The primary education sector in Pakistan faces many challenges relating to access to education and quality of resources. This paper evaluates the Educational Voucher Scheme (EVS) in Lahore, Pakistan aimed at increasing access to primary schooling for low income families residing in the underdeveloped areas of Lahore by using the four criteria for evaluating privatization plans in education outl...

HOSSEIN JAHANGIRIAN, MD JELAS HARON, MOHD HALIM SHAH ISMAIL , ROSHANAK RAFIEE-MOGHADDAM, LEILI AFSAH-HEJRI d , YADOLLAH ABDOLLAHI , MAJID REZAYI , NAZANIN VAFAEI f Department of Chemical and environmental engineering, Faculty of engineering, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 UPM, Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia Chemistry Unit, Centre of Foundation Studies for Agricultural Science, Universiti Putra M...

BACKGROUND Ventilator practices in patients at risk for acute lung injury (ALI) and ARDS are unclear. We examined factors associated with choice of set tidal volumes (VT), and whether VT < 8 mL/kg predicted body weight (PBW) relates to the development of ALI/ARDS. METHODS We performed a secondary analysis of a multicenter cohort of adult subjects at risk of lung injury with and without ALI/AR...

BACKGROUND The prognostic value of inflammation indexes in esophageal cancer has not been established. Recent studies have shown that the advanced lung cancer inflammation index (ALI) is a useful predictive factor. The purpose of the current study was to determine whether the ALI is useful for predicting long-term survival in patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC). PATIENTS A...

The univariate conditioning of copulas is studied, yielding a construction method for copulas based on an a priori given copula. Based on the gluing method, g-ordinal sum of copulas is introduced and a representation of copulas by means of g-ordinal sums is given. Though different right conditionings commute, this is not the case of right and left conditioning, with a special exception of Archi...

INTRODUCTION Sepsis-induced acute lung injury (ALI) has been reported to have a higher case fatality rate than other causes of ALI. However, differences in the severity of illness in septic vs. non-septic ALI patients might explain this finding. METHODS 520 patients enrolled in the Improving Care of ALI Patients Study (ICAP) were prospectively characterized as having sepsis or non sepsis-indu...

Receptor for advanced glycation end-products (RAGE) is a marker of alveolar type I cells and is elevated in the pulmonary edema fluid of patients with acute lung injury (ALI). We tested the hypothesis that RAGE in the bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) would be elevated in experimental models of direct ALI characterized by alveolar epithelial cell injury. We developed ELISA measurements for RAGE and ...

INTRODUCTION Acute lung injury (ALI) can result from various insults to the pulmonary tissue. Experimental and clinical data suggest that spontaneous breathing (SB) during pressure-controlled ventilation (PCV) in ALI results in better lung aeration and improved oxygenation. Our objective was to evaluate whether the addition of SB has different effects in two different models of ALI. METHODS F...