Uncertainty exists over the ability of the exacerbations of chronic pulmonary disease tool (EXACT) patient-reported outcome diary to quantify exacerbation severity and frequency. To clarify this, we investigated the ability of the EXACT to assess severity of exacerbations and examined the relationship between exacerbations diagnosed using London chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) coho...

• Five viticultural parameters have been proposed in the literature as particularly important for defining a balanced vine able to produce high quality grapes: 1) total leaf area/yield, 2) yield/pruning weight, 3) pruning weight/linear meter of canopy length, 4) total leaf area/linear meter of canopy length, and 5) leaf density (leaf layer number). For very high-quality production, 2 more varia...

BACKGROUND The Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) is a federally funded multi-center research network. To promote high quality research within the network, it is important to establish evaluation tools to measure performance of the research sites. PURPOSE To describe the collaborative development of a site performance measure tool "report card" in an academic pediatric...

Balanced asynchronous circuits have been touted as a superior replacement for conventional synchronous circuits. To assess these claims, we have designed, manufactured and tested an experimental asynchronous smart-card style device. In this paper we describe the tests performed and show that asynchronous circuits can provide better tamperresistance. However, we have also discovered weaknesses w...

The MalaCards human disease database (http://www.malacards.org/) is an integrated compendium of annotated diseases mined from 68 data sources. MalaCards has a web card for each of ∼20 000 disease entries, in six global categories. It portrays a broad array of annotation topics in 15 sections, including Summaries, Symptoms, Anatomical Context, Drugs, Genetic Tests, Variations and Publications. T...

Given a graph G with n vertices and k players, each of which is placing a facility on one of the vertices of G, we define the score of the ith player to be the number of vertices for which, among all players, the facility placed by the ith player is the closest. A placement is balanced if all players get roughly the same score. A graph is balanced if all placements on it are balanced. Viewing b...

This study used a balanced factorial design to examine the performance of normal young adults on a parquetry block assembly task that occupational therapists use to treat constructional deficits in adults. Ninety-six 18- to 34-year-old right-handed college students or college graduates (48 men and 48 women) were tested. Independent variables were subjects' sex, presence or absence of color on t...

The management of pharmacotherapy and the process of dispensing medicines is becoming critical in clinical pharmacy due to the increase of incidence and prevalence of chronic diseases, the complexity and customization of therapeutic regimens, the introduction of innovative and more expensive medicines, the unbalanced relation between expenditure and revenue as well as due to the lack of rationa...

Recognizing that the strategic performance of a business can not be evaluated using traditional financial measures alone, the balanced score card (BSC) complements financial measures with non-financial measures in the expectation that the non-financial performance will drive the financial success of the business. However, when the BSC is deployed at the departmental level, the commonly used hie...