This paper compares and contrasts financial strength ratings assigned by Value Line, Standard and Poor's, and Moody's. All of these rating agencies use modified ratings. When modifiers are considered, these agencies agree between 85 97 percent of the time. A model using stock market information as well as liquidity, leverage, activity and profitability ratios is presented. Cronbach's alpha, a m...

This study aimed to determine whether cough at night keeps children awake, to describe the relationship between children's cough and sleep and to report parents' perceptions of their children's cough and sleep. Thirty-nine children with reported persistent cough at night (>3 weeks) were recruited and studied for 6 nights by video-recording. Coughs were counted and sleep state was coded for awak...

We review the intimate connection between (super-)gravity close to a spacelike singularity (the "BKL-limit") and the theory of Lorentzian Kac-Moody algebras. We show that in this limit the gravitational theory can be reformulated in terms of billiard motion in a region of hyperbolic space, revealing that the dynamics is completely determined by a (possibly infinite) sequence of reflections, whi...

The more important criteria for identification of the S form of H. pertussis and for its differentiation from R variants are presented in summary fashion in Table IV. The differences as indicated in detail in the foregoing sections and as shown briefly in this tabulation are so clear-cut that they call for little, if any, further comment. Of all the differential characteristics, the morphologic...

Failure to access healthcare is an important contributor to child mortality in many developing countries. In a national household survey in Malawi, we explored demographic and socioeconomic barriers to healthcare for childhood illnesses and assessed the direct and indirect costs of seeking care. Using a cluster-sample design, we selected 2,697 households and interviewed 1,669 caretakers. The ma...

Background and Objectives: Identification of surgical instruments in laparoscopic video images has several biomedical applications. While several methods have been proposed for accurate detection of surgical instruments, the accuracy of these methods is still challenged high complexity of the laparoscopic video images. This paper introduces a Surgical Instrument Detection Framework (SIDF) for a...

Recently, various imaging equipment such as high resolution computed tomography (HRCT) have been intoroduced into medical fields. Accordingly, many related image processing techniques are proposed into medical fields for extraction of abnormal area. Also, segmentation is one of the most important problems for analyzing the abnormalities and some segmentation techinques have been developed for a...

distribution of retinal blood vessels (rbvs) in retinal images has an important role in the prevention, diagnosis, monitoring and treatment of diseases, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, or heart disease. therefore, detection of the exact location of rbvs is very important for ophthalmologists. one of the frequently used techniques for extraction of these vessels is region growing-based se...