the main goal of early detection of hearing impairment in children is early intervention. there is growing interest in early detection of hearing impairment in developing countries. the main purpose of this study was to investigate the spoken language development in severe to profound hearing impaired children and compared their speech intelligibility with normal hearing children at the same ag...

In this paper, we present a novel framework for automatically assessing facial attractiveness that considers four ratio feature sets as objective elements of facial attractiveness. In our framework, these feature sets are combined with three regression-based predictors to estimate a facial beauty score. To enhance the system’s performance to make it comparable with human scoring, we apply a sco...

By comparing 401(k) eligible and ineligible households’ wealth, this paper estimates that, on average, about one half of 401(k) balances represent new private savings, and about one quarter of 401(k) balances represent new national savings. Responses to eligibility vary considerably, however, with households who normally save the most largely contributing funds they would have saved anyway. Thi...

BACKGROUND Emergency medical admissions are rising, particularly in the elderly. Variation in admission rates between general practices has received little attention, and requires explanation. METHODS A retrospective review was carried out of emergency medical admissions to the District General Hospital (DGH) and the Community Hospitals (CHs) in West Gloucestershire in subjects over 75 years ...

Air may enter the mediastinal fascial planes either by accident or design. The term " pneumomediastinum" should be reserved for the Continental practice of insufflation of air into the mediastinum in contrast radiography (Bariety, Coury, Mathe, and Abdlanet, 1953). The accidental extravasation of air into the mediastinum, or " mediastinal emphysema," is described in this paper, which includes a...

BACKGROUND There is increasing recognition that child based, as well as parent based factors may be associated with children being excluded from their families. Despite the distress routinely observed among the parents of hyperactive children, there is little research on this in clinic populations. AIMS To examine removals from home in a typical secondary care population, where hyperkinesis w...

Many different laboratories are currently developing mass-spectrometric techniques to analyze and identify microorganisms. However, minimal work has been done with mixtures of bacteria. To demonstrate that microbial mixtures could be analyzed by matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (MALDI-MS), mixed bacterial cultures were analyzed in a double-blind fashion. Nine differ...

objective: to record and classify mechanisms of injury and injury severity score (iss) in trauma patients admitted to the largest trauma center in southern iran. methods: this was a prospective cross-sectional study including all the patients who were admitted to nemazee hospital from 2009 to 2010. we recorded the trauma injury information of 1217 patients who were admitted to of emergency room...

background: speech perception ability depends on auditory and extra-auditory elements. the signal-to-noise ratio (snr) is an extra-auditory element that has an effect on the ability to normally follow speech and maintain a conversation. speech in noise perception difficulty is a common complaint of the elderly. in this study, the importance of snr magnitude as an extra-auditory effect on speech...