BACKGROUND Successfully completing a surgical informed consent process is an important element of the preoperative consult. A previous study of Dutch general surgeons demonstrated that the implementation of SIC did not meet acceptable standards. However, the quality of the SIC process in the orthopedic surgical or plastic surgical arena is unknown. METHODS Following ethical approval, an onlin...

Contactless measuring techniques are becoming increasingly important for industrial applications . The use of a laser, solid-state detector arrays and powerful small computers leads to a very efficient fringe analysis in holography as well as in Moire and speckle techniques . Due to the computer analysis, much more information can be extracted from interferograms, leading to higher sensitivitie...

This paper provides evidence that domestic opportunities to share risk have contributed to lower rates of private saving. Two econometric procedures are used in the analysis: (1) traditional instrumental variables estimation and (2) dynamic panel methods. The results reveal a negative relationship between domestic opportunities to diversify risk and aggregate private saving rates in a cross-sec...

In this paper the authors try to address and give first solutions to this problem, defining and implementing a portable tool-kit aimed at the automatic collection, processing and analysis of failure data in order to assess and predict reliability. The work has been accomplished within the ESPRIT II SCOPE project which aims at defining software assessment and certification procedures, demonstrat...

The design of industrial and municipal incinerators is based on combustion and heat considerationsl The procedures are given for calculating the quantities of air, flue gas, water and heat, as well as the gas temper­ atures. To assist the reader, a municipal incinerator is used as an example. The relation between refuse analysis and flue gas analysis is explained. Sections on dry and wet dust c...

Department of Chemical System Engineerin Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan. E-ma +81-3-5841-8838; Tel: +81-3-5841-1148 Japan Technological Research Association Process (ARPChem), 5-1-5 Kashiwanoha, Ka National Institute of Advanced Industrial Central 5, 1-1-1 Higashi, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 3 Department of Chemical System Engine Kashiwanoha, Kashiwa-shi, Chiba 277-8589 † Electronic supplementary infor...

This paper proposes WLAN-based GPRS Support Node (WGSN), a solution for integrating 3G and WLAN services. We show that the 3G mechanisms can be re-used for WLAN user authentication and network access without introducing new procedures and without modifying the existing 3G network components. We describe the WGSN features and show how they are designed and implemented. A WGSN prototype has been ...

Successful optimization processes of highly utilized industrial squirrel cage induction machines enforces fast, reliable and accurate design concepts. Therefore, modern numerical finite element calculation procedures, which incorporate moveable rotor parts, non-linear iron saturation effects and realistic geometric properties, have been systematically established and applied to an induction mot...

Effects of climate change on productivity of agricultural crops in relation to diseases that attack them are difficult to predict because they are complex and nonlinear. To investigate these crop-disease-climate interactions, UKCIP02 scenarios predicting UK temperature and rainfall under high- and low-CO(2) emission scenarios for the 2020s and 2050s were combined with a crop-simulation model pr...

Research was carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of the biological control of the Botrytis gray mould, caused by Botrytis cinerea Pers., one of the most important fungal diseases of the tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum Mill.). Biological control was performed by using Trichoderma harzianum Rifai, an antagonist that is a naturally occurring fungus found on some plants and in the soil worldw...