Changes in gay and bisexual men's connectedness to the gay community are related to the declining public visibility of HIV/AIDS and greater acceptance for homosexuality and bisexuality in mainstream society. Little work, however, has focused on perceived acceptance for subgroups within the gay community or broader society. Using interviews (n = 20) and a survey (n = 202) of gay and bisexual men...

There have been few reports concerning the endoscopic removal of impacted esophageal foreign bodies from patients. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of dual-channel endoscopy in managing foreign-body ingestions in patients. A total of 19 patients with foreign-body ingestions between September 2008 and July 2011 were selected from the Digestive Endoscope Center in Lis...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to access the performance of 117 Greek National Health System (NHS) hospitals for the year 2011, to compare the findings with the results from similar studies of the previous years (2009 and 2010) and to investigate the changes during the last three years of financial crisis. METHOD An input-oriented Data Envelopment Analysis was used to measure three ind...

Electrochemical methods offer a powerful, reliable, and environmentally benign approach for the synthesis of small organic molecules, such are useful not only transformation but also preparation oligomers polymers. assembly is concept that allows structurally well-defined middle-sized molecules to be synthesized by applying electrochemical methods. The dendrimers, dendronized polymers, oligosac...

T he notion that the distribution of firm size in poor countries is characterized by a bimodal distribution with a “missing middle” is a widely accepted fact in development economics (for example, see Krueger 2013). The idea of the missing middle is that there are a large number of small firms, some large firms, but very few medium-sized firms. The purported fact about the missing middle is cit...

OBJECTIVE The contribution of unhealthy dietary patterns to the epidemic of obesity has been well recognized. Differences in availability of foods may have an important influence on individual eating behaviors and health disparities. This study examined the availability of food stores and food service places by city characteristics on city level of income and urbanization. METHODS The cross-s...

T he topic of the “credit crunch” received considerable attention during the early 1990s. As a result, several initiatives aimed at eliminating regulatory disincentives to lending were put in place. For example, documentation requirements recently were reduced to the legal minimum for loans to small and medium-sized businesses. Also, examiners and bankers were encouraged to emphasize the charac...