Eight hundred and three samples from a single HCV antibody negative diagnostic population were tested on the Abbott ARCHITECT HCV Ag assay. All samples initially reactive were retested in duplicate. Samples repeatedly reactive were tested for HCV RNA to determine the true status. Samples that were confirmed as positive were excluded from the specificity and negative delta calculations. A total ...

BACKGROUND Infection with the Hepatitis B virus (HBV) continues to be one of the leading healthcare issues in Pakistan, affecting over 6 million people. The existence of HBsAg mutants is well documented in many countries. In Pakistan, HBV screening in the majority of the blood banks is performed by Rapid Detection Devices or ELISA tests. These tests are designed to detect HBsAg, but may not det...

Let M be a simply connected complex submanifold of C . We prove that M is irreducible, up a totally geodesic factor, if and only if the normal holonomy group acts irreducibly. This is an extrinsic analogue of the well-known De Rham decomposition theorem for a complex manifold. Our result is not valid in the real context, as it is shown by many counter-examples.

Since their inception, social networking sites (SNSs) have experienced exponential growth. While substantial research has been dedicated to users’ initial adoption of SNSs, the fall of MySpace reminds us that the long-term success of SNSs depends on users’ post adoption staying power. Inspired by this, this work-in-progress investigates users’ “stickiness” with a specific SNS. Based on Li et al...

This paper reports on an empirical investigation of the relationship between print and hypertext reading skills. Subjects in the study were university students at a public Midwestern university. A repeated-measures, counter-balanced design was employed. Subjects were categorized as highand low-ability readers based on a standardized measure of reading achievement. Experimental tasks required su...

Content contribution from individuals is critical to the viability of online communities. In this study we identify the factors that are associated with the quantity and the quality of content sharing in a photo sharing community, where the act of content creation is decoupled from the act of content sharing. We draw on theories of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and find that the prospect ...

Architecture conception is a difficult and time consuming process, requiring advanced skills from the software architect. The tasks of an architect are alleviated if means can be provided to generate architectures that can be evaluated with respect to functional and non functional requirements. This paper discusses of an easier approach to evaluate the software architecture. To achieve this goa...