There are 10 million different methods of determining whether a company is ripe for an investment.

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The Army Corps, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Geological Survey continue to study the issue and hope within a couple of years to refine methods of determining the likely source of a particular DNA sample, she said.

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The patent covers touch screen devices, methods, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics.

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This implies several crucial recognitions: that intuition and experience are not sufficient to make all decisions in a way that maximizes shareholder value, that non-experimental methods are not up to the task of determining causality with sufficient reliability to guide many actions, and that experiments can be applied in practice to enough business issues to justify the costs of the capability.

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While high-end evaluation methods like randomized control trials (RCTs) are the surest means of determining what interventions in fact cause certain outcomes, they are also time-consuming and costly and beyond the means of many, if not most, mainstream nonprofits.

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There is reasonable concern that current methods of option pricing, both the Black-Scholes and binomial models, are not appropriate for determining the cost of the nontransferable, long-term options that companies issue to employees.

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