We describe three birth cohort studies, respectively carried out in 1978/79 and 1994 in Ribeirão Preto, a city located in the most developed region of Brazil, and in 1997/98 in São Luís, a city located in a less developed region. The objective of the present report was to describe the methods used in these three studies, presenting their history, methodological design, objectives, developments,...

Flower pollination algorithm is a new nature-inspired algorithm, based on the characteristics of flowering plants. In this paper, we extend this flower algorithm to solve multi-objective optimization problems in engineering. By using the weighted sum method with random weights, we show that the proposed multi-objective flower algorithm can accurately find the Pareto fronts for a set of test fun...

The problem of aggregating multiple criteria to form overall objective functions is of considerable importance in many disciplines. The most commonly used aggregation is based on the weighted sum. The ordered weighted averaging (OWA) aggregation, introduced by Yager, uses the weights assigned to the ordered values (i.e. to the worst value, the second worst and so on) rather than to the specific...

Introduction In recent years numerous approaches for the efficient, accurate and simultaneous quantitation of T1, T2, and M0 have been proposed – Ref 1 and 2 among them. Indeed, growing interest in generating synthetic MR images [2] and in “quantitative” tissue characterization continues to drive technical developments in MR relaxometry. Here we propose a novel 2D multi-slice pulse sequence tha...

In this paper, a new general scalarization technique for solving multiobjective optimization problems is presented. After studying the properties of this formulation, two problems as special cases of this general formula are considered. It is shown that some well-known methods such as the weighted sum method, the -constraint method, the Benson method, the hybrid method and the elastic -constrai...

The objectives of this study are to survey the weight-bearing limitation practices and delay for returning to running and impact sports of high volume hip arthroscopy orthopedic surgeons. The study was designed in the form of expert survey questionnaire. Evidence-based data are scares regarding hip arthroscopy post-operative weight-bearing protocols. An international cross-sectional anonymous I...

We describe three birth cohort studies, respectively carried out in 1978/79 and 1994 in Ribeirão Preto, a city located in the most developed region of Brazil, and in 1997/98 in São Luís, a city located in a less developed region. The objective of the present report was to describe the methods used in these three studies, presenting their history, methodological design, objectives, developments,...

One-hundred-ninety-two weanling pigs from two separate trials, (initial weight 6.0 and 5.6 kg) and 400 growing-finishing pigs (initial weight 17 kg) were fed normal and high lysine corn diets containing four levels of lysine in a 2 X 4 factorial arrangement. Crossbred (Large White X Landrace X Duroc) pigs were used in all experiments. The objectives of the experiments were to (1) compare normal...

Aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) is widely used for cardiovascular prophylaxis and as anti-inflammatory pharmaceutical. An investigation was carried out to evaluate the influence of subchronic dose of aspirin on reproductive profile of male rats, if any. Experimental animals were divided into three groups: control and aspirin subchronic dose of 12.5 mg/kg for 30 days and 60 days, respectively, wh...

The objectives of the present study were to investigate the effects of breed, sex, parity, year of birth and season of birth on birth weight, weaning weight and yearling weight recorded on 713 calves born between 1996 and 2008. The data included offspring from five local cattle breeds (Dhanni, Lohani, Dajal, Red Sindhi, Cholistani) and crossbreds (Holstein or Jersey crosses) maintained at Baran...