Public opinion formation plays a very important role in economic policy development. Opinions put forward in various social platforms offered by the media and the Internet have a large impact on international treaty negotiations. In particular this seems to be the case for international negotiations regarding the abatement of greenhouse gasses. In this paper we argue that social opinion formati...

Observational studies have suggested that postmenopausal hormone replacement therapy (HRT) may improve cognitive function, but data from randomized clinical trials have been sparse and inconclusive. The effects of HRT on dementia and mild cognitive impairment were assessed in a subgroup of participants in the Women's Health Initiative Memory Study (WHIMS) (a multicenter, randomized, double-blin...

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Without the help and support from a large number of people, this work would not have been possible. First of all, I would like to thank Prof. Laurence Jacobs for making this exchange possible and for being a great advisor, supporter, teacher and friend. He opened a new door to ultrasonic wave propagation I might not have entered without him. A huge 'Thank You' goes to Dr. Jin-Y...

Oestrogen therapy is the gold standard treatment for hot flushes/night sweats, but it and oestrogen/progestin are not suitable for all women. MPA (medroxyprogesterone acetate) reduces hot flushes, but its effectiveness compared with oestrogen is unknown. In the present study, oral oestrogen [CEE (conjugated equine oestrogen)] and MPA were compared for their effects on hot flushes in a planned a...

Disrupted vegetation is often used as an indicator for landslide activity in forested regions. The extraction of irregular trees from airborne laser scanning data remains problematic because of low quality of observed data and paucity of field data validation. We obtained high density airborne LiDAR (HDAL) data with 180 points m -2 for characterizing tree growth anomalies caused by landslides. ...

Evaluating and optimizing e-government services is imperative for governments especially due to the capacity of e-services to transform public administrations and assist the interactions of governments with citizens, businesses and other government agencies. Existing widely applied evaluation approaches neglect to incorporate citizens’ satisfaction measures. Several citizen satisfaction models ...

To ensure test security and fairness, alternative forms of the same test are administered in practice. However, alternative forms of the same test generally do not have the same test difficulty level, even though alternative test forms are designed to be as parallel as possible. Equating adjusts for differences in difficulties among forms of the test. Six traditional equating methods are consid...

Controlled exposure experiments or CEEs are an important technique for determining the responses of animals to signals that are not part of their own communicative repertoire. CEEs are useful for establishing the relationship between acoustic dosage and behavioral response, a critical element of risk assessment, similar to dose:response studies for exposure to chemicals. CEEs share some propert...

The potential of laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) to discriminate biological and chemical threat simulant residues prepared on multiple substrates and in the presence of interferents has been explored. The simulant samples tested include Bacillus atrophaeus spores, Escherichia coli, MS-2 bacteriophage, α-hemolysin from Staphylococcus aureus, 2-chloroethyl ethyl sulfide, and dimethyl ...

BACKGROUND Estrogen increases C-reactive protein (CRP) in postmenopausal women. Estrogen also decreases cell adhesion molecules, whereas elevated CRP stimulates the expression of cell adhesion molecules. Because androgens have antiinflammatory effects, androgenic progestins such as medroxyprogesterone acetate (MPA) may inhibit proinflammatory effects of estrogen. We investigated the effects of ...