Every year, the United States was estimated to have suffered from billions of dollars of trade losses due to piracy and counterfeiting in China. While the Chinese undeniably have taken a free ride on the creative efforts of Western authors and inventors, greed alone does not explain the massive piracy and counterfeiting problems in the country. Instead, one needs to develop a better understandi...

This paper proposes a revised system of Old Chinese back vowels: *ɤ (之), *u (宵), *o (幽), *ɔ (侯) and *a (魚), which is purely monophthongal and may account for more related phenomena. There are such kinds of mixed rhymes in the Shijing: 之 and 幽, 宵 and 幽, 幽 and 侯. It is due to the sound similarity between the rhyme groups of each pair. The back vowels of Old Chinese widely experienced a raising-di...

Synchronous chat rooms have been used to support students’ collaborative learning. However, little work has empirically studied its relationship with students’ sense of community and furthermore the role of personality in affecting students’ chat room behavior. In this paper, we report results of a user experiment (with 489 students). We find that students who have actively used chat room posse...

Ultrasound is an inexpensive, easy, mobile, dynamic study that has many advantages over other imaging modalities. Several studies have shown the need for ultrasound during procedures, with significantly improved outcomes and patient satisfaction. Other studies have also shown that ultrasound has medical and economic advantages over magnetic resonance imaging. With the increased use of ultrasoun...

BACKGROUND Utilization is used as the principal marker of theatre performance in the NHS. This study investigated its validity as: a managerial tool, an inter-Trust indicator of efficient theatre use and as a marker of service performance for surgeons. METHODS A multivariate linear regression model was constructed using theatre data comprising all elective general surgical operating lists per...