BACKGROUND The escalating prevalence of obesity might prompt obese subjects to consider themselves as normal, as this condition is gradually becoming as frequent as normal weight. In this study, we aimed to assess the trends in the associations between obesity and self-rated health in two countries. METHODS Data from the Portuguese (years 1995-6, 1998-6 and 2005-6) and Swiss (1992-3, 1997, 20...

BACKGROUND An understanding of the characteristics of smokers who have never tried to quit may be useful to help identify and target these individuals and encourage them to attempt to give up smoking. Using national survey data we investigated variables associated with smokers reporting never having tried to quit. METHODS Using data from the 2007 and 2009 UK Office for National Statistics Opi...

BACKGROUND Amputations in general and amputations of upper extremities, in particular, have a major impact on patients' lives. There are only a few long-term follow-up reports of patients after macro-replantation. We present our findings in contrast with the existing literature. METHODS Sixteen patients with traumatic macro-amputation of an upper extremity were eligible for inclusion in this ...

between 1993-1996 seventy-three consecutive patients (33 m, 40 f, mean age 35.4) with newly diagnosed achalasia underwent one or more pneumatic dilatations with the rigiflex balloon using a protocol of graded dilatation with a fixed inflation pressure of 10 psi and constant duration of 30 seconds for all patients without using fluoroscopy. using vantrappen's classification for assessment o...

Wireless channels are characterized by more serious bursty and location-dependent errors. Many packet scheduling algorithms have been proposed for wireless networks to guarantee fairness and delay bounds. However, most existing schemes do not consider the difference of traffic natures among packet flows. This will cause the delay-weight coupling problem. In particular, serious queuing delays ma...

We develop a simple theory of flows to study the flow of data in real-time computing networks. Flow Theory is based on discrete and nondeterministic mathematics, rather than the customary continuous or probabilistic mathematics. The theory features two types of flows: smooth and uniform, and eight types of flow operators. We prove that, if the input flow to any of these operators is smooth or u...

With Weighted Fair Queuing, the link’s bandwidth is distributed among competing flows proportionally to their weights. In this paper we propose an extension of the DCF function of IEEE 802.11 to provide weighted fair queuing in Wireless LAN. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is able to provide the desired bandwidth distribution independent of the flows aggressiveness and their wi...