OBJECTIVE Little is known about the association between gout and socioeconomic status (SES). Inequalities in rheumatology provision associated with SES may need to be addressed by health care planners. The aim of this study is to investigate the association of gout and SES in the community at both the individual and area levels. METHODS Questionnaires were sent to all patients older than age ...

The area of the Dunas da Joaquina, in Santa Catarina island, contains one of the most important remnants of restinga habitat in Santa Catarina State, southern Brazil. In December 2003, a fire occurred in a portion of this area, affecting most of the vegetation, including the bromeliad community. In this study, the density of individuals and the diet composition of the bromelicolous treefrog Sci...

The permeability of the natural geology plays a crucial role in accurately analyzing seepage behavior project area. This study presents novel approach for inverse analysis coefficient. finite element model (FEM) combined with orthogonal experimental design is used to construct sample set coefficient inversion. established random forest (RF) algorithm surrogate applied determine optimal values p...

The paper presents a path planning algorithm for a non-circular shaped mobile robot to autonomously navigate in an unknown area for humanitarian demining. For that purpose the path planning problem comes down to planning a path from some starting location to a final location in an area so that the robot covers all the reachable positions in the area while following the planned path. Based on ou...

In five experiments, we examined whether the number of items can guide visual focal attention. Observers searched for the target area with the largest (or smallest) number of dots (squares in Experiment 4 and "checkerboards" in Experiment 5) among distractor areas with a smaller (or larger) number of dots. Results of Experiments 1 and 2 show that search efficiency is determined by target to dis...

Sedentary and territorial rockfish of the genus Sebastes exhibit distinctive homing ability and can travel back to an original location after displacements of metres or even kilometres. However, little is known about the behavioural and sensory mechanisms involved in homing. Although our previous study demonstrated that nocturnal black rockfish Sebastes cheni predominantly use their olfactory s...

BACKGROUND There is an extensive body of literature on health system quality reporting that has yet to be characterized. Scoping is a novel methodology for systematically assessing the breadth of a body of literature in a particular research area. Our objectives were to showcase the scoping review methodology in the review of health system quality reporting, and to report on the extent of the l...

BACKGROUND The length of postnatal hospital stay has declined over the last 40 years. There is little evidence to support a policy of early discharge following birth, and there is some concern about whether early discharge of mothers and babies is safe. The Cochrane review on the effects of early discharge from hospital only included randomised controlled trials (RCTs) which are problematic in ...

When searching for hosts on a plant, female parasitoids use strategies to maximize efficiency. Searching strategies include the expressed behaviors, the time budget associated with each behavior, the time allocated to the different plant parts and the exploration sequence of plant parts. Searching efficiency refers to the time taken to find the first egg, the number of eggs found per foraging t...

OBJECTIVE Polymyalgia rheumatica (PMR) is an inflammatory musculoskeletal condition predominantly diagnosed and managed in the community. Socioeconomic status (SES) is known to be associated with many inflammatory rheumatologic conditions, but has not been investigated in relation to PMR. This study aimed to investigate the association between PMR and SES at both the area and individual levels....