Structured abstract Background: The efficacy of corticosteroids for reducing the incidence of post-extubation laryngeal edema remains controversial. Objective: To evaluate whether methylprednisolone (MP) started 12 hr prior to planned tracheal extubation, can prevent post-extubation laryngeal edema. Design: Prospective, randomized, blinded, placebocontrolled trial performed in 15 intensive care...

Individuals may perceive themselves as independent and distinct from others or as interdependent and connected to others. Do these differences in self-construal influence entrepreneurial preferences and intentions to start a new business in university students? Few studies have examined the influence of cultural orientations on entrepreneurial intentions at the individual level of analysis. Two...

People’s childbearing intentions change over their lives. These changes are sometimes conceptualised as a response to constraints such as the biological clock or lack of a partner. However, we find that they are influenced by a much wider range of factors: social norms; adaptation to the wishes of a partner; re-partnering; and learning about the costs and benefits of parenthood. In a departure ...

This work shows how successive grasp attempts can be re-planned to make use of tactile information acquired during previous grasp attempts. Our main contributions are to enable planning of dexterous grasping for high degree of freedom manipulators, and belief updating from tactile sensors in 6 dimensional space. The method is demonstrated in trials with simulated robots. Sequential re-planning ...

BACKGROUND Studies of planned home births attended by registered midwives have been limited by incomplete data, nonrepresentative sampling, inadequate statistical power and the inability to exclude unplanned home births. We compared the outcomes of planned home births attended by midwives with those of planned hospital births attended by midwives or physicians. METHODS We included all planned...

Requirements engineering process improvement (REPI) has gained much attention in research and practice. Most REPI approaches are of solution-driven and activity-based nature. They focus on the assessment of company-specific RE reference models against an external norm of best practices, and they propagate an improvement by forecasting the adaptation of the processes and methods in the RE refere...

In our reengineering project, we regard architecture modeling and reengineering techniques of telecommunication systems. Our work concerns analysis and restructuring of such systems, including the re-design and re-implementation. As telecommunication systems are often planned and modeled using state machines, it seems reasonable to analyze the systems also on the more abstract representation le...