This feature review provides an overview of the state-of the art and recent developments in tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (TERS), in-depth information about the different available types of instruments including their (dis-)advantages and capabilities as well as a short glance at a number of samples that have recently been investigated using ...

With experience and training the colonoscope can be a very effective tool in the screening and diagnosis of colorectal cancer. However, the colonoscope most commonly used today has changed very little in the last three decades. It is not without its problems, including a risk of perforation and significant patient ...

We propose a feasible experimental test of a 1D version of the Fermi problem using superconducting qubits. We give an explicit nonperturbative proof of strict causality in this model, showing that the probability of excitation of a two-level artificial atom with a dipolar coupling to a quantum field is completely ...

This paper presents an approach and a software, BetaDock, to the docking problem by putting the priority on shape complementarity between a receptor and a ligand. The approach is based on the theory of the b-complex. Given the Voronoi diagram of the receptor whose topology is stored in the quasi-triangulation, ...

Introduction: siRNA has poor in vivo stability and has a plasma half life of only a few minutes after intravenous administration. These problems can be overcome by conjugating/encapsulating siRNA with various nanosystems. Surface modifications of such nanosystems can further improve the cellular uptake of siRNA-nanosystems. In this review, the authors ...

Abstract In this article, we study the problem of finding a singleton attractor for several biologically important subclasses of Boolean networks (BNs). The problem of finding a singleton attractor in a BN is known to be NP-hard in general. For BNs consisting of n nested canalyzing functions, we present an ...

Community forestry initiatives have been shown to reduce rural poverty while promoting the conservation and sustainable use of forests. However, a number of challenges face communities wanting to initiate or maintain formal, community-based forest management. Through a grounded theory approach, this paper uses three case studies of community forest management ...

SUMMARY: The relationship between genes and proteins is a dynamic relationship that changes across time and differs in different cells. The study of these differences can reveal various insights into biological processes and disease progression, especially with the aid of proper tools for network visualization. Towards this purpose, we have ...

OBJECTIVE:: The aim of this brief report was to investigate binaural directivity patterns for normal and aided hearing, as opposed to conventional monaural measures. DESIGN:: Head-related transfer functions for an artificial head measured at the entrance to the ear canal and above the pinnae and a binaural loudness model for ...

Objectives (a) To determine the extent and range of errors and issues in the Systematised Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) hierarchies as they affect two practical projects. (b) To determine the origin of issues raised and propose methods to address them. Methods The hierarchies for concepts in ...

Solving simple arithmetic problems involves three stages: encoding the problem, retrieving or calculating the answer, and reporting the answer. This study compared the event-related potentials elicited by single-digit addition and multiplication problems to examine the relationship between encoding and retrieval/calculation stages. Results showed that the operation effect appeared as early ...

We show that the type 2 Broyden secant method is a robust general purpose mixer for self consistent field problems in density functional theory. The Broyden method gives reliable convergence for a large class of problems and parameter choices. We directly mix the approximation of the electronic density to provide ...

Abstract A small number of combinatorial optimization problems have search spaces that correspond to elementary landscapes, where the objective function f is an eigenfunction of the Laplacian that describes the neighborhood structure of the search space. Many problems are not elementary; however, the objective function of a combinatorial optimization problem ...

Griffiths, C.A., Ryan, P. & Foster, J.H. (2011). Thematic analysis of Antonovsky's sense of coherence theory. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 52, 168-173. Antonovsky's sense of coherence (SOC) theory relates to the adaptive capacity of humans. In response to Antonovsky's call to study the sense of coherence concept using methods other ...

Higher acculturation is associated with increased obesity and depression among Latino-Americans, but not much is known about how acculturation is related to their prevalence of back and neck problems. This study examines whether acculturation is associated with the 12-month prevalence of self-reported chronic back or neck problems among US-born and ...

OBJECTIVES: To assess the effectiveness of two usability evaluation methods, cognitive walkthrough (CW) and think aloud (TA), for identifying usability problems and to compare the performance of CW and TA in identifying different types of usability problems. METHODS: A CW was performed by two usability evaluators and 10 physicians were ...

This paper gives a comprehensive review of the application of meta-heuristics to optimization problems in systems biology, mainly focussing on the parameter estimation problem (also called the inverse problem or model calibration). It is intended for either the system biologist who wishes to learn more about the various optimization techniques ...

