web information usability is a new issue, which has attracted many specialists in these days. it has been of great importance regarding the increasing growth of web sites requiring quality monitoring. web quality measurement has intrinsic difficulties and complexities, pushing specialists to devise automatic ways to measure its different aspects, among them usability and accessibility. this stu...

Since their appearance, cartoons and their creators took interest in social and political facts and figures. Often a more direct witness than a text, cartoons were quickly transformed from their initial entertaining role, to a tool to attack oppressors and reveal social injustices. To easily communicate with their public, they had to share the same codes and experiences that lived their audienc...

OBJECTIVE To assess the clinical status of chronic spontaneous urticaria (CSU) and understand treatment approaches in Italy through specialists who treat CSU (dermatologists and allergy specialists) and CSU patients' experience. DESIGN Multicentre survey. SETTING Online structured questionnaires (one for physicians and one for patients). PARTICIPANTS Physicians and patients with CSU in It...

OBJECTIVES To identify obstacles impeding the use of the reply letter by secondary level specialists in the municipality of Camaragibe, Pernambuco, Brazil, and to highlight possible solutions for improving communication at the interface between secondary level specialist care and primary care. METHODS Conducted in 2003, this qualitative study used semistructured interviews with 10 randomly se...

BACKGROUND The "gatekeeping" model of access to specialty care has been an essential managed care tool, intended to control costs of care and promote coordination between generalists and specialists. OBJECTIVE To investigate the impact of removing gatekeeping on specialist utilization. METHODS A capitated multispecialty group discontinued a gatekeeping system on April 1, 1998. We assessed t...

Theory predicts that dietary specialization is limited in part because of physiological trade-offs associated with specialization. Specifically, dietary specialists are predicted to evolve mechanisms that reduce costs and enhance excretion of plant secondary metabolites (PSMs) that they frequently consume, but are less energetically and/or mechanistically efficient at eliminating novel PSMs. Al...