BACKGROUND The incidence of femoral neck and trochanteric fractures reportedly differ by age and regionality. We investigated differences in monthly variations of the occurrence of femoral neck and trochanteric fractures as well as place and cause of injury in the Kyoto prefecture over a 6-year period. METHODS Fracture type (neck or trochanteric fracture), age, sex, place of injury, and cause...

This study utilizes process control techniques to identify action limits for TomoTherapy couch positioning quality assurance tests. A test was introduced to monitor accuracy of the applied couch offset detection in the TomoTherapy Hi-Art treatment system using the TQA "Step-Wedge Helical" module and MVCT detector. Individual X-charts, process capability (cp), probability (P), and acceptability ...

OBJECTIVE To examine whether dietary intake reported by school-aged children relates to the chronological period of data collection. DESIGN Cross-sectional surveys in 39 countries in different monthly periods of the 2009-2010 school year. SETTINGS Questionnaires were completed in schools anonymously. PARTICIPANTS Children from 39 countries, aged 11, 13, and 15 years (n = 209,320). MAIN ...

Information about the long-term trends of surface and tropospheric ozone is important for assessing the impact of ozone on human health, vegetation, and climate. Long-term measurements from East Asia, especially China’s eastern provinces, are urgently needed to evaluate potential changes of tropospheric ozone over this economically rapid developing region. In this paper, surface ozone data from...

Terrestrial isoprene emissions directly respond to leaf temperature, photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), soil moisture, and plant characteristics such as leaf area index (LAI). Prior work has estimated isoprene interannual variability at 5e25%, however the relative contributions of individual environmental factors have not been delineated. A biogenic isoprene emissions model (MEGAN) is c...

Cloud fraction (CF) is known as the dominant modulator of Earth’s radiative fluxes. Ground-based CF observations are useful to characterize the cloudiness of a specific site and are valuable for comparison with satellite observations and numerical models. We present for the first time CF statistics (relative to liquid clouds only) for Bern, Switzerland, derived from the observations of a ground...

The present study used an intensive longitudinal design to examine whether mental rotation performance varies according to a monthly cycle in both males and females and whether these variations are related to variations in progesterone, estradiol, and testosterone levels. We collected reaction time and accuracy data for 10 males and seven females each workday over eight weeks using 136 pairs of...

Surface water storage is a key component of the terrestrial hydrological and biogeochemical cycles that also plays a major role in water resources management. In this study, surface water storage (SWS) variations are estimated at monthly time-scale over 15 years (1993–2007) using a hypsographic approach based on the combination of topographic information from Advance Spaceborne Thermal Emission...

In this paper, using longitudinal data on route level monthly average weekday ridership in the entire Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) bus system from January 2002 through December 2010, we evaluate the ridership effects of the CTA real-time bus information system. This bus information system is called CTA Bus Tracker and was incrementally implemented on different CTA bus routes from August 2006...