the api 20e technique for identification of e.coli was evaluated and the results compared with those obtained by the conventional biochemical tests recommended in report 71. the results obtained showed very close correlation between the two methods. a total of 196 (81.6%) out of 240 isolates were identified as e.coli by api. system, while the conventional method identified only 194 (80.8%). the...

Objectives. Bariatric surgery has been shown to be an effective intervention for weight loss and diabetes management. Despite this, many patients qualified for bariatric surgery are not interested in undergoing the procedure. The objective of this study is to determine the factors influencing receptivity to bariatric surgery among those who qualify for the procedure. Methods. Patients attending...

In 1999 the directive 1999/93/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council was enacted, providing a legal framework for a common introduction of electronic signatures in Europe. So far the signature market has failed miserably. Mobile electronic signatures could be a potential and promising way to increase the market acceptance of electronic signatures. In this contribution we used an infra...

In Norway there is only one governemental regulating body, who register all health professionals in Norway. In Norway there is also only one legislative Act, which regulate all health professionals and there is one central database, with all registered health professionals in Norway. In Norway there are 29 regulated professions in the health care services, of which the medical laboratory techno...

Foreign doctors, the backbone of South African rural health care delivery, are being 'thrown in the deep end' with little support, supplementary training or supervision, resulting in serious miscommunication and sometimes even xenophobia from health care colleagues who treat them as professionally inferior. This emerged during a discussion at the 15th annual conference of the Rural Doctors Asso...

In a secret sharing scheme, shares of a secret are distributed to participants in such a way that only certain predetermined sets of participants are qualified to reconstruct the secret. An access structure on a set of participants specifies which sets are to be qualified. The information rate of an access structure is a bound on how efficient a secret sharing scheme for that access structure c...

People have a large amount of information that they wish to maintain awareness of, but yet forget to check or are too busy to check it on a regular basis. Examples of this information include weather forecasts, stock quotes, traffic reports, and financial accounts. This information can be quite important, but monitoring it is not properly supported by existing tools which focus only on the user...

This paper reports part of a study that examines how to harness the knowledge assets of older workers. Five older workers, from both public and private sector organisations, were interviewed face-to-face regarding their potential contributions to other work colleagues based on their expertise on work practices. Preliminary results revealed the following set of common themes: (a) challenges in t...

This paper reports a speech production experiment in which the effects of surrounding phrase lengths and head-argument distance on intra-sentential pause duration were tested. While the results confirm an effect of phrase length on pausing, this effect is found to be distinctly stronger for long phrases preceding the pause than for long upcoming phrases. The results are discussed with respect t...