PURPOSE Shoe manufacturing workers are exposed daily to an extensive range of potential physical and chemical occupational hazards. Shoe manufacturing in Indonesia is one of the industrial sectors that has shown sustained growth amongst the newly industrialized countries (NICs). In this study, we investigated the possible potential exposure of the workers to physical and occupational hazards an...

The independent effects of chronic disease, age, severity of illness, lung injury score (LIS) and etiology, and preceding nonpulmonary organ-system dysfunction (OSD) on the outcome of acute lung injury (ALI) have not been examined in an exclusively medical-intensive-care-unit (MICU) population. Therefore, 107 consecutive MICU patients with ALI (76% with acute respiratory distress syndrome [ARDS...

Radial Basis Function Neural Networks (RBFNNs) have been widely used for classification and function approximation tasks. Hence, it is worthy to try improving and developing new learning algorithms for RBFNNs in order to get better results. This paper presents a new learning method for RBFNNs. An improved algorithm for center adjustment of RBFNNs and a novel algorithm for width determination ha...

Corresponding author: Hae Keum Kil, M.D., Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, and Anesthesia and Pain Research Institute, Yonsei University College of Medicine, 50, Yonsei-ro, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul 120-752, Korea. Tel: 82-2-2228-2420, Fax: 82-2-312-7185, E-mail: [email protected] This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ...

BACKGROUND A voluntary surveillance scheme of occupational skin diseases (OSDs) in The Netherlands starting in 2001 aimed to improve insight in the incidence of OSD especially occupational contact dermatitis (OCD), risk professions and causal agents. This paper presents the results of this scheme during 2001-05. METHODS Reports of new cases of OSD received from the participating dermatologist...

Only time - and new senior management intervention - will tell whether the Eastern Cape health department's financial rescue package will fully honour its R1.6 billion accumulated debt, including Occupation Specific Dispensation (OSD) pay hikes.

Public sector doctor relations with their employer, soured by clumsy, inconsistent provincial implementation of long-awaited Occupation Specific Dispensation, (OSD), pay hikes and further delayed mid-level category doctors pay talks, are on a knife edge.

In this study, the definition and optimization of a medium for cost-effective heterologous production as well efficient recovery plant secondary metabolite p-coumaric acid (p-CA) was performed. Experimental designs were carried out to end. First, Plackett Burman design used choose important factors that affect p-CA production. Then, central composite face centered find optima two major paramete...

Recently, novel data-driven offset-sparsity decomposition (OSD) method was proposed by us to increase colorimetric difference between tissue-structures present in the color microscopic image of stained specimen in histopathology. The OSD method performs additive decomposition of vectorized spectral images into image-adapted offset term and sparse term. Thereby, the sparse term represents an enh...

With the emerging of 10 Gbps Ethernet, modern storage networks allow the hosts to access remote cache nearly as quickly as they can access from their local storages. Aiming at improving the performance and load-balancing of large-scaled object-based storage systems, we propose an objectbased caching scheme that works collaboratively by distributing redundant objects among neighboring object-bas...