introduction: to compare the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of femtosecond laser versus mechanical microkeratome corneal flap creation in correction of refractive errors. methods: i this review, a comprehensive search of medline, scopus, cochrane, trip database, supplemented by hta and economic databases was performed. we searched for randomized controlled trials (rcts) of femtosecond laser wh...

this paper tries to determine efficiency of noise control method using fuzzy logic and based on collected data. from among various methods of noise control in workplace, sex methods (enclosure, installing noise absorber, enclosure and absorber, active, and administrative control, and personal protective equipment) were typically selected based on experts' judgment. for each of selected control ...

Outsourcing generally involves non-strategic resources and/or non-asset specific capabilities. However, in this paper, the authors examine the non-traditional, but increasingly more common, use of IT to facilitate theoretically inconsistent outsourcing decisions involving core resources and capabilities. The authors reconcile theory with practice by developing propositions to explain how IT can...

Collecting large labeled data sets is a laborious and expensive task, whose scaling up requires division of the labeling workload between many teachers. When the number of classes is large, miscorrespondences between the labels given by the different teachers are likely to occur, which, in the extreme case, may reach total inconsistency. In this paper we describe how globally consistent labels ...

Componentisation of software promises to deliver cost efficiency that has not been achieved through object orientation [19]. PAC [5] is a popular conceptual architecture for structuring user interface software in an object oriented fashion. This paper reports our experience of adapting and refining PAC as a component architecture in the context of consumer electronics, and On-screen Displays in...

A number of methods have been described for the isolation of genomic DNA from whole blood. However, these described methods are either unreliable or too expensive to be used routinely in small diagnostic laboratories of developing countries. We have evaluated the slightly modified salt-out method for DNA isolation so that it can be applied on whole blood samples using a three step procedure: (1...

Many roads in the United States have approached the end of their design and/or service lives. In a recent report published by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), 42% of highways in the United States are congested and cost the economy about $100 billion in wasted time and extra fuel consumption. Due to the poor condition of the national highway network, it has been given a grade “D” ...

Testing products in a cost-efficient way remains an attractive topic for Model-Based Testing (MBT) of product lines in both academia and industry, which can be addressed by employing systematic and automated approaches based on models (such as feature models and UML models). Cost-effective testing products can be divided into three main problems, i.e., test selection, test generation, and test ...

In this paper we present a novel approach to multiagent planning in domains with concurrent actions and associated concurrent action constraints. In these domains, we associate the actions of individual agents with subsets of objects, which allows for a transformation of the problems into single-agent planning problems that are considerably easier to solve. The transformation forces agents to s...