OBJECTIVE Income and regional gradients in being without a regular family doctor have been reported. The study objective was to assess the extent to which the slopes of both income and regional gradients vary by individuals' health needs. METHOD Using the Canadian Community Health Survey and multivariate regression analyses, the study examined the income and interprovincial variations in pote...

We present a generalized method for reconstructing the shape of an object from measured gradient data. A certain class of optical sensors does not measure the shape of an object but rather its local slope. These sensors display several advantages, including high information efficiency, sensitivity, and robustness. For many applications, however, it is necessary to acquire the shape, which must ...

Accurate perception of surface reflectance poses a significant computational problem for the visual system. The amount of light reflected by a surface is affected by a combination of factors including the surface's reflectance properties and illumination conditions. The latter are not limited by the strength of the illuminant but also include the relative placement of the light illuminating the...

Erosion by glacial and fluvial processes shapes mountain landscapes in a long-recognized and characteristic way. Upland valleys incised by fluvial processes typically have a V-shaped cross-section with uniform and moderately steep slopes, whereas glacial valleys tend to have a U-shaped profile with a changing slope gradient. We present a novel regional approach to automatically differentiate be...

BACKGROUND Water transport in peritoneal dialysis (PD) patients occurs through the small pores and water channels, the latter allowing free water transport (FWT). The osmotic gradient is known to be one of the major determinants of water transport. The objective of the study was to analyse the relation between each transport route and the osmotic gradient. METHODS The 4-h standard peritoneal ...

Latitudinal declines of species richness from the tropics to the poles represent a general spatial pattern of diversity on land. For the marine realm, the generality of this pattern has frequently been questioned. Here, I use a database with nearly 600 published gradients (198 of which were marine) to assess whether there is a marine latitudinal diversity gradient of similar average strength an...

In this paper we demonstrate the performance of a slope limiting procedure combined with a discontinuous Galerkin (DG) finite element solver for 2D compressible Euler equations. The slope limiter can be categorized into van Albada type and is differentiable. This slope limiter is modified from a similar limiter used in finite volume solvers to suit the needs of the DG solver. The gradient in an...

In this article, we are concerned with the third-order methods [see e.g. Refs. 8,10]. Just as Newton method approximates the gradient of the objective function with a linear function with the same slope at the current iterate, the third-order methods approximate the gradient with a ‘parabola’ with the same slope and curvature at the current iterate. The most famous third-order method is the imp...

Building of Dam from thousands of years BC was known, and the humans with use of them alwaystry to preserve and utilize surface water resources, but sedimentation problem always is the mostimportant factor in shortening the useful life of dams , and a lot of reservoirs were filled by sedimentsdue to this process and therefore most of dams have been abandoned. One of the most importantphenomena ...

Studies of spatial representation generally focus on flat environments and visual input. However, the world is not flat, and slopes are part of most natural environments. In a series of 4 experiments, we examined whether humans can use a slope as a source of allocentric, directional information for reorientation. A target was hidden in a corner of a square, featureless enclosure tilted at a 5° ...