Is rigid sternal fixation really better? Was the correct control group used?

Rigid Sternal Fixation Improves Postoperative Recovery

INTRODUCTION During the past five years, ridged sternal fixation has been utilized for sternal closure after cardiac surgery. It is known that this procedure provides better sternal stability; however, its contribution to patient recovery has not been investigated. METHODS Retrospective chart review was conducted for patients who underwent CABG and/or valve surgery in our institution between ...

Comparison of Alternative Rigid Sternal Fixation Techniques

Routing Tables: Is Smaller Really Much Better?

We examine the case for small Internet routing and forwarding tables in the context of router design. If Moore’s Law drives costeffective scaling of hardware performance in excess of the Internet’s growth, protocol modifications and “clean slate” efforts to achieve major reduction in routing table sizes may be unnecessary. We construct an abstract model for the computation and memory requiremen...

Bromide interference: is less really better?

Increased serum bromide may result from the ingestion of various drugs and from environmental exposures. Chloride methods that are less susceptible to bromide interference have a clinical disadvantage in that they are less likely to arouse suspicion in cases of bromide toxicity. When there is a clinical suspicion of bromide toxicity, differences among various analyzers in the amount of interfer...

The Bigger Brauer Group Is Really Big

I show that each étale n-cohomology class on noetherian schemes comes from a Čech cocycle, provided that any n-tuple of points admits an affine open neighborhood. Together with results of Raeburn and Taylor on the bigger Brauer group, this implies that for schemes such that each pair of points admits an affine open neighborhood, any étale Gm-gerbe comes from a coherent central separable algebra...