Safety risk management has a considerable effect on disproportionate injury rate of construction industry, project cost and both labor and public morale. On the other hand time-cost optimization (TCO) may earn a big profit for project stakeholders. This paper has addressed these issues to present a multi-objective optimization model to simultaneously optimize total time, total cost and overall ...

Matrix Converter is a near ideal static frequency changer which provides solution to the problem of converting ac from one frequency and one magnitude to variable frequency and variable magnitude ac, without any bulky energy storing components like capacitors or inductors. One of the major obstacles towards commercial acceptance of this topology has been the commutation of the bidirectional swi...

BACKGROUND/AIMS There is lack of consensus on the optimal time allotted for colonoscopy, which increases patient wait times. Our aim was to identify and quantify the individual pre-procedural factors that determine the total procedure time (TPT) of colonoscopy. METHODS This retrospective study involved 4,494 subjects, undergoing outpatient colonoscopy. Effects of age, sex, body mass index, ab...

In a survey of hospital visiting hours in general medical and surgical wards throughout the United Kingdom a pattern of visiting emerged showing that many hospitals still have very restricted visiting. A quarter of the 404 hospitals that responded permitted visiting for an average of two hours a day or less. In contrast, just over a third of hospitals allowed visiting for more than five hours a...

Unlike most of the existing methods in Space Time coding (STC) system which focus on design of STC gaining full rate and/or maximum diversity, we propose an approach to improve spectral efficiency of the code. The proposed scheme carries more information symbols in each transmission block as compared to its counterpart code, and yet retains the property of simple decoding. Simulation results sh...

Records on 65,536 Landrace pigs collected between 1985 and 1999 in herds on the National Swine Registry STAGES program were used to estimate genetic change in lean growth rate, days to 250 lb, backfat, and loin eye area. Genetic change was measured as the change in average estimated breeding value (EBV) over years. Analysis was by a multitrait best linear unbiased prediction (BLUP) animal model...