OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to investigate the level of work engagement among Dutch dental hygienists. METHODS A total of 1,520 questionnaires were randomly distributed to the members of the Dutch Dental Hygienists' Association (Nederlandse Vereniging van Mondhygiënisten). The questionnaire consisted of the short form Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, a hypothesized three-factor structu...

We present a study of the sensitivity to rare D decays of a Tau-Charm Factory detector. We consider both flavour changing neutral currents and family number violating decays, and evaluate the impact of varying the solid angle coverage, lepton identification and neutral hadron identification of the detector. We find that stringent demands must be made on the detector design in order to effective...

Somatosensory information is critical to balance control and fall prevention in older adults. Recently, it has been shown that low-level input noise (electrical or mechanical) can enhance the sensitivity of the human somatosensory system. In this study, we tested the effect of low-level electrical noise, applied at the knee, on balance control in 13 healthy elderly volunteers. Subjects performe...

Today, while many researchers focus on the improvement of the regularization term in IR algorithms, they pay less concern to the improvement of the fidelity term. In this paper, we hypothesize that improving the fidelity term will further improve IR image quality in low-dose scanning, which typically causes more noise. The purpose of this paper is to systematically test and examine the role of ...

Immigration, immigration policies and education of immigrants alter competence levels. This study analysed their effects using PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS data (1995 to 2012, N=93 nations) for natives' and immigrants' competences, competence gaps and their population proportions. The mean gap is equivalent to 4.71 IQ points. There are large differences across countries in these gaps ranging from arou...

In this study of Oklahoma's universal pre-K program, the authors relied on a strict birthday eligibility criterion to compare "young" kindergarten children who just completed pre-K to "old" pre-K children just beginning pre-K. This regression-discontinuity design reduces the threat of selection bias. Their sample consisted of 1,567 pre-K children and 1,461 kindergarten children who had just com...

Simultaneous multislice acquisition using rosette trajectories (SMART) is a recently introduced functional magnetic resonance imaging pulse sequence that offers high-speed data acquisition by simultaneously exciting several slices. A drawback to its benefit of rapid acquisition is the cumulative effect of the systematic noise present in the off-resonant slices. In this work, a systematic noise ...

A new method for automatic analysis and characterization of recorded hummingbird wing motion is proposed. The method starts by computing a multiscale dense optical flow field, which is used to segment the wings, i.e., pixels with larger velocities. Then, the kinematic and deformation of the wings were characterized as a temporal set of global and local measures: a global angular acceleration as...

This study investigated a hypothesis of dependence of child height and weight on the month of their birth. The sample comprised 1,241 subjects, 568 boys and 673 girls, age 6-20 years, from villages in Olsztyn Province, Northeast Poland. Individuals' height and weight data were standardized by sex and age to allow grouping of individuals born in the same month irrespective of their sex and age a...

Agilent Technologies tested a large number of 6890 Plus gas chromatographs (GCs) over a 10-month period to characterize analytical performance. A sequence of ten runs was performed on each GC to measure retention time reproducibility. The results for retention time reproducibility show that a given peak typically falls within a very tight range of 0.002 to 0.003 min. The average standard deviat...