INTRODUCTION The Lao People's Democratic Republic (PDR), like almost all countries, is faced with a shortage of qualified health workers in rural and remote areas. The situation has worsened due to the unbalanced distribution of the health workforce, resulting from a tendency to gravitate to more central areas. METHODS This cross-sectional study aimed to assess the proportion and associated f...

BACKGROUND A child's sleep pattern is important in defining his or her mental and physical well-being. Although we have reported previously on the utility of collecting 2 weeks of daily sleep logs, this type of record keeping is often onerous for the parents. Therefore, we established a new questionnaire, called the Japan Children's Study Sleep Questionnaire (JCSSQ), which is used to collect sl...

Tensors, which are the linear-algebraic extensions of matrices in arbitrary dimensions, have numerous applications to data processing tasks in computer science and computational science. Many tensors used in diverse application domains are sparse, typically containing more than 90% zero entries. Efficient computation with sparse tensors hinges on algorithms that can leverage the sparsity to do ...

Some concerns exist, however, regarding bulk-fill composites. One proposed rationale for limiting composite increments to 2 mm is to allow the curing light to penetrate to the resin farthest away from the light source.1,2 A second reason for using 2-mm increments is to minimize the shrinkage and shrinkageinduced stress associated with composite polymerization. Contraction stresses that exceed t...

Sonication technology has recently been touted to decrease composite viscosity during delivery and may allow better cavity preparation adaptation and minimize voids. The purpose of this investigation was to evaluate the difference between conventional, hand-placed, incremental application of a standard hybrid resin-based composite (RBC) and sonicated application of a bulk-fill RBC in box-type a...

Production of microlens arrays using the resist reflow technique has been extensively reported1,2. Theses arrays have fill factors approaching 75% and in lensed systems the unlensed light introduces noise into the imaging system. N T Gordon, C L Jones and D Purdy3 reported a sophisticated techniques able to create full fill, however, this is expensive. Davies and McCormick4, using optical litho...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the application of a combined finite-discrete element program, such as ELFEN, for the simulation and prediction of backfill stope failure risks due to blast loading effects in underground mines. A real size of a backfilled stope blasted in the nearby rock of the paste fill is modelled. The dynamic fracture propagation and fragmentation in rock and the...