'What Manchester thinks today, London thinks tomorrow' (19th century saying) This issue is dedicated to Manchester and its celebration of 60 years of academic occupational medicine. As a Mancunian myself I am particularly proud to be writing this editorial and introducing you to a special issue that has seen the people of Manchester respond to another challenge. Whether it is industry, art, mus...

Concurrent Time-stamp Systems (ctss) allow processes to temporally order concurrent events in an asynchronous shared memory system, a powerful tool for concurrency control, serving as the basis for solutions to coordination problems such as mutual exclusion, `-exclusion, randomized consensus, and multi-writer multi-reader atomic registers. Solutions to these problems all use an \unbounded numbe...

In the late seventies, Pnueli suggested that functional properties of reactive systems be formally expressed in temporal logic. In order that model checking such a logic be possible, it must have sufficient expressive power, its semantics must be formally defined in a rigorous way, and the complexity of model checking it must be well understood and reasonable. In order to allow widespread adopt...

A comprehensive graphical analysis approach to perform data exploration utilizing the latest capabilities available in SAS systems are presented here. This ® practical approach integrates graphical analysis tools available in SAS systems and provides step-wise instructions to perform data exploration quickly without writing SAS program statements or using menu interface by running the SAS macro...

Several concise formulations of mathematical induction are presented and proven equivalent. The formulations are expressed in variable-free relation algebra and thus are in terms of relations only, without mentioning the related objects. It is shown that the induction principle in this form lends itself very well for use in calculational proofs. As a non-trivial example a proof of a generalisat...

The complementation problem for nondeterministic word automata has numerous applications in formal verification. In particular, the language-containment problem, to which many verification problems is reduced, involves complementation. For automata on finite words, which correspond to safety properties, complementation involves determinization. The 2 blow-up that is caused by the subset constru...

This is a short book, 207 pages excluding the index, and is ideal for health professionals who wish to learn about or improve their skills in clinical evidence and critical appraisal. The reader can use the book like a critical appraisal course manual working through each chapter consecutively. Alternatively for the person with some knowledge of clinical evidence methodology and critical apprai...

Haemost 2013; 110: 308-315. Dabigatran, an oral thrombin inhibitor, is licensed as an alternative to warfarin for stroke prevention in patients with atrial fibrillation. As the first of the new oral anticoagulants (NOACs) to gain approval for this indication, its use is increasing now that its safety has been confirmed using real-world data (1, 2), and clinical guidelines have given preference ...

A Z-plasty is a critical and reliable technique that is useful for scar revisions and correction of free margin distortion. A Z-plasty can help lengthen a contracted scar, change the direction of a scar so that it is better aligned with the relaxed skin tension lines, or interrupt and break a scar for better camouflage. This article will review the technique of a basic Z-plasty as well as provi...