The aim of this study was to evaluate differences in the effects of Qi therapy without touching or with touching on anxiety, mood, neurohormones, and cellular immune function. Twenty-four healthy male subjects were randomly assigned to either QTN (n = 12) or QTT (n = 12). They received Qi therapy (external Qigong) without touching (QTN) or with touching (QTT). Nonparametric statistical tests re...

Touching is a powerful means for eliciting sexual arousal. Here, we establish the topographical organization of bodily regions triggering sexual arousal in humans. A total of 704 participants were shown images of same and opposite sex bodies and asked to color the bodily regions whose touching they or members of the opposite sex would experience as sexually arousing while masturbating or having...

Results Alcohol-based hand sanitizer were used 170L per 1,000 patients. Conventional observation by ward nurses indicated that compliance with hand hygiene before touching a patient was 77%. Direct observation with the web camera indicated that hand hygiene was required 11.6 times/hour for each patient. Adherence to hand hygiene was 22.5%. Compliance with hand hygiene was 25.3? before touching ...

The topological properties of electronic edge states in time-periodically driven spatially-periodic corrugated zigzag graphene nanoribbons are studied. An effective one-dimensionalHamiltonian is used to describe the electronic properties of graphene and the time-dependence is studiedwithin the Floquet formalism. Then the quasienergy spectrumof the evolution operator is obtained using analytical...

The problem of correctly segmenting touching characters is an hard task to solve. In the recent years, many methods and algorithms have been proposed without achieving a comprehensive solution. In this paper, a novel method based on fuzzy logic is studied. The proposed method combines three features of touching characters that in other studies have been exploited one at a time. The strategy is ...

We present a procedure to split (or segment) touching numerals. We are neither assuming a dominant orientation for the text direction nor long character strings. The basic idea is to compute the convex hull of the outer contour, to choose a baseline from one of the sides of the convex hull and to project the pixels of the touching characters (either perpendicularly or at a slant). Lu's function...

This paper deals with a new scheme for automatic segmentation of unconstrained handwritten connected numerals. The scheme is mainly based on features obtained from a new concept based on water reservoir. A reservoir is a metaphor to illustrate the region where numerals touch. Reservoir is obtained by considering accumulation of water poured from the top or from the bottom of the numerals. At fi...