics provides little gains and accuracies of >99% are achievable. Conclusions: Our findings will help to determine the best approach for processing NGS data to confidently call variants for downstream analyses. To enable others to implement and replicate our results, all of our codes are freely available at http://metamoodics.org/wes

The crystal structure and electrical properties of the oxide ion conductor Ba3WNbO8.5

This research was supported by the Northern Research Partnership and the University of Aberdeen. We also acknowledge Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) for provision of beamtime at ISIS.Peer reviewedPostprin