Objectives: To investigate whether plain radiographs can show changes in joint damage due to rheumatoid arthritis (RA) within 3 months. Methods: 188 film pairs taken with a 3 month interval were evaluated. They were scored with (chronological) and without (paired) knowledge of the sequence of the films according to the Sharp/van der Heijde method. Changes in joint damage were analysed on a grou...

The fluidization characteristics of a prototype-fluidized bed laboratory reactor were understudied in order to investigate the suitable conditions at which the dehydrogenation reaction of butane could be carried out. To achieve this, a reactor with an effective volume of 1100ml was fabricated and coupled with temperature and pressure accessories. Zeolites were obtained from the market and clay ...

In many vaccine efficacy studies where the endpoint is a rare infection/disease event, an event-driven design is commonly used for testing the hypothesis that study vaccine lowers the risk of the event. Uncertainty of the incidence rate has a large impact on the sample size and study duration. To mitigate the risk of running a potentially large, long-duration efficacy trial with an uncertain ev...

Microspheres are one of the novel drug delivery system and are formulated conveniently to obtain prolonged or controlled drug delivery to enhance the bioavailability and target drug to the specific sites. Ritonavir loaded ethylcellulose buoyant microspheres were formulated using ethylcellulose as rate retarding material. Buoyant microspheres were formulated by emulsion solvent diffusion method....

Videotaping is currently recognized as the most reliable method of predator identification at active bird nests but it is relatively expensive and labour intensive. While the number of published studies has increased over the past 10 years, the mean sample size is not increasing. Thirty-one case studies (n 5 events) reported 6 70 (median 22) predation events by 2 14 (6) species of predators. Th...

Background: The utility of statistical process control (SPC) methods has received growing interest in the healthcare community to help improve clinical and administrative processes. SPC charts are chronological graphs of process data that are used in many other industries to help understand, control, and improve processes and that, although based in statistical theory, are easy for practitioner...

Handling Editor: Holger Schielzeth Abstract 1. Meta-analyses conventionally weight study estimates on the inverse of their error variance, in order to maximize precision. Unbiased variability in the estimates of these study-level error variances increases with the inverse of study-level replication. Here, we demonstrate how this variability accumulates asymmetrically across studies in precision...

We present calculations of the localisation length, 2 , for two interacting particles (TIP) in a one-dimensional random potential, presenting its dependence on disorder, interaction strength U and system size. 2 (U) is computed by a decimation method from the decay of the Green function along the diagonal of nite samples. Innnite sample size estimates 2 (U) are obtained by nite-size scaling. Fo...

Supercritical carbon dioxide has currently received a lot of attention as attractive media for the production of small and solvent-free particles. Rapid expansion of supercritical solutions (RESS) technique has been paid much attention and has been expected as an effective and environmentally friendly nanoparticle design method. In this study, the production of nanoparticles of RS-(±)-ibuprofen...

We study the effects of homebuyers’ beliefs about future house price changes on their mortgage leverage choice. We show that, from a theoretical perspective, the relationship between homebuyers’ beliefs and their leverage choice is ambiguous, and depends on the magnitude of a “collateral adjustment friction” that reduces homebuyers’ willingness to adjust their house size in response to beliefs ...