Four treatment groups (80 male Sprague-Dawley rats/group) were used in a 2 X 2 factorial design: inhalation of 600 ppm vinyl chloride (VC) 4 hr/day, 5 days/week for 1 year; VC and ingestion of 5% ethanol in water (v/v); filtered air and ethanol; filtered air. Ingestion of ethanol was begun 4 weeks prior to inhalation of VC and continued for life or termination of the study at two and one-half y...

Fluoroethene (FE) is a stable molecule in aqueous solution and its aerobic transformation potentially yields F-. This work evaluated if FE is a suitable surrogate for monitoring aerobic vinyl chloride (VC) utilization or cometabolic transformation. Experiments were carried out with three isolates, Mycobacterium strain EE13a, Mycobacterium strain JS60, and Nocardioides strain JS614 to evaluate i...

Visual Cryptography (VC) is a powerful technique that combines the notions of perfect ciphers and secret sharing in cryptography with that of raster graphics. A binary image can be divided into shares that are able to be stacked together so as to approximately recover the original image. VC is a unique technique in the sense that the encrypted message can be decrypted directly by the Human Visu...

VC-dimension is the measure of model complexity (capacity) used in VC-theory. The knowledge of the VC-dimension of an estima-2 tor is necessary for rigorous complexity control using analytic VC generalization bounds. Unfortunately, it is not possible to obtain the analytic estimates of the VC-dimension in most cases. Hence, it has been recently proposed to measure the VC-dimension of an estimat...

Corneal nociceptors terminate at the trigeminal subnucleus interpolaris/caudalis (Vi/Vc) transition and subnucleus caudalis/upper cervical spinal cord (Vc/C1) junction regions of the lower brain stem. The aims of this study were to determine if local GABAA receptor activation modifies corneal input to second-order neurons at these regions and if GABAA receptor activation in one region affects c...

BACKGROUND WHO has set a goal of 75% vaccination coverage (VC) for seasonal influenza for residents and also recommends immunization for all healthcare workers (HCWs) in nursing homes (NHs). We conducted a cross-sectional study to estimate the VC for seasonal influenza vaccination in Norwegian NHs in 2012/2013 since the VC in NHs and HCWs is unknown. METHODS We gathered information from NHs c...

A virtual community (VC) of committed members is of great strategic value to online firms and vendors owing to its ability to attract and retain members. However, online firms and vendors find it difficult to instill commitment among their VC members. Therefore, this study examines the mechanism of customer commitment formation in a relationship-cum-interest based VC. By understanding the mecha...

Let vc(G) denote the minimum size of a vertex cover of a graph G = (V,E). It is well known that one can approximate vc(G) to within a factor of 2 in polynomial time; and despite considerable investigation, no (2−ε)-approximation algorithm has been found for any ε > 0. Because of the many connections between the independence number α(G) and the Lovász theta function θ(G), and because vc(G) = |V ...

Gender composition of VCs shapes the members’ communication style and content, and has a potential in influencing the anticipated benefits from VC participation. Extending prior research on VC participation and group composition, this study examines the moderating effect of gender composition in influencing the linkage between two important identity-based determinants, i.e., identification and ...

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