Mailing address: Carolina Fedrizzi el Andari • Rua Olavo Bilac, 314/3195010-080 Caxias do Sul, RS Brazil E-mail: [email protected] Manuscript received February 15, 2010; revised manuscript received March 09, 2010; accepted April 01, 2010.

Factors hypothesized to affect beliefs in fantastical beings were examined by introducing children to a novel fantastical entity, the Candy Witch. Results revealed that among older preschoolers, children who were visited by the Candy Witch exhibited stronger beliefs in the Candy Witch than did those who were not. Among children who were visited, older children had stronger beliefs than did youn...

The X.500 directory provides a powerful mechanism for storing and retrieving information about objects of interest. To interpret the information stored in the directory, the schema must be known to all the components of the directory. The rapid increase in the number of schemas and the relatively slow pace of standardization and subsequent publication has given rise to the challenge of making t...

With the increasing use of mobile and nomadic communication devices requirements for security and privacy are rising as well. Following brief surveys of existing approaches to mobility management, general security considerations for UMTS and confidential storing of location information we introduce the ideas and concepts behind the new ‘anonymous subscriber’ method for UMTS, largely based on ex...

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Featuring plush rats, well-groomed humans, and a colony of rodents numbering a thousand strong, Ratatouille had shots where the original scene descriptions contained many hundreds of millions of hairs. To make these shots renderable, we developed many new technologies to optimize our RenderMan-based hair rendering pipeline, including caching to speed up runtime sculpting, a technique for optimi...

BACKGROUND The Gold standard treatment for symptomatic gallstone disease is laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) since 1990. LC can be performed safely as a day case procedure. The objective of this study was to evaluate the results of laparoscopic cholecystectomy in symptomatic gall stones disease in terms of length of hospital stay, complications, morbidity and mortality. METHODS This retrospe...