BACKGROUND There is an ongoing debate about the applicability of current criteria for large waist circumference (WC) in older adults. OBJECTIVES Our aim was to explore cut-off values for large WC in adults aged 70 years and older, using previously used and new methods. DESIGN Prospective cohort study. PARTICIPANTS Data of 1049 participants of the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (LASA) ...

Most plant-feeding insects are ecological specialists restricted to one or a few closely related host-plant species. A long-standing hypothesis asserts that natural selection favors host specialization because of trade-offs between performance on alternative hosts, yet empirical evidence for such tradeoffs is scarce. Here we assess trade-offs between adaptations to alternative hosts over macroe...

This paper investigates the relationship between the level of experience of managers and founders, and the likelihood of survival of their new firms. We take advantage of a comprehensive dataset covering the entire Danish labor market from 1980-2000. This is used to trace the activities of top ranked members of start-ups prior to their founding, and follow the fate of these firms. More specific...

This study evaluated the sensitivities and false positive rates of the screening test using ultrasonographic measurement of thickness of nuchal translucency (NT) with different cut-offs for chromosomal aberration in a Korean population. We included 2,570 singleton pregnancies undergoing ultrasound between 11 weeks and 14 weeks of gestation in this study. We analyzed the sensitivities of NT alon...

This paper discusses a novel transformation based design methodology and its use in the design of complex programmable VLSI systems. During the life cycle of a complex system the optimal trade-off between, partially, implementing in hardware or software is changing. This is due to varying system requirements (short time-to-market, low-cost, low-power etc.) and improving device technology. The p...

In the engineering design process, it is important to know the engineering trade-offs achievable under various design preferences and strategies. In this paper, a family of engineering design trade-offs are evolved from an automatic design synthesis methodology based on evolutionary computation. The complete Pareto optima frontier can be evolved by a consideration of fitness function that aggre...

Achieving timely and comprehensive functional design verifi-cation is a ubiquitous problem in electronics. This panel offers per-spectives on verification from designers of cardiac pacemakers,communications satellites, compute servers, networking equip-ment, and IP. The panelists will begin by dissecting the bottlenecks in theirverification processes. For example, are simula...

When should a new instrumental technique or analytical method be adopted for use in clinical chemical analyses? Many clinical methods are approved by the FDA based on the 510 k process, which requires demonstration that a new test is at least as good as those already in the marketplace. This is justified from both a scientific and free-market regulatory perspective when replacement of a sound m...

Digital imager sensor responses must be transformed to calibrated (human) color representations for display or print reproduction. Errors in these color rendering transformations can arise from a variety of sources, including (a) noise in the acquisition process (including photon noise and sensor noise) and (b) sensor spectral responsivities inconsistent with those of the human cones. These err...

The last few years have seen a number of new and important publications in moral theory. Arguably none more important than Larry S. Temkin’s Rethinking the Good: Moral Ideals and the Nature of Practical Reasoning. This fascinating work highlights and explores in depth a seemingly fundamental inconsistency in our own axiological beliefs. Put roughly, the inconsistency arises given our general wi...