BACKGROUND Sweepers are prone to develop chronic obstructive pulmonary disease even without tobacco smoking. PURPOSE To investigate roadside dust as a cause of air flow obstruction among sweepers, and the role of spirometry in its preclinical diagnosis. MATERIAL AND METHODS One-hundred nonsmoking sweepers (aged 30-60 years) of both sexes sweeping on roads for 8-12 hours a day for the Capita...

A flow-injection analysis method for the determination of nitrite and nitrate in natural water samples has been developed that consists of two systems based on their reduction to NO with hydrazine and/or ascorbic acid, followed by chemiluminescence detection. The procedure of sweeping the generated NO into an NOx monitor, by means of a gas-liquid separating coil consisting of microporous polyte...

AIM To evaluate the efficacy of sweeping of fetal membranes for induction of labor in uncomplicated term pregnancies. METHODS A randomized controlled trial was performed in 122 pregnant women beyond 39 weeks of gestation with no complications. The women were assigned to have their membranes swept or not (controls) for labor induction. The main outcome measures included duration of pregnancy a...

Prioritized sweeping is a model-based reinforcement learning method that attempts to focus an agent’s limited computational resources to achieve a good estimate of the value of environment states. To choose effectively where to spend a costly planning step, classic prioritized sweeping uses a simple heuristic to focus computation on the states that are likely to have the largest errors. In this...