The implementation of Clinical Governance will require a redefinition of duties and accountability as a prerequisite to develop and achieve an overall improvement in clinical care through a culture of assessment and monitoring of quality. External Quality Assessment Schemes (EQAS) are the main tool enabling laboratories to measure the quality of their results; they must carefully assess and mon...

Group structure and cohesion along with their changes over time play an important role in the success of missions where crew members spend prolonged periods of time under conditions of isolation and confinement. Therefore, an objective system for unobtrusive monitoring of crew cohesion and possible individual stress reactions is of high interest. For this purpose, an experimental wireless group...

THIS paper aims at describing, illustrating, and interpreting the ocular lesions associated with onchocerciasis. The literature of onchocerciasis already includes many pictures of the ocular lesions. The paintingst and diagrams in this paper supplement those previously published and are intended to fill gaps in the existing literature. The accompanying text expresses the author's views on the i...

Coherence resonance occurring in semiconductor lasers with optical feedback is studied via the Lang-Kobayashi model with external nonwhite noise in the pumping current. The temporal correlation and the amplitude of the noise have a highly relevant influence in the system, leading to an optimal coherent response for suitable values of both the noise amplitude and correlation time. This phenomeno...

This paper investigates the consequences of imperfect and uneven factor market development for farm efficiency in rural China during transition. In particular, we estimate the extent to which an inverse relationship in farm productivity can be attributed to the administrative (instead of market) allocation of land, and the extent of unevenly developed non-agricultural opportunities. Using a rec...

Mitrana and PP aun commenced a study on cooperating distributed (CD) grammar systems with components working in diierent derivation modes, called hybrid CD grammar systems. In this paper, we introduce several hybrid derivation modes of CD grammar systems and characterize via this internal hybridization (i.e., all grammars of a CD grammar system work in the same mode) several external hy-bridiza...

There are over 30 commercial, as well as numerous in-house assays, available for human papillomavirus testing. Laboratories performing such assays would need to assess accuracy and reproducibility of their results by incorporating ongoing internal control as well as participating in external quality-assurance schemes (EQAS) as part of their quality assurance program. Several EQAS are available ...

Eye-transfer tests, external noise manipulations, and observer models were used to systematically characterize learning mechanisms in judging motion direction of moving objects in visual periphery (Experiment 1) and fovea (Experiment 2) and to investigate the degree of transfer of the learning mechanisms from trained to untrained eyes. Perceptual learning in one eye was measured over 10 practic...

The temperature effect on denitrification rate of a two-sludge system has been studied. An industrial high-strength wastewater and an industrial by-product containing mainly methanol, as external carbon source, were used in this study. The maximum denitrification rate (MDR) was determined at six different temperatures: 6, 8, 10, 15, 20 and 25oC in batch mode. The temperature coefficient was fou...

In this paper we use panel data on …rms from Brazil and China to investigate the role of …nancial constraints for borrowing and investment. We develop a structural investment model, in which borrowing is costly but sometimes necessary to …nance investment. Structural parameters are estimated by matching simulated model moments to empirical data, using a simulated minimum distance estimator. The...