Is there any Substitution Between Medical Services and Over-the-Counter Medications in the Case of the Common Cold? -Analysis Based on an Original Survey-.

This article examines the choice of health care in Japan for patients suffering from the common cold.HEALTH ; JAPAN

An Empirical Research of Substitutability between Medical Services and Over-the-Counter Medication. An Analysis of Thirteen Different Minor Ailments.

This paper examines the choice of health care for minor aliments in Japan for patients suffering from thirteen different minor aliments. Original data were obtained from a survey conducted by the authors. For the common cold, shoulder/neck pain, backache, constipation/diarrea, asthenopia, various skin diseases, and hameorrhoids, an increase in the coinsurance rate statistically significantly lowers the demand for medical services.MEDICAL CARE ; INSURANCE ; HEALTH

Source bearing and steering-vector estimation using partially calibrated arrays

The problem of source direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation using a sensor array is addressed, where some of the sensors are perfectly calibrated, while others are uncalibrated. An algorithm is proposed for estimating the source directions in addition to the estimation of unknown array parameters such as sensor gains and phases, as a way of performing array self-calibration. The cost function is an extension of the maximum likelihood (ML) criteria that were originally developed for DOA estimation with a perfectly calibrated array. A particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is used to explore the high-dimensional problem space and find the global minimum of the cost function. The design of the PSO is a combination of the problem-independent kernel and some newly introduced problem-specific features such as search space mapping, particle velocity control, and particle position clipping. This architecture plus properly selected parameters make the PSO highly flexible and reusable, while being sufficiently specific and effective in the current application. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed technique may produce more accurate estimates of the source bearings and unknown array parameters in a cheaper way as compared with other popular methods, with the root-mean-squared error (RMSE) approaching and asymptotically attaining the Cramer Rao bound (CRB) even in unfavorable conditions

Baryon enhancement in high-density QCD and relativistic heavy ion collisions

We argue that the collinear factorization of the fragmentation functions in high energy nuclear collisions breaks down at transverse momenta $p_T \lesssim Q_s/g$ due to high parton densities in the colliding hadrons and/or nuclei. We find that gluon recombination dominates in that $p_T$ region. We calculate the inclusive cross-section for $\pi$ meson and nucleon production using the low energy theorems for the scale anomaly in QCD, and compare our quantitative baryon-to-meson ratio to the RHIC data.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure; Contribution to Quark Matter 2008 in Jaipur, India; submitted to J. Phys.

Disk Accretion onto Magnetized Neutron Stars: The Inner Disk Radius and Fastness Parameter

It is well known that the accretion disk around a magnetized compact star can penetrate inside the magnetospheric boundary, so the magnetospheric radius \ro does not represent the true inner edge \rin of the disk; but controversies exist in the literature concerning the relation between \ro and \rin. In the model of Ghosh & Lamb, the width of the boundary layer is given by \delta=\ro-\rin\ll\ro, or \rin\simeq\ro, while Li & Wickramasinghe recently argued that \rin could be significantly smaller than \ro in the case of a slow rotator. Here we show that if the star is able to absorb the angular momentum of disk plasma at \ro, appropriate for binary X-ray pulsars, the inner disk radius can be constrained by 0.8\lsim \rin/\ro\lsim 1, and the star reaches spin equilibrium with a relatively large value of the fastness parameter ($\sim 0.7-0.95$). For accreting neutron stars in low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs), \ro is generally close to the stellar radius \rs so that the toroidal field cannot transfer the spin-up torque efficiently to the star. In this case the critical fastness parameter becomes smaller, but \rin is still near \ro.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, to appear in Ap