which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Over the years, mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have gained increasing interest in various clinical fields due to its unique properties including immune modulation and tissue regeneration. The mechanisms by which MSCs exert its therapeutic potential can be bro...

Since it was first identified in the 1930s, premenstrual syndrome (PMS) has presented the clinician with challenges from an etiological as well as treatment perspective. To know the cause is to know the cure. The cause of PMS appears to be a complicated interplay among hormones, neurotransmitters, nutrients and psychosocial factors. To complicate the picture further, the same imbalances are not...

Since the late 1990s CRM has become a buzzword especially among business practitioners and consultants. Companies have invested or are planning to invest huge amounts to implement CRM strategies, tools and infrastructure in order to win the battle in today’s increasingly competitive economy. However, many executives are struggling with trying to determine how their enterprises will balance the ...

The explosive growth of the Internet and other sources of networked information have made automatic me diation of access to networked information sources an increasingly important problem Much of this informa tion is expressed as electronic text and it is becoming practical to automatically convert some printed docu ments and recorded speech to electronic text as well Thus automated systems cap...

A dislocation is a crystallographic defect, or irregularity, within a crystal structure. The presence of dislocations strongly influences many of the properties of materials. The theory was originally developed by Vito Volterra in 1905, but the term 'dislocation' was not coined until later by the Professor Sir Frederick Charles Frank of the Physics Department at the University of Bristol. In 19...

Received January 13, 2010; accepted for publication March 29, 2010 Address reprint requests to Salvatore Lentini, MD FESC: CardioVascular and Thoracic Department, Policlinico G. Martino Hospital, Università di Messina, Viale Gazzi, 98100 Messina, Italy. ©2010 The Editorial Committee of Annals of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery. All rights reserved.

What struck me from the opening chapter was the broad range of voices from all over the world. Like a good chamber orchestra , the varied voices of strings, woodwind and percussion were in balance, treating us to a breadth and depth one rarely finds in a book of conference proceedings. With the world of Western medicine gradually opening its doors to new ways of approaching healing, of which ma...

Budgetary constraints are almost a constant challenge confronted by academia. In the case of small colleges and universities, these constraints become even more pronounced when these institutions enhance their programs to meet the needs of their constituents. While in some cases program enhancement might simply be accomplished by hiring new faculty members; in others, it might require additiona...

This paper reviews a range of the most popular policy evaluation methods in empirical microeconomics: social experiments, natural experiments, matching methods, instrumental variables, discontinuity design and control functions. It discusses the identification of both the traditionally used average parameters and the more demanding distributional parameters. In each case, the necessary assumpti...

Important marketing scales such as SERVQUAL are often adapted for use in a particular applied/theory-testing context and/or refined using some statistical method, assuming the resultant scale will have improved psychometric properties for a particular application. However, little attention has been paid to the consequences of how scale modifications are made, the criteria that are used to asses...