pneumonia and with that breakthrough, a whole therapeutic industry was born. As our technical knowledge grows exponentially we are forced to adapt our cultural, social, political and ethical frameworks in the wake of such profound changes. It is in this context of global change, both frightening and exhilarating, that contemporary nursing finds itself. Weathered by history and tradition, profes...

Preterm birth, defined as birth before 37 weeks gestation, is a major contributor to perinatal morbidity and mortality. It occurs in 12,000 pregnancies in the Netherlands per year. Of all perinatal mortality, 50-70% can be attributed to preterm birth. Preterm birth can be iatrogenic due to the condition of the mother or the child, but the majority occurs spontaneously, either starting with pret...

Ruby is a dynamic, object-oriented language with advanced features such as yield operator and dynamic class manipulation. They make Ruby a popular, highly productive scripting language, but they also make the semantics of Ruby complicated and difficult to understand. Even the JIS/ISO standard of Ruby seems to contain some ambiguities. For Ruby to be established as a reliable scripting language,...

Candida albicans is the most common and important factor causing candidiasis infections in human. As fungi are resistant to anti-fungal agents, and also with respect to the restrictions in treatment of fungal diseases such as their high costs and side effects, study of the combination of herbal medicine is truly required. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of herbal ess...

The term “service” is quite overused in the telecommunications research area. This paper continues previous research by the author toward a better understanding of the service concept. The term service in this paper means the “something” that a human user receives from the computing environment that includes mobile and fixed devices, various kinds of interconnected networks forming a larger who...

The LULU operators for sequences are extended to multi-dimensional arrays via the morphological concept of connection in a way which preserves their essential properties, e.g. they are separators and form a four element fully ordered semi-group. The power of the operators is demonstrated by deriving a total variation preserving discrete pulse decomposition of images.

We lay the combinatorial foundations for [5] by setting up and proving the essential properties of the coding apparatus for singular cardinals. We also prove another result concerning the coding apparatus for inaccessible cardinals.

OntoClean is a methodology for validating the ontological adequacy of taxonomic relationships. It is based on highly general ontological notions drawn from philosophy, like essence, identity, and unity, which are used to characterize relevant aspects of the intended meaning of the properties, classes, and relations that make up an ontology. These aspects are represented by formal metaproperties...