Screening questions have been proposed as practical tools for detecting limited functional health literacy, but have achieved only moderate accuracy in previous studies. We hypothesized that a combination of screening questions and demographic characteristics could better predict a patient's functional health literacy. Three hundred and twenty-two hospital users from São Paulo, Brazil, were int...

This with the integration of distributed generation (DG) to meshed distribution systems, the operating time of the protective system becomes a major concern in order to avoid nuisance DG tripping. This paper proposes a new tripping characteristic for directional overcurrent relays (DOCRs) that can achieve a higher possible reduction of overall relays operating time in meshed distribution networ...

The distribution of the duration of trips in a metropolitan area is an important input to estimating area-wide running loss emissions, operating mode fractions and vehicle miles of travel (VMT) accumulated on local roads in the region. In the current paper, we formulate and implement a methodology for modeling trip durations. The approach develops a log-linear regression model of the duration o...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to investigate the clinical outcome of intracardiac echocardiography (ICE) for transcatheter closure of atrial septal defect (ASD) compared with the trans-esophageal echocardiography (TEE) guided method. METHODS From May 2010 to April 2011, 46 patients who underwent ICE guided (n=23) or TEE guided (n=23) transcatheter closure of ASD were analyzed retrospec...

There have been recent efforts to use social media to estimate demographic characteristics, such as age, gender or income, but there has been little work on investigating the effect of data acquisition methods on producing these estimates. In this paper, we compare four different Twitter data acquisition methods and explore their effects on the prediction of one particular demographic character...

A quantitative understanding of cities' demographic dynamics is becoming a potentially useful tool for planning sustainable growth. The concomitant theory should reveal details of the cities' past and also of its interaction with nearby urban conglomerates for providing a reasonably complete picture. Using the exhaustive database of the Census Bureau in a time window of 170 years, we exhibit he...

The aim of this study was to investigate the clinical outcome of intracardiac echocardiography (ICE) for transcatheter closure of atrial septal defect (ASD) compared with the trans-esophageal echocardiography (TEE) guided method. From May 2010 to April 2011, 46 patients who underwent ICE guided (n = 23) or TEE guided (n = 23) transcatheter closure of ASD were analyzed retrospectively. We compar...

OBJECTIVE The authors explored whether demographic and psychosocial variables predicted differences in physical activity for participants with arthritis in a trial of Active Living Every Day (ALED). METHOD Participants (N = 280) from 17 community sites were randomized into ALED or usual care. The authors assessed participant demographic characteristics, self-efficacy, outcome expectations, pa...

Models for infectious diseases usually assume a fixed demographic structure. Yet, a disease can spread over a region encountering different local demographic variations that may significantly alter local dynamics. Spatial heterogeneity in the resulting dynamics can lead to important differences in the design of surveillance and control strategies. We illustrate this by exploring the north-south...