Objectives: To examine the association between fibromyalgic pain and weather to determine the nature of their interrelationship. Methods: The daily pain ratings of 55 female patients previously diagnosed with fibromyalgia were recorded on visual analogue scales (VAS) over 28 days. These ratings were then related to the official weather parameters and a composite weather variable using time seri...

The combinatorial complexities of (1) the Voronoi diagram of moving points in 2D and (2) the Voronoi diagram of lines in 3D, both under the Euclidean metric, continues to challenge geometers because of the open gap between the (n2) lower bound and the O(n3+ε) upper bound. Each of these two combinatorial problems has a closely related problem involving Minkowski sums: (1′) the complexity of a Mi...

Majority of the advances in spectacle lens continue to occur in the area of progressive lens design by most of the spectacle lens manufacturers. Since the introduction of progressive addition lenses (PALs) in 1959 by Essilor, it has gained worldwide acceptance for the treatment of presbyopia. While progressive lens design, manufacturing and dispensing techniques have grown at a good pace in the...

This papers shows that using separators, which is a pair of two complementary contractors, we can easily and efficiently solve the localization problem of a robot with sonar measurements in an unstructured environment. We introduce separators associated with the Minkowski sum and the Minkowski difference in order to facilitate the resolution. A test-case is given in order to illustrate the prin...

We extend the class of reversal-bounded counter machines by authorizing a finite number of alternations between increasing and decreasing mode over a given bound. We prove that extended reversal-bounded counter machines also have effective semi-linear reachability sets. We also prove that the property of being reversal-bounded is undecidable in general even when we fix the bound, whereas this p...

The original definition of P-systems calls for rules to be applied in a maximally parallel fashion. However, in some cases a sequential model may be a more reasonable assumption. Here we study the computational power of different variants of sequential P-systems. Initially we look at cooperative systems operating on symbol objects and without prioritized rules, but which allow membrane dissolut...

We introduce two-player games which build words over infinite alphabets, and we study the problemof checking the existence of winning strategies. These games are played by two players, who take turns inchoosing valuations for variables ranging over an infinite data domain, thus generating multi-attributeddata words. The winner of the game is specified by formulas in the Logic of Rep...

We present two approximate Minkowski sum algorithms for planar regions bounded by line and circle segments. Both algorithms form a convolution curve, construct its arrangement, and use winding numbers to identify sum cells. The first uses the kinetic convolution and the second uses our monotonic convolution. The asymptotic running times of the exact algorithms are increased by km logm with m th...

In this paper we introduce a decision procedure for the combined theory of sets, arithmetic and sums of sets, that can be used as abstraction for problems in verification. This theory and the developed decision procedures is also the first step in our path to develop decision procedures for more theories that can be used as abstraction in more situations, for example with the additional bridgin...

Objectives To evaluate clinical characteristics in patients with JIA registered in the hospital based registry. Methods The registry is based on written informed consent. JIA patients were classified using ICD-10 codes and they were registered once. Gender, date of registration and year for disease onset was recorded, in addition to onset type, number of active joints and physician’s global ass...