BACKGROUND Overcrowding and prolonged length of stay in emergency departments (ED) are increasing problems in hospitals. Rapid availability of all laboratory results has an impact on clinical decision-making, admissions or discharge decisions and resource utilisation. Increasing number of our urinary drugs of abuse (DOA) screens had a turnaround time (TAT) of up to 33 days after the discharge o...

Three-dimensional (3-D) cloud characterization permits the derivation of important cloud geometry properties such as fractional cloudiness, mean cloud and clear length, aspect ratio, and the morphology of cloud cover. These properties are needed as input to the hierarchical diagnosis (HD) and instantaneous radiative transfer (IRF) models, to validate sub-models for cloud occurrence and formatio...

BACKGROUND Population movements following disasters can cause important increases in morbidity and mortality. Without knowledge of the locations of affected people, relief assistance is compromised. No rapid and accurate method exists to track population movements after disasters. We used position data of subscriber identity module (SIM) cards from the largest mobile phone company in Haiti (Dig...

The nonlinearity and arousal hypothesis predicts that highly aroused mammals will produce nonlinear, noisy vocalizations. We tested this prediction by measuring faecal glucocorticoid metabolites (GCMs) in adult yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventris), and asking if variation in GCMs was positively correlated with Wiener entropy-a measure of noise. Contrary to our prediction, we found a si...

The simulation of major midwinter stratospheric sudden warmings (SSWs) in six stratosphere-resolving general circulation models (GCMs) is examined. The GCMs are compared to a new climatology of SSWs, based on the dynamical characteristics of the events. First, the number, type, and temporal distribution of SSW events are evaluated. Most of the models show a lower frequency of SSW events than th...

This paper describes J-Sim, a Java library for discrete-time process-oriented simulation. J-Sim is a fully portable successor to C-Sim, an already existing library written in C. The concepts used in both libraries are inherited from the Simula language. In this paper, the theoretical background, basic principles of implementation, and a simple example of use are presented.

Significant declines in spring Northern Hemisphere (NH) snow cover extent (SCE) have been observed over the last five decades. As one step toward understanding the causes of this decline, an optimal fingerprinting technique is used to look for consistency in the temporal pattern of spring NH SCE between observations and simulations from 15 global climate models (GCMs) that form part of phase 5 ...

Two statistical downscaling models, the non-homogeneous hidden Markov model (NHMM) and the Statistical Down–Scaling Model (SDSM) were used to generate future scenarios of both mean and extremes in the Tarim River basin,which were based on nine combined scenarios including three general circulation models (GCMs) (CSIRO30, ECHAM5,and GFDL21) predictor sets and three special report on emission sce...

two statistical downscaling models, the non-homogeneous hidden markov model (nhmm) and the statistical down–scaling model (sdsm) were used to generate future scenarios of both mean and extremes in the tarim river basin,which were based on nine combined scenarios including three general circulation models (gcms) (csiro30, echam5,and gfdl21) predictor sets and three special report on emission sce...

In this paper we discuss the problem of efficient use of Content Management Systems in the development of a web site, and we propose a new approach towards the definition of a Green Content Management System (GCMS). Our GCMS distinguishes between pages which contain dynamic data and pages which are not supposed to change frequently. This second kind of documents is generated, off-line, every ti...