Assessing the effects of environmental constraints on community structure often relies on methods that consider changes in species functional traits in response to environmental processes. Various indices have been proposed to measure relevant aspects of community trait composition from different viewpoints and perspectives. Among these, the 'community-weighted mean trait value' ...

During a multiple casualty chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear incident it is imperative that triage is accurately undertaken to use resources effectively and give the greatest chance of survival to those who need it. This reflection explores an option to assist in this matter by proposing a colorimetric breathing detection ...

Abstract Objective: The directivity index (DI) and polar pattern of directional hearing aids are typically measured in an anechoic chamber, which is expensive and not commonly found. This article proposes a quasi-anechoic technique to measure hearing aid directivity in small and reverberant enclosures using the root-mean-square amplitude of the first ...

Background:  There are a number of people living with late effects of polio, but the extent of engagement with the upper extremity is unclear. The objective is to describe the polio involvement in persons attending the polio clinic and to assess the perceived problems in self-reported arm/hand function. Material and ...

This study was carried out to model the functional form of the effect of contextual risk (number of adverse life events) on emotional and behavioural problems in early adolescence, and to test how intelligence and academic achievement compare as moderators of this effect. The effect of number of adverse life ...

Many observational coding schemes have been offered to measure communication in health care settings. These schemes fall short of capturing multiple functions of communication among providers, patients, and other participants. After a brief review of observational communication coding, the authors present a comprehensive scheme for coding communication that is (a) ...

Research into emotional communication to date has largely focused on facial and vocal expressions. In contrast, recent studies by Hertenstein, Keltner, App, Bulleit, and Jaskolka (2006) and Hertenstein, Holmes, McCullough, and Keltner (2009) exploring nonverbal communication of emotion discovered that people could identify anger, disgust, fear, gratitude, happiness, love, sadness ...

One of the key problems of motor control is the redundancy problem, in particular how the central nervous system (CNS) chooses an action out of infinitely many possible. A promising way to address this question is to assume that the choice is made based on optimization of a certain cost ...

The angular synchronization problem is to obtain an accurate estimation (up to a constant additive phase) for a set of unknown angles θ(1), …, θ(n) from m noisy measurements of their offsets θ(i) - θ(j) mod 2π. Of particular interest is angle recovery in the presence of many outlier measurements ...

Abstract Objective: The purpose of this research was to evaluate a new directional hearing aid algorithm which automatically adapts to an anti-cardioid pattern in background noise when a speech signal originates from behind the hearing aid user. Design: Using the hearing-in-noise-test (HINT) in the soundfield, with the sentences delivered adaptively ...

We present two parameterized algorithms for the closest string problem. The first runs in $O\left(nL + nd\cdot 17.97^d\right)$ time for DNA strings and in $O\left(nL + nd\cdot 61.86^d\right)$ time for protein strings, where $n$ is the number of input strings, $L$ is the length of each input string, and $d$ ...

The clinical communication space refers to the activities that take place in the context of clinical communication. Communication is an important part of healthcare delivery yet the communication space has been described a source of medical errors and other communication issues such as interruptions. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) can ...

To describe the problems reported by people with cancer and major depressive disorder as elicited before starting problem-solving therapy (PST). Ninety-eight outpatients, with a variety of cancers who met criteria for major depression, received PST as part of a system of treatment called 'Depression Care for People with Cancer' within ...

Background  Feeding and sleeping problems are common during infancy. Many regulatory problems of this kind are connected to various child and family factors. This study is a follow-up of children with early feeding and/or sleeping problems, 6 years after clinical contacts. Methods  A total of 230 families (72%) participated in ...

The author's objective is to correct many of the misconceptions about India and to combat mistaken analysis. He highlights the hundreds of millions who live in poverty, the rampant corruption and the incompetence of the administration. He asserts that comparisons with China are always to the disadvantage of India, except ...

In the context of interacting activities requiring close-body contact such as fighting or dancing, the actions of one agent can be used to predict the actions of the second agent [1]. In the present study, we investigated whether interpersonal predictive coding extends to interactive activities - such as communicative interactions ...

Blanchard (2009a, 2009b, 2009c) proposed a definition of paraphilia for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM)-5, delimiting a range of so-called normative sexuality and defining paraphilia as any intense and persistent sexual interest other than that. The author examines the wording and intended meaning of this definition, and he argues that ...

