BACKGROUND Functional constipation is a common clinical complaint. Although the effectiveness of Ma Zi Ren Wan for alleviating functional constipation symptoms has been proven in a previous randomized placebo-controlled study, further evidence is needed to make clinical recommendations about Chinese herbal medicine. In particular, a comparison with conventional western medicine for functional c...

Background: Massive growth in human mobility has dramatically increased the risk and rate of pandemic spread. Macro-level descriptors of the topology of the World Airline Network (WAN) explains middle and late stage dynamics of pandemic spread mediated by this network, but necessarily regard early stage variation as stochastic. We propose that much of early stage variation can be explained by a...

Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) supports a number of different traffic classes, including Constant Bit Rate (CBR), Available Bit Rate (ABR), and Variable Bit Rate (VBR). Applications wishing to use a particular class must determine the set of traffic parameters which characterize the connection. In this paper, we consider how to engineer the traffic parameters for VBR WAN voice, where multiple...

To allow a seamless integration between wireless LANs and Wireless WANs, we developed a full stack adaptation model and a simple subnet architecture that superimposes Mobile-IP on cellular-type wireless LANs. The idea is to use Mobile IP as an integrative layer atop different LAN/WAN networks. While Mobile-IP is widely used in wireless WANs, it is not known how well it performs under a wireless...

Practical experiments in a wide-area ATM network environment are essential to gain a better understanding of the factors affecting ATM performance. This article summarizes the main lessons learned through the authors' practical experiences with ATM and how these can be applied to performance tuning. In order to achieve maximum performance from an ATM WAN, factors ranging from the transport prot...

The objective of this paper is to show the possible ways of implementing WAN networks over ATM networks. The first part is a presentation of the various standardised network data protocols for the transfer of data on public data networks and their relation to ATM. We quickly come to the realisation that the predominant protocol is currently the TCP/IP, which is also used on the known computer n...