The Ebola virus disease (EVD) is a serious illness characterized by fever, severe vomiting and diarrhea, and, in severe cases, multi-organ failure requiring mechanical ventilation and renal replacement therapy. The current outbreak has centered in West Africa and affected over 15,000 individuals. EVD is transmitted by direct contact with blood or other infectious bodily fluid, and as such, nume...

PURPOSE Literature on institutionalization of patients with dementia has not considered the role of caregivers' quality of care, which encompasses caregivers' exemplary care (EC) behaviors and caregivers' potentially harmful behaviors (PHBs) toward care recipients. This study sought to understand the role of quality of care in mediating between caregiving stressors and caregiver desire to insti...

Clinical guidelines for the care of patients with progressive chronic kidney disease (CKD) have been developed by a broad range of organizations within the kidney community. Despite consensus among these guidelines and significant effort on the part of federal agencies, voluntary health organizations, and professional groups, existing data suggest that much work remains to achieve acceptable le...

Zahra Jehan Iqbal, MD, Long Cao, MD, Karl Chiang, MD, Sundeep Adusumalli, MD, Farah Khalid, BA, Rajasekhar Nekkanti, MD From the Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Heath Sciences and Brody School of Medicine, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina, Department of Cardiology, Division of Heath Sciences and Brody School of Medicine East Carolina University, Greenville, Nort...

In this report we discuss the design of cross-directional controllers which are guaranteed to be robustly stabilizing while incorporating a quadratic programme for steady state performance. The report is loosely based on the technical report of Akkermans (2003) who proposes using the multivariable circle criterion to guarantee closed-loop stability of cross-directional controllers in the presen...

Critics of mass culture often identify 1950s-style status competition as one of the central forces driving consumerism. Thomas Frank has challenged this view, arguing that countercultural rebellion now provides the primary source of consumerism in our society, and that ‘cool’ has become its central ideological expression. This paper provides a rearticulation and defense of Frank’s thesis, first...

f(xj) = p(xj), j = 1, . . . , n. This is sometimes called Lagrange interpolation to distinguish it from Hermite interpolation, see below. For the basics, see Chapter 7 in Heath. As in Heath, we let Pn be the (function) space of polynomials of degree at most n. We let C([a, b]) denote the set of continuous functions on the interval [a, b]. Similarly, we let C([a, b]) be the n times continuously ...