BACKGROUND Atopic dermatitis (AD) is common among pre-school children in Shanghai. This study aimed to identify the risk factors for childhood AD from the perspectives of home environment, demographics and parents-grandparents' atopic disease. METHODS A cross-sectional study was conducted in Shanghai in April-June, 2010. Preschool children's parents or guardians were invited to participate a ...

Regenerative events for different queueing models are considered. The aim of this paper is to construct these events for continuous-time processes if they are given for the corresponding discrete-time model. The construction uses so-called renovative events revealing the property of the state at time n of the discrete-time model to be independent (in an algebraic sense) of the states referring ...

Urban infrastructures, to fully take advantage of future investments, must first be recognized as interconnected complex systems systems. This forum paper describes research and education needs that, if properly addressed, could prepare the civil engineering profession meet new challenges urban infrastructure renovation. Among needs, objective documentation life-cycle performance constructed le...

COBOLISRE is a sofhvare re-engineering and renovation environment for COBOL systems. I t supports a wide range of features such as system-level analysis and browsing, program-level analysis and browsing, data model recovery, concept recognition, and code segmentation. COBOLISRE is implemented on top of a distributed execution architecture to address issues of multi-user access, performance, and...

We evaluate the parsing technology used by people working in the reengineering industry. We discuss parser generators and complete systems like Yacc, TXL, TAMPR, REFINE, CobolTransformer, COSMOS, and ASF+SDF. We explain the merits and drawbacks of the various techniques. We conclude that current technology may cause problems for the reengineering industry and that modular and/or com-positional ...

Incorporating energy efficiency is nowadays the top priority of building renovation projects. The renovation solutions are normally the result of many combined solutions concerning all components of the building (walls, roofs, windows, doors, HVAC, occupation...) and the final outcome is the sum of these micro solutions. The modeling and simulation of the building thermal behavior can quickly b...

One of the undesired effects of software evolution is the proliferation of unused components, which are not used by any application. As a consequence, the size of binaries and libraries tends to grow and system maintainability tends to decrease. At the same time, a major trend of today s software market is the porting of applications on hand-held devices or, in general, on devices which have a ...