OBJECTIVES To explore young adult women smokers' cognitive and emotional response to using dark brown 'plain' cigarette packs in natural settings and whether plain packaging is associated with any short-term change in smoking behaviour. DESIGN A naturalistic approach. Participants used plain cigarette packs provided to them for 1 week and for 1 week their own fully branded packs, but otherwis...

BACKGROUND Studies have shown that abdominal girth and vertebral column length have high predictive value for spinal spread after administering a dose of plain bupivacaine. we designed a study to identify the specific correlations between abdominal girth, vertebral column length and a 0.5% dosage of plain bupivacaine, which should provide a minimum upper block level (T12) and a suitable upper b...

background and objectives: although mild stress can bring vitality and dynamics into life, excessive stress can result in physical and psychological illnesses. scientific achievements have failed to take an effective step in controlling stress. one of the most effective factors on stress is religion and religious beliefs. the purpose of the present study was to determine mental health and stres...

BACKGROUND Preliminary work has shown that ropivacaine provides spinal anaesthesia of shorter duration than bupivacaine, and may be of particular use in the day-case setting. However, there are few data comparing the actions of plain and hyperbaric solutions of this drug. METHODS Forty ASA grade I-II patients undergoing elective perineal surgery under spinal anaesthesia were randomized to rec...

The OPmac package provides simple additional macros on top of plain TEX. It enables users to take advantage of basic LTEX functionality: font size selection, automatic creation of tables of contents and indices, working with bibliography databases, tables, references optionally including hyperlinks, margin settings, etc. In this paper, the significant properties of OPmac are described. The comp...

BACKGROUND Tobacco use is responsible for 5.4 million deaths every year worldwide and is a leading cause of preventable death. The burden of these deaths is rapidly shifting to low and middle-income countries, such as Brazil. Brazil has prohibited most forms of tobacco advertising; however, the cigarette pack remains a primary source of marketing. The current study examined how tobacco packagin...

This paper is based on a theory being developed in collaboration with Seymour Papert [Note 1] in which we v i e w t h e m i n d a s a n o r g a n i z e d s o c i e t y o f intercommunicating "agents". Each such agent is, by itself, very simple. The subject of this paper is how that simplicity affects communication between different parts of a single mind and, indirectly, how it may affect inter...

As for serial code on CPUs, parallel code on GPUs for dense polynomial arithmetic relies on a combination of asymptotically fast and plain algorithms. Those are employed for data of large and small size, respectively. Parallelizing both types of algorithms is required in order to achieve peak performances. In this paper, we show that the plain dense polynomial multiplication can be efficiently ...