T his article was motivated by a case study where a small company using a well-known agile method – eXtreme Programming (XP) – requested help addressing specific conflicts that arose on the project where they were a subcontractor to a larger organization employing a traditional development method. The purpose of this article is not to compare agile and traditional methods, but to raise awarenes...

Historically, the term risk assessment has been applied to the examination of potential risk to human health as a result of exposure to some introduced environmental toxicant. As an intellectual discipline, risk assessment is in its infancy. Within the past couple of decades, considerable research has been done in the fields of toxicology, industrial hygiene, environmental impact assessment, en...

Rapid developments in education technology have provided educators and students new options in a constantly changing, competitive teaching and learning environment. As the number of online teaching resources continue to increase, research into student attitudes toward traditional and online methods of delivery is important in order to determine whether the increased usage of technology in the c...

BACKGROUND In the evaluation of patients with acute asthma, pulsus paradoxus (PP) is an objective and noninvasive indicator of the severity of airway obstruction. However, in children PP may be difficult or impossible to measure. Indwelling arterial catheters facilitate the measurement of PP, but they are invasive and generally reserved for critically ill patients. OBJECTIVE To determine the ...

Numerous computerized methods emerge to replace traditional methods in people’s personal, work and social lives, but many are hesitant to make the transition. This study examines the factors that influence human choice between different methods. According to Activity Theory, traditional and computerized methods are both tools that a person uses for a certain task. The situated experiences with ...

H ydrophobic charge-induction chromatography, or HCIC, is a novel chromatographic technique for separation of biological macromolecules, based on the pH-dependent behavior of ionizable, dual-mode ligands. Selectivity is orthogonal to ion exchange and other commonly employed chromatographic modes (Figure 1). Binding is based on mild hydrophobic interaction and is achieved under nearphysiological...

Along with the changes of disease spectrum, medical models and health concept, people pay more and more attention to the diagnostic and therapeutic approaches of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). With the effect assessment being changed from disease-based model to patient-based model, how to scientifically and objectively explain the validity of TCM has become the premise for further developm...

Whether or not a proportion of nerve cells disappears from the human brain during adult life remains a controversial question 80 years after it was first asked. In this paper the authors review briefly the reasons for this uncertainty and describe an attempt to find an answer in so far as the cerebellar Purkinje cells are concerned. A loss of about 2-5 % per decade was identified. The problems ...

Arsenic contamination of rice by irrigation with contaminated groundwater and secondarily increased soil arsenic compounds the arsenic burden of populations dependent on subsistence rice-diets. The arsenic concentration of cooked rice is known to increase with the arsenic concentration of the cooking water but the effects of cooking methods have not been defined. We tested the three major rice ...