The late teens is an important transitional period as adolescents move into new social worlds which support or challenge their smoking. This paper draws on research with 99 Scottish 16- to 19-year olds which explored their understanding of their smoking and attitudes towards quitting and cessation support. The study involved qualitative interviews mostly with friendship pairs. Interviewees also...

in industries, preventive maintenance (pm) is not a new practice to minimise the sudden breakdown of production machine. pm will be performed at predetermine intervals to provide a balance between failure cost and component utilisation (aging). however, most of pm interval is based on experience or original equipment manufacturer (oem) recommendations. consequently, the benefits from pm are not...

In This Paper, we focus on estimating the expected total cost and expected cost rate for age replacement under warranty policy. We describe how to use design of Accelerated life testing (ALT) plans by assuming constant stress and life times are independently distributed as Exponentiated Pareto Distribution (EP) for predicting the cost of age replacement under warranty policy. This problem is st...

— This paper summarizes ten replacement models which combine tkree basic replacements: (i)age replacement; (ii)block replacement; (in) periodic replacement with minimal repair at failure. The expected cast rates ofeach model are derived, using the usual caktdus method ofprobabitity. As an example, we give an optimum policy to minimize the expected cost rate ofone model

OBJECTIVE To compare the health-related quality of life of people with osteoarthritis before and after primary total hip and knee replacement surgery with that of the general Australian population. DESIGN A prospective cohort study. SETTING Three Sydney hospitals, public and private. PARTICIPANTS Patients with osteoarthritis undergoing primary total hip (n = 59) and knee (n = 92) joint re...

Background: Patients with unclassified hypogammaglobulinemia (UCH) constitute a diagnostic and therapeutic dilemma, because information concerning the clinical and immunological characteristics of these patients is insufficient. Objective: To evaluate B-cell subsets in cases with UCH and common variable immunodeficiency (CVID) and their association with treatment requirement in UCH patients. Me...

BACKGROUND Mechanical valves and bioprostheses are widely used for aortic valve replacement. Though previous randomised studies indicate that there is no important difference in outcome after implantation with either type of valve, knowledge of outcomes after aortic valve replacement is incomplete. OBJECTIVE To predict age and sex specific outcomes of patients after aortic valve replacement w...