Page 1 During my recent in-depth evaluation of ACCION's PortaCredit technology, I interviewed their technical staff and visited the MFIs implementing the technology. What I saw impressed me considerably. The technology takes time to implement, but when done it works and it works quite well. The most important evidence in my mind is that the operational staff love it and would never choose to go...

BACKGROUND Exposure to particulate air pollution is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. The mechanism by which exposure increases risk is poorly understood but could involve changes in the flow properties of blood. OBJECTIVE The aim of this investigation was to assess the effect, in rats, of intratracheal instillation of particulate air pollution on leukocyte flow pro...

BACKGROUND The lymphocytes separated from whole blood are used in HLA flow cytometry crossmatch (FCXM) for renal transplantation. In this study, the methodology of whole blood flow cytometry was applied to FCXM, omitting lymphocyte separation step. METHODS In the 20 cases (including positive 5 cases) of T cell FCXM for renal transplantation, the standard assay using the separated mononuclear ...

Because of the inherent computational complexity, mining the complete frequent itemset in dense datasets remains to be a challenging task. Mining Maximal Frequent Itemset (MFI) is an alternative to address the problem. Set-Enumeration Tree (SET) is a common data structure used in several MFI mining algorithms. For this kind of algorithm, the process of mining MFI’s can also be viewed as the pro...

BACKGROUND Paraoxonase-3 (PON3), as a high density lipoprotein (HDL)-associated lactonase, is capable of preventing the oxidative modification of low density lipoprotein (LDL). PON3 activity in follicular fluid (FF) is three times more than its activity in serum. However, the detailed role of PON3 in women's fertility remains unknown. The aim of this study was to investigate the correlation bet...

B eing agile is a declaration of prioritizing for project maneuverability with respect to shifting requirements, shifting technology, and a shifting understanding of the situation. Other priorities that might override agility include predictability , cost, schedule, process-accreditation, or use of specific tools. Most managers run a portfolio of projects having a mix of those priorities. They ...

The field of microfinance emerged in the developing world as a vehicle to provide financial services to poor segments of population is gradually being seen as a profitable business opportunity. In the initial stages of development, these activities were perceived to be done with a service agenda. As the micro finance institutions (MFIs) began to mature, they started facing performance dilemma, ...

The role of humans in historic fire regimes has received little quantitative attention. Here, we address this inadequacy by developing a fire history in northeastern Oklahoma on lands once occupied by the Cherokee Nation. A fire event chronology was reconstructed from 324 tree-ring dated fire scars occurring on 49 shortleaf pine (Pinus echinata) remnant trees. Fire event data were examined with...

Flow cytometry has provided a powerful tool for analyzing bacteria-host cell associations. Established approaches have used bacteria, labeled either directly with fluorochromes or indirectly with fluorescently conjugated antibodies, to detect these associations. Although useful, these techniques are consistently unable to include all host cells in the analysis while excluding free, aggregated b...