Congenital abnormalities are the leading cause of infant mortalities in the United States (25%) and across the world [1]. Public health interventions have included reducing maternal disease, prenatal care of mothers, reduction of exposure to teratogens (agent that can disturb the development of an embryo or fetus), and nutritional interventions [2]. Potentially the most significant nutritional ...

When Dr Pless presents his qualifications “to pontificate” on preventing child injuries, he forgets to mention that he has nurtured, cajoled, nagged and inspired a generation of researchers and practitioners in the field to strive for a better deal for children. I am among those so privileged. Perhaps for this reason more than any other, I find myself contemplating his convictions along with th...

Plants have evolved a variety of defensive strategies to resist herbivory, but at the interspecific level, the relative effectiveness of these strategies has been poorly evaluated. In this study, we compared the level of herbivory between species that depend on ants as indirect defenders and species that rely primarily on their own direct defenses. Using a dataset of 871 species and 1,405 data ...

In this paper, a new approach is proposed for the personalization of the access to different information sources (servers, Web pages, services, etc.) distributed across the Internet. In contrast to the traditional approaches, with personalization software owned and controlled by the owner of the information source, we propose to use the software that is prepared and controlled directly by the e...

In this paper we present improved techniques for the schedulability analysis of tasks with precedence relations in multiprocessor and distributed systems, scheduled under a preemptive fixed priority scheduler. Recently developed techniques, based on the analysis of tasks with dynamic offsets, take into account the precedence relations between tasks only indirectly, through terms iteratively est...