Fusion procedures are an accepted and successful management strategy to alleviate pain and/or neurological symptoms associated with degenerative disease of the lumbar spine. In 2005, the first version of the "Guidelines for the performance of fusion procedures for degenerative disease of the lumbar spine" was published in the Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine. In an effort to incorporate evidence ...

New approaches to generating and evaluating toxicity data for chemicals are needed to cope with the ever-increasing demands of new programs. One such approach involves the use of an integrated testing and evaluation strategy based on the specific properties and activities of a chemical. Such an integrated strategy, whether applied to existing or future programs, can promote efficient use of res...

Tiered wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have many advantages over traditional WSNs. However, they are vulnerable to security attacks, especially the attacks to the storage nodes that buffer and process the data readings from sensors. In this paper, we propose a secure data collection protocol SDC to support timebased queries in tiered WSNs. With small overhead introduced to data communication, S...

This study presented a transformation approach of Model Driven Architecture for 3-tiered applications. Mapping rules from computation independent model to platform independent model and from platform independent model to platform specific model were developed. This approach was demonstrated using an on-line bookshop application. With this approach, the weak link of Model Driven Architecture, tr...

changes in credit risk may arise when either the value or the risk of corporate assets changes. changes in the equity value associated with the changes in the asset value and changes in asset risk can be characterized into potentially countervailing direct and indirect effects. the indirect effect of risk on equity value is a function of factors that affect the debt value of including leverage,...

In the present study, we experimentally tested the role of hand motor circuits in simple-arithmetic strategies. Educated adults solved simple additions (e.g., 8 + 3) or simple subtractions (e.g., 11 - 3) while they were required to retrieve the answer from long-term memory (e.g., knowing that 8 + 3 = 11), to transform the problem by making an intermediate step (e.g., 8 + 3 = 8 + 2 + 1 = 10 + 1 ...