Integral abutment bridges (IABs) have many advantages over conventional bridges in terms of strength and maintenance cost. Due to the integrity of these structures uniform thermal and seismic loads are known important ones on the structure performance. Although all bridge design codes consider temperature and earthquake loads separately in their load combinations for conventional bridges, the t...

International standards for calculating heart period variability (HPV) from a series of R-wave intervals (R-R) in an electrocardiographic (ECG) recording have been widely accepted. It is possible, and potentially useful in various settings, to use systolic blood pressure waveform intervals to estimate HPV, but the validity of HPV derived from blood pressure (BP) waveforms has not been establish...

BACKGROUND Palliative care is nowadays essential in nursing care, due to the increasing number of patients who require attention in final stages of their life. Nurses need to acquire specific knowledge and abilities to provide quality palliative care. Palliative Care Quiz for Nurses is a questionnaire that evaluates their basic knowledge about palliative care. The Palliative Care Quiz for Nurse...

PURPOSE To develop a new test of activities of daily living (ADLs) appropriate for the low-vision population: the Melbourne Low-Vision ADL Index (MLVAI). METHODS The MLVAI was designed as a desk-based clinical assessment, comprising 18 observed items on complex ADLs in part (a) and 9 questions on broad self-care ADLs in part (b). Each item was rated on a five-level descriptive scale from 0 to...

We express our sincere thanks to the honorable Editors and anonymous Reviewers for valuable comments and fruitful suggestions, which significantly improved the manuscript. In this paper, hierarchical Bayes approach is presented for estimation and prediction of reliability indexes and remaining lifetimes of a cold standby series system under general progressive Type II censoring scheme. A simula...

PURPOSE The study aims to clinically validate the defining characteristics (DCs) of the nursing diagnosis (ND) of Activity Intolerance for patients with ischemic heart disease and refractory angina. METHODS Cross-sectional study was used, involving 22 patients with ND of Activity Intolerance. The Fehring method was used to validate the ND. FINDINGS Most DCs presented reliability indexes bet...

Our researches have been made on brown forest soil that had been used in long-term experiments set up according to specified fertilization system for over 30 years. We have chosen those experiment variants in which quantities of nitrogen fertilizers were gradually increased. The soil samples taken from 0 cm to 30 cm depth were used to determine biological indexes of nitrogen availability (aerob...

To support “Database as a service” (DaaS) in the cloud, the database system is expected to provide similar functionalities as in centralized DBMS such as efficient processing of ad hoc queries. The system must therefore support DBMS-like indexes, possibly a few indexes for each table to provide fast location of data distributed over the network. In such a distributed environment, the indexes ha...