Purpose – Six Sigma has been part of our business lexicon for more than a decade. Debates on its emergence as a strategic initiative have created critics who consider it as an old wine in a new bottle. Is Six Sigma a management fad? This article presents some common myths and realities of Six Sigma business strategy. The paper provides an excellent resource for those people who would like to kn...

Prenatal screening programmes have been critiqued for their routine implementation according to clinical rationale without public debate. A new approach, non-invasive prenatal diagnosis (NIPD), promises diagnosis of fetal genetic disorders from a sample of maternal blood without the miscarriage risk of current invasive prenatal tests (e.g. amniocentesis). Little research has investigated the at...

(i) Showing New Viewpoints (A) Facilitation, (B) Greetings, (C) Raising a problem, (D) Showing new information or viewpoints (ii) Responding Previous Utterances (E) Opinions, (F) Supplementary explanations, (G) Repeating previous utterances, (H) Giving responses (iii) Comedy Performances (I) Boke (Silly jokes), (J) Ijiri (Making fun of the others), (K) Waru-Nori (Repeating silly jokes), (L) Tsu...

The aim of the present study was to analyze the risk factors for new-onset chronic kidney disease (CKD) in patients who have received a liver transplant. A total of 190 patients who underwent liver transplantation between March 2001 and January 2015 were followed up, and analyzed retrospectively. Sex, age, primary disease, preoperative laboratory findings (hemoglobin, albumin, creatinine and gl...

INTRODUCTION The current medical literature has conflicting results about factors related to hypothyroidism and nodular recurrences during follow-up of hemithyroidectomized patients. We aimed to evaluate factors that may have a role in new nodule formation, hypothyroidism, increase in thyroid lobe and increase in nodule volumes in these patients with and without Hashimoto's thyroiditis (HT), an...

BACKGROUND "Casual sex" is seldom as non-selective and random as it may sound. During each sexual encounter, people consciously and unconsciously seek their casual sex partners according to different attributes. Influential to a sexual network, research focusing on quantifying the effects of physical appearance on sexual network has been sparse. METHODS We evaluated the application of Log odd...

We investigated the prognostic significance of new-onset angina in patients in whom coronary anatomic characteristics were known. New onset angina was defined as angina of less than 3 months duration. Consecutive patients (n = 1727) with significant coronary artery disease (diagnosed at cardiac catheterization) and who had not had a prior myocardial infarction or congestive heart failure were s...

Lymphogranuloma venereum (LGV) is a sexually transmitted infection caused by Chlamydia trachomatis. Five laboratory confirmed cases of LGV were detected in MSM (men who have sex with men) in the upper North Island; four in Auckland between September and December 2013 and a fifth case was detected in Waikato in June 2014. The absence of a recent travel history for four cases supports the likelih...