Background: Automatic DSP (digital signal processing) features, widely available in hearing aids today, are useful because they alleviate the need for the hearing aid wearer to manually adjust the hearing aid as listening conditions change. Although the theoretical basis for the design of these features may be sound, little is ...

The goal of the present study was to investigate the neuroanatomical basis of arithmetic fact retrieval. The rationale was that areas playing a crucial role in arithmetic fact retrieval should show a systematic increase of activation with increasing retrieval effort. To achieve this goal, we utilized the problem-size effect as ...

Fixed momentary schedules of differential reinforcement of other behavior (FM DRO) generally have been ineffective as treatment for problem behavior. Because most early research on FM DRO included presentation of a signal at the end of the DRO interval, it is unclear whether the limited effects of FM DRO were ...

Recent literature states that many necessary skills of CPR and first aid are forgotten shortly after certification. The purpose of this study was to determine the skill and knowledge decay in first aid in those who are paid to respond to emergency situations within a workplace. Using a choking victim ...

In a number of estimation problems in bioinformatics, accuracy measures of the target problem are usually given, and it is important to design estimators that are suitable to those accuracy measures. However, there is often a discrepancy between an employed estimator and a given accuracy measure of the problem. In ...

PURPOSE: Huntington's Disease (HD) is a fatal, hereditary neurodegenerative disorder that is characterized by a triad of motor, cognitive and psychiatric symptoms that impact on both communicative effectiveness and the treatment techniques used to maximize communicative participation. The purpose of this article is to describe the application of the World ...

EMERGENCY SERVICE PROVIDERS ARE FACING THE FOLLOWING PROBLEM: how and where to locate vehicles in order to cover potential future demand effectively. Ambulances are supposed to be located at designated locations such that in case of an emergency the patients can be reached in a time-efficient manner. A patient is ...

Objective: The goal of the present study was to examine the prevalence of behavioural and emotional problems among children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Method: Archival data from a total of 71 children (Mage = 10.24, SD = 2.91) diagnosed by their clinicians to have high-functioning ASD were obtained. ...

The haplotype assembly problem seeks the haplotypes of an individual from which a set of aligned SNP fragments are available. The problem is important as the haplotypes contain all the SNP information, which is essential to such studies as the analysis of the association between specific diseases and their potential ...

Strategies for finding one's way through an unfamiliar environment may be helped by 2D maps, 3D virtual environments, or other navigation aids. The relative effectiveness of aids was investigated. Experiments were conducted in a large, park-like environment. 24 participants (12 men, 12 women; age range = 22-50 years; M=32, SD ...

Matching visual patterns that appear scaled, rotated and deformed with respect to each other is a challenging problem. We propose a linear formulation that simultaneously matches feature points and estimates global geometrical transformation in a constrained linear space. The linear scheme enables search space reduction based on the lower convex ...

A novel sintering additive based on LiNO(3) was used to overcome the drawbacks of poor sinterability and low grain boundary conductivity in BaZr(0.8)Y(0.2)O(3-δ) (BZY20) protonic conductors. The Li-additive totally evaporated during the sintering process at 1600 °C for 6 h, which led to highly dense BZY20 pellets (96.5% of the ...

Previous meta-analytic research has shown both concurrent and prospective linkages between peer victimization and internalizing problems in youth. However, the linkages between peer victimization and externalizing problems over time have not been systematically examined, and it is therefore unknown if externalizing problems are antecedents of victimization, consequences of victimization, both, ...

There is growing evidence that many offspring of bipolar parents will develop moderate to severe forms of psychopathology during childhood and adolescence. The purpose of this study was to apply growth curve models to evaluate developmental progression with regard to continuity and cascades representative within the context of a family ...

It is increasingly recognized that youth who follow early onset persistent (EOP), childhood limited (CL) and adolescent onset (AO) trajectories of conduct problems show somewhat varying patterns of risk (in childhood) and adjustment problems (in adolescence and adulthood). Little, however, is known about how other adjustment problems differentially co-develop with ...

Psychiatric morbidity has been shown to be associated with the increased reporting of a range of social problems involving legal rights ('rights problems'). Using a validated measure of psychiatric morbidity, this paper explores the relationship between psychiatric morbidity and rights problems and discusses the implications for the delivery of health ...