Construction joint ventures have attracted a lot of research interest over the last two decades. Joint venturing can allow participating companies to rapidly change the scale or scope of their businesses. However, joint ventures are often regarded as a risky business. The construction industry is associated with high degrees of risk in the nature of its business activities, operational environm...

BACKGROUND This observational study was designed to evaluate the reliability and diagnostic validity of Joint Vibration Analysis (JVA) in subjects with bilateral disc displacement with reduction and in subjects with bilateral normal disc position. METHODS The reliability of selecting the traces was assessed by reading the same traces at an interval of 30 days. The reliability of the vibration...

In this paper, we investigate the empirical correlates of the agreement process. Informally, the agreement process is the dialog process by which collaborators achieve joint commitment on a joint action. We propose a speci"c instantiation of the agreement process, derived from our theoretical model, that integrates the IRMA framework for rational problem solving (Bratman, Israel & Pollack, 1988...

Computed tomography (CT) provides excellent bony detail, whereas magnetic resonance (MR) imaging is superior in evaluating the neural structures. The purpose of this prospective study was to assess interobserver and intermethod agreement in the evaluation of cervical vertebral column morphology and lesion severity in Great Danes with cervical spondylomyelopathy by use of noncontrast CT and high...

Objective. A study supported by the EULAR and the ACR being conducted to establish classification criteria for polymyalgia rheumatica (PMR) will include ultrasound examination of the shoulders and hips. Ultrasound (US) depicts glenohumeral joint effusion, biceps tenosynovitis, subdeltoid bursitis, hip joint synovitis, and trochanteric bursitis in PMR. These findings may aid in distinguishing PM...

OBJECTIVE Patients can potentially monitor disease activity of RA through self-assessed swollen joints (clinical synovitis), but reliability is poor. The objective is to evaluate the use of education by US feedback on the ability of patients to assess for clinical synovitis in RA. METHODS We performed a 6 month, single-centre, randomized controlled trial on patients with established RA to stu...

in a large scale cyclic storage system ,as the number of rule parameters and/or number of operating period increase, general purpose gradient-based nlp solvers and/or genetic algorithms may loose their merits in finding optimally feasible solution to the problem. in these cases hybrid ga which decomposes the main problem into two manageable sub-problems with an iterative scheme between ga and l...