AIM To investigate the importance of attachment types on the retention loss of extracoronal attachment-retained removable partial dentures depending on the usage period. MATERIALS AND METHODS In order to observe the retention loss of 5 different attachments (OT Strategy, OT Strategy-metal protected, Vario-stud-snap and Vario-soft 3 and ERA-RV) over time, attachment-retained partial dentures r...

Simple methods for estimating the proportion of land changing from forest to nonforest are developed. Variance estimators are derived to facilitate significance tests. A power analysis indicates that 400 inventory plots are required to reliably detect small changes in net or gross forest loss. This is an important result because forest certification programs may require additional precautions w...

There are many methods for the analysis and design of embedded cantilever retaining walls. They involve various different simpli®cations of the net pressure distribution to allow calculation of the critical retained height. In the UK, it is commonly assumed that net pressure consists of the sum of the active and passive limiting pressure values. In the USA, the net pressure is commonly simpli®e...

This paper proposes a robust real-time artificial landmarks detection and recognition system for indoor mobile robot. First, histograms of oriented gradient (HOG) features are extracted to resolve the illumination changes in indoor environment. Second, AdaBoost based algorithm is used in detection phase to increase the processing speed. Finally, RBF-SVM classifier is used for recognition. Exper...

OBJECTIVE: The goal was to determine the net return (gain or loss after costs were subtracted from revenues) to private pediatric medical practices from investing time and resources in vaccines and vaccination of their patients. METHODS: A cross-sectional survey of a convenience sample of private medical practices requested data on all financial and capacity aspects of the practices, including ...