Web-Based Access to Positive Airway Pressure Usage with or without an Initial Financial Incentive Improves Treatment Use in Patients with Obstructive Sleep Apnea.

Study Objectives: We tested whether providing adults with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) with daily Web-based access to their positive airway pressure (PAP) usage over 3 mo with or without a financial incentive in the first week improves adherence and functional outcomes.

Setting: Academic- and community-based sleep centers.

Participants: One hundred thirty-eight adults with newly diagnosed OSA starting PAP treatment.

Drivers of accident preparedness and safety: evidence from the RMP Rule.

This paper provides an overview of recent results derived from the accident history data collected under 112(r) of the Clean Air Act Amendments (the Risk Management Program (RMP) Rule) covering the period 1994-2000, together with a preliminary assessment of the effectiveness of the RMP Rule as a form of Management System Regulation. These were undertaken at the University of Pennsylvania by a multi-disciplinary team of economists, statisticians and epidemiologists with the support of the US Environmental Protection Agency and its Office of Emergency Prevention, Preparedness and Response (OEPPR, formerly CEPPO). Section 112(r) of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 requires that chemical facilities in the US that had on premises more than specified quantities of toxic or flammable chemicals file a 5-year history of accidents.

The financial management of catastrophic flood risks in emerging-economy countries.

This article examines the potential of pre- and post-disaster instruments for funding disaster response and recovery and for creating incentives for flood loss mitigation in countries with emerging or transition economies. As a concrete case, we discuss the disaster recovery arrangements following the 1997 flood disaster in Poland. We examine the advantages and limitations of hedging instruments, which are instruments for transferring the risk to investors either through insurance or capital market-based securities.

Matching With Doses in an Observational Study of a Media Campaign Against Drug Abuse.

Multivariate matching with doses of treatment differs from the treatment-control matching in three ways. First, pairs must not only balance covariates, but also must differ markedly in dose. Second, any two subjects may be paired, so that the matching is nonbipartite, and different algorithms are required.

The chemical accident risk assessment thesaurus: a tool for analyzing and comparing diverse risk assessment processes and definitions.

The Chemical Accident Risk Assessment Thesaurus (CARAT) is a database of the laws, regulations, guidance documents, and definitions of terms related to the risk assessment of accidental releases of chemicals from fixed installations. The database also contains information on the application of risk assessment methodologies to specific examples of potential chemical releases. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development urged the development of the Thesaurus to improve the communication among the member countries about the risk assessment of hazardous installations.

Identifiability of Individual Contributions in a Threshold Public Goods Experiment.

This paper experimentally examines how information affects behavior in a threshold public goods game. Three treatments investigate how subjects react to varying amounts of information about the contribution behavior of other group members. Results suggest that revealing anonymous information about others' contributions leads to a significant decrease in contributions and an increase in the variance of contributions.