OBJECTIVE To determine the efficacy of computed tomography in creating custom nasal septal buttons. DESIGN Retrospective chart review and telephone follow-up. SETTING Tertiary care referral center. SUBJECTS Ninety-five patients with symptomatic septal perforations repaired with custom Silastic septal buttons fashioned from reformatted computed tomographic images. Follow-up greater than 1 ...

BACKGROUND Elevators are ubiquitous and active inside hospitals, potentially facilitating bacterial transmission. The objective of this study was to estimate the prevalence of bacterial colonization on elevator buttons in large urban teaching hospitals. METHODS A total of 120 elevator buttons and 96 toilet surfaces were swabbed over separate intervals at 3 tertiary care hospitals on weekdays ...

Buttons & Scissors is a popular single-player puzzle. A level is played on an n-by-n grid, where each position is empty or has a single coloured button sewn onto it. The player’s goal is to remove all of the buttons using a sequence of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal scissor cuts. Each cut removes all buttons between two distinct buttons of the same colour, and is not valid if there is an in...

Modern UNIX-based graphical workstations still lack really graphical interfaces. Yet recreating existing UNIX tools with graphical interfaces may prove to be a prohibitive task. This paper describes the design and implementation of a set of tools that make the task of providing a graphical UNIX user interface easier. The main tool, called Perly, provides on-screen graphical buttons connected to...

Gravity mouse is a mouse interface that accelerates the cursor towards potential targets. Its design is based on the premise that as the cursor approaches a potential selection the system can be more certain of the selection. Usability studies with multiple buttons, target and distracter buttons, demonstrate a 100 ms reduction in selection time for 52x41 px buttons and a 130 ms reduction for 19...

We introduce backoff processes, an idealized stochastic model of browsing on the world-wide web, which incorporates both hyperlink traversals and use of the “back button.” With some probability the next state is generated by a distribution over out-edges from the current state, as in a traditional Markov chain. With the remaining probability, however, the next state is generated by clicking on ...