BACKGROUND Studies conducted in transitional communities from Africa and Asia have pointed to the process of urbanisation as being responsible for the increase in asthma prevalence in developing regions. In Latin America, there are few published data available on the potential impact of urbanisation on asthma prevalence. The aim of the present study was to explore how the process of urbanisatio...

Anthropogenic infl uences have disproportionally aff ected freshwater ecosystems, and a loss of biodiversity is forecasted to greatly reduce ecosystem function and services. Loss of species may destabilize communities by limiting the stabilizing forces of compensatory dynamics and/or statistical averaging, both of which are eff ects that can buff er variation in aggregate community properties. ...

Health and social care systems are implementing fundamental changes to organizational structures and work practices in an effort to achieve integrated care. While some integration initiatives have produced positive outcomes, many have not. We reframe the concept of integration as a learning process fueled by knowledge exchange across diverse professional and organizational communities. We thus ...

A general allometric scaling model predicts that plant body mass MT will scale as the −4/3 power of plant density N. Here, we show how this model predicts numerous other scaling attributes of plant populations and communities, including annual growth rate GT, standing leaf biomass ML, basal stem diameter D, and aboveand below-ground biomass, MSH and MR. These predictions are consistent with the...

This paper reports on our ongoing work regarding opinion mining from Web-based discussion forums in the realm of the Understanding Advertising (UAd) project. Our approach to opinion mining is to first RDFise discussion forums in SIOC, and in a second phase to interlink the so created data with linked datasets such as DBpedia. We are confident that this should allow a market researcher to formul...

Microbes in the ocean dominate biogeochemical processes and are far more diverse than anticipated. Thus, in order to understand the ocean system, we need to delineate microbial populations with predictable ecological functions. Recent observations suggest that ocean communities comprise diverse groups of bacteria organized into genotypic (and phenotypic) clusters of closely related organisms. A...

Objective: One of the most frequent causes of death and acquired disability in the pediatric population is the Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). TBI is secondary to falls, road traffic and vehicle collisions, child abuse and assaults. Penetrating brain injury is a severe form of traumatic brain injury. Blunt head injury is more frequent than TBI in children, but the second one carries a poor progno...