Vietnamese-American women who regularly see Vietnamese-American physicians are less likely to obtain Pap tests, perhaps because of the physicians' limited training in preventive medicine and the women's discomfort receiving Pap tests from male physicians. To address this problem, during 2001-2003, the University of California, San Francisco's (USCF) Vietnamese Community Health Promotion Project...

The assessment of a person’s traits is a fundamental problem in human sciences. Compared to traditional paper & pencil tests, computer based assessments not only facilitate data acquisition and processing but also allow for adaptive and personalized tests so that competency levels are assessed with fewer items. We focus on speeded tests and propose a mathematically sound framework in which late...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this research was to study how the speed and legibility of fourth-graders handwriting was affected by type of pencil grip on the Evaluation Tool of Children's Handwriting-Cursive. METHOD Ninety-five typically developing students and 6 students receiving special education services completed the Evaluation Tool of Children's Handwriting-Cursive (ETCH-C). Photographs wer...

Pencil Grasp Pattern: How Critical is it to Functional Handwriting? Heidi D. Schwellnus Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Rehabilitation Science University of Toronto 2012 This thesis reports the results of a large study to evaluate the kinetics of pencil grasp patterns in terms of speed and legibility of handwriting of children in Grade 4. Current clinical practice as recent as 2008 ...

Pencil core granulomas are still infrequently reported in the literature. A 67-year-old woman presented with a 4mm hard blue subcutaneous nodule on the forehead. She remembered being injured with a pencil tip about 60 years before. The subcutaneous nodule was excised, which microscopically revealed a foreign body reaction with histiocytes containing fragmented coarse black particles. We diagnos...

Suppose that an n-by-n regular matrix pencil A − λB has n distinct eigenvalues. Then determining a defective pencil E−λF which is nearest to A−λB is widely known as Wilkinson’s problem. It is shown that the pencil E − λF can be constructed from eigenvalues and eigenvectors of A − λB when A − λB is unitarily equivalent to a diagonal pencil. Further, in such a case, it is proved that the distance...

We study how small perturbations of a skew-symmetric matrix pencil may change its canonical form under congruence. This problem is also known as the stratification problem of skewsymmetric matrix pencil orbits and bundles. In other words, we investigate when the closure of the congruence orbit (or bundle) of a skew-symmetric matrix pencil contains the congruence orbit (or bundle) of another ske...

∼= P, where g(x, y, z) = 0 is a homogeneous equation of the curve Z and (λ, μ) ∈ P. Then a general curve in P is birational to an elliptic curve. Remark 1.1. The construction of pencil P can be generalized to the case when C has at most ordinary double points and the points P1, · · · , P9 are not necessarily distinct (see [3]). The pencil P is called a standard Halphen pencil. Definition 1.2. A...

BACKGROUND Postoperative cognitive dysfunction (POCD) is being recognized as a complication contributing to perioperative morbidity and mortality of the elderly. We hypothesized that the use of the shorter-acting volatile anaesthetic desflurane would be associated with less incidence of POCD when compared with sevoflurane. METHODS Approved by the local ethical committee, 80 patients (aged 65-...