I recently visited a retired physician who practiced in Roma, Texas, population 10000. His family has lived and ranched in Roma for 6 generations, well before the border was moved and Roma became part of the United States. As the town's first and only physician for most of his 4-plus decades in practice, Dr Mario Ramirez did it all: deliveries, house calls, minor surgery, and seeing 60 people a...

Voluntary action - in particular the ability to produce desired effects in the environment - is fundamental to human existence. According to ideomotor theory we can achieve goals in the environment by means of anticipating their outcomes. We aimed at providing neurophysiological evidence for the assumption that performing actions calls for the activation of brain areas associated with the senso...

BACKGROUND Demand for consultations in primary care has risen recently, necessitating a change in working practices. As part of this process, the possible contribution of practice nurses in the telephone assessment of home visit requests merits attention. AIMS To survey the views of our patients encountering our nurse triage system for home visit requests, set up in June 1995, and to plot its...

On a recent program night, third-grader Tyrell came to speak with Ms. Dee, our COO. He had received a mattress at Christmas and was now very happy to have his own place to sleep. Tyrell’s mom is out of the house, and he and his siblings live with Granny. He proceeded to tell Ms. Dee his dream of having his mattress “put up” (which meant with a frame and box spring) but wasn’t sure how this was ...

Emily Schmidt: An Analysis of Individual Variation in Behavior (Under the direction of Karin Pfennig) Individual animals within a population often show differences in their behavior. Recently, scientists have begun to study the causes and consequences of individual variation in behavior explicitly rather than attributing differences to observer error or noise. The study of behavioral syndromes,...

BACKGROUND Patient adherence to isoniazid (INH) monotherapy for latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI) has been suboptimal despite its proven efficacy. Various strategies have been studied to improve adherence, but all have been based at a clinic or treatment program. At the Santa Clara Valley Tuberculosis Clinic, it was our practice to refer a subset of high-risk LTBI patients to the Public Heal...

network effects, increase in the value of consuming a product if many other consumers use the same product, is a feature of many markets of high-technology products. frequently cited examples of products exhibiting network effects are telecommunication or software products. this research explores the role of network effects in the consumer´s choice of mobile operator in tehran. for our empirica...