INTRODUCTION Patient-safety monitoring based on health-outcome indicators can lead to misinterpretation of changes in case mix. This study aimed to compare the detection of indicator variations between crude and case-mix-adjusted control charts using data from thyroid surgeries. METHODS The study population included each patient who underwent thyroid surgery in a teaching hospital from Januar...

Asphalt pavement recycling has grown dramatically over the last few years as the preferred way to rehabilitate existing asphalt pavements. Rehabilitation of existing asphalt pavements has employed different techniques; one of them, cold in-place recycling with foamed asphalt (CIR-foam), has been effectively applied in Iowa. However, Iowa’s current cold in-place recycling (CIR) practice utilizes...

rutting of hot mix asphalt pavements due to increased number of heavy vehicles, especially in tropical regions, causes several performance problems. large stone asphalt mixtures have more stiffness and shear resistance and so more rutting resistance compared to conventional mixtures. hence, using these mixtures in thick layers of hot mix asphalt pavements at tropical regions could be an appropr...

BACKGROUND Many pesticides in current use have recently been revealed as in vitro androgen receptor (AR) antagonists, but information about their combined effects is lacking. OBJECTIVE We investigated the combined effects and the competitive AR antagonism of pesticide mixtures. METHODS We used the MDA-kb2 assay to test a combination of eight AR antagonists that did not also possess AR agoni...

Kutylowski et al. have introduced a voter-verifiable electronic voting scheme ”a practical voting scheme with receipts”, which provides each voter with a receipt. The voter can use her receipt to check whether her vote has been properly counted in the final tally, but she cannot use the receipt to prove others how she has voted. Another interesting property of this scheme is that, thanks to the...

The VALG project is introducing e-voting to municipal and county elections to Norway. Part of the e-voting system is a mix-net along the lines of Puiggalí et al. a mix-net which can be efficiently verified by combining the benefits of optimistic mixing and randomized partial checking. This paper investigates their mix-net and proposes a verification method which improves both efficiency and pri...

This article reports the first known study on the disposal of puppies in an Afro-Caribbean community. The study reported the fate of 2,427 puppies through 517 interviews with dog caregivers. The study reported that surviving puppies from "pure-bred" females were typically sold (60.1% of surviving puppies) whereas those from mongrel (potcakes) mothers were given away (48.4%). Pure-bred mothers p...