There has been a general tendency for learning to get further removed from experience as students progress from primary education, through secondary education, and to tertiary education. Learning becomes more language-based, conceptual, and abstract. There are important side effects. In the domain of physics, for example, it is well known that many students can readily solve physics problems dr...

162 Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care 2003: 29(3) Background Inevitably there are limited long-term safety data for any new contraceptive method. Detailed scientific studies, performed in a small number of women, provide evidence on mode of action. Larger clinical trials examine efficacy, side effects and acceptability. The number of women-years of exposure is less than fo...

Many privacy preserving data mining algorithms attempt to selectively hide what database owners consider as sensitive. Specifically, in the association-rules domain, many of these algorithms are based on item-restriction methods; that is, removing items from some transactions in order to hide sensitive frequent itemsets. The infancy of this area has not produced clear methods neither evaluated ...

Consider an n-vertex planar graph G. We present an O(n)-time algorithm for computing an embedding of G with minimum distance from the external face. This bound improves on the best previous bound by an O(n log n) factor. As a side effect, our algorithm improves the bounds of several algorithms that require the computation of a minimum distance embedding.

We followed the work of an international research network that holds regular meetings in technology-enhanced environments. The team is geographically distributed and to support its collaborative work it uses a set of technical artifacts, including audioand videoconferencing systems and a media space. We have been studying some of the techniques and social conventions the team develops for its c...

In this thesis I will give a formal definition of side effects. I will do so by modifying a system for modelling program instructions and program states, Quantified Dynamic Logic, to a system called DLAf (for Dynamic Logic with Assignments as Formulas), which in contrast to QDL allows assignments in formulas and makes use of short-circuit evaluation. I will show the underlying logic in those fo...

This is a clearly deleterious process, which seems difficult to conciliate with natural selection, which predicts evolution towards increasing fitness. Historically, the first evolutionary explanation able to conciliate these two processes is known as the mutation accumulation theory (Medawar, 1952). According to this theory, in age-structured populations the force of selection decreases with i...

Introduction Preterm birth is still a major health problem throughout the world. Preterm birth results in 75% of neonatal mortality. We sought to identify risk factors which cause preterm birth. Materials and Methods This cross-sectional study assessed all preterm neonates born in Asali Hospital in Khorram Abad (either by NVD or C/S) during the first 6 months of 2007. Sampling method was censu...

Background Pre-eclampsia and the subsequent eclampsia account for a common cause of maternal mortality worldwide and efforts aimed at reducing its menace are vital. Objective To estimate the serum magnesium levels in pre-eclampsia and eclampsia and to study the effect of using different regimens of magnesium sulphate. Methods 70 cases of pre-eclampsia and eclampsia and 35 normal pregnant women ...

Reported maternal and child health (MCH) outcomes in Nigeria are amongst the worst in the world, with Nigeria second only to India in the number of maternal deaths. At the national level, maternal mortality ratios (MMRs) are estimated at 630 deaths per 100,000 live births (LBs) but vary from as low as 370 deaths per 100,000 LBs in the southern states to over 1,000 deaths per 100,000 LBs in the ...