Competition is of interest to both policy makers and managers. A nation’s competitiveness is of utmost importance to policymakers especially in terms of attracting investments. The purpose of this paper is to analyze a report by the World Economic Forum which presents the position of each nation in terms of its Global Competitiveness Rank and a score. The score is derived at by analyzing severa...

OBJECTIVE To demonstrate an association between thrombocytopenia and platelet behavior in predicting mortality in septic patients. METHODS Patients with criteria for sepsis at admission or at any time during hospitalization were selected; patients hospitalized for less than 24 hours were excluded. Thrombocytopenia was defined as a platelet count lower than 150.000/mm³, and recovery was define...

With an ever-increasing number of briefer interactions with a larger number of different “things”, innovative perspectives on authentication could be helpful. Ideally, authentication solutions are designed to balance requirements of security with those of usability, with the latter including cognitive ability for choosing credentials such as passwords, and memorability of those credentials. Som...

The ability to detect an object depends on the contrast between the object and its background. Despite this, many models of visual search rely solely on the properties of target and distractors, and do not take the background into account. Yet, both target and distractors have their individual contrasts with the background. These contrasts generally differ, because the target and distractors ar...

T he heart as an endocrine gland was unequivocally established with the ingenious experiments of DeBold and coworkers 1981 that demonstrated the existence of atrial natriuretic factor (ANF).1 These and subsequent studies have reported that ANF exists as a prepro-ANF molecule that is stored as a 126-amino-acid pro-ANF within atrial granules.2,3 In response to atrial stretch, pro-ANF is cleaved b...