Huntington's disease

In this case study, we describe the symptoms, neurological exam, neuropsychological test results, and brain pathology of a man who died with Huntington's disease (HD). HD is a rare neurodegenerative disease. Like other movement disorders involving the basal ganglia, HD affects motor, cognitive, and psychiatric functioning. The disease follows an autosomal dominant pattern of inheritance, with onset of symptoms most commonly occurring in the late 30s or early 40s, as in this patient. HD is caused by an unstable expansion of the trinucleotide CAG, coding for glutamine, on chromosome 4. Despite knowledge of the gene mutation responsible for HD, no definitive treatment is currently available to slow or halt progression of the disease. However, symptomatic treatment can significantly improve the quality of life for patients with HD.     

The impact of an industry-based rehabilitation programme

An industry specific rehabilitation programme was developed to cater for the special requirements of the New Zealand logging industry. The aims of the rehabilitation programme were to: reduce the amount of time lost due to injury, reduce the number of lost time injuries, and overall, to reduce the direct costs associated with logging injuries. The programme was field-tested on a logging company. The rehabilitation programme was effective for reducing the average amount of time lost due to injury and also for reducing the cost of the injuries. Although there were a number of factors that may have had an impact upon these results, this research provides evidence that this rehabilitation programme was effective for reducing the severity and cost of injury to the New Zealand logging industry.     

Privatizing Australian Airports: Ownership, Divestment and Financial Performance

This article addresses the performance of the three largest Australian airports following their privatization. The airports represent cases of divestment of government business enterprises into privately-owned businesses each with differing ownership arrangements. The performances of the privatized airports are considered using financial data obtained from general purpose financial reports of the entities. There are significant implications for future divestment policies, including the value of divestment as a policy response in uncompetitive environments, the use of particular infrastructure investment models, and the nature of the linkage between ownership structure and financial performance.     

Identifying Technology Spillovers and Product Market Rivalry

The impact of R&D on growth through spillovers has been a major topic of economic research over the last thirty years. A central problem in the literature is that firm performance is affected by two countervailing “spillovers” : a positive effect from technology (knowledge) spillovers and a negative business stealing effects from product market rivals. We develop a general framework incorporating these two types of spillovers and implement this model using measures of a firm's position in technology space and productmarket space. Using panel data on U.S. firms, we show that technology spillovers quantitatively dominate, so that the gross social returns to R&D are at least twice as high as the private returns. We identify the causal effect of R&D spillovers by using changes in federal and state tax incentives for R&D. We also find that smaller firms generate lower social returns to R&D because they operate more in technological niches. Finally, we detail the desirable properties of an ideal spillover measure and how existing approaches, including our new Mahalanobis measure, compare to these criteria.     

The value of rescheduling functionality within standard MRP packages

One of the basic functions of an MRP system is to issue rescheduling messages that urge the planner tospeed up or slow down open orders. It seems in practice that these messages are not used at all by planners. This is mostly due to the inaccuracy of MRP, that more or less ignores safety time, safety stocks and lotsize flexibility in the calculation of reschedule-in messages. Reschedule-out messages are usually ignored because planners do not see the value of the message. Other reasons for not adhering to rescheduling messages are a lack of maintenance of MRP parameters or simply the wrong use of the MRP function. In the future, MRP rescheduling functionality will be used even less than today, due to the changing role of MRP within the planning framework. With the uprise of finite capacity scheduling packages, MRP is being pushed one level upward in the planning hierarchy. This means that rescheduling functionalities for the short term will become completely obsolete in MRP systems.