This study reports the feasibility of reusing glass fibre waste resulting from the thermolysis of polyester fibreglass (PFG) to produce a glass-ceramic material. PFG was treated at 550oC for 3 h in a 9.6 dm thermolytic reactor. This process yielded a solid residue (≈68 wt.%), an oil (≈24 wt.%) and a gas (≈8 wt.%). The oil was mainly composed of aromatic (≈84%) and oxygenated compounds (≈16%) an...

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to evaluate whether light-emitting diodes (LEDs) could be effective in a noninvasive, therapeutic device for the treatment of osteoarthritic (OA) knee joints. DESIGN Five weeks following the anterior cruciate ligament transection (ACLT) of mature New Zealand White rabbits, the animal knees were exposed to LED stimulation at intervals of 10 min/day, 5 ...

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) is changing its method of measuring the growth of the U.S. economy. Shifts in the structure of the economy—particularly the spectacular fall in computer prices—have meant that BEA’s traditional “fixed-base-year” method of tracking the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) has tended to overstate growth in recent years. As a res...

As a continuation of the research on the BGK type schemes, in this paper we present a second order unsplitting method for the shallow water equations. Diierent from any other approaches, the source terms are included explicitly into the time-dependentux functions across cell interface.

As total health care expenditures are expected to constitute an increasing portion of the US gross domestic product during the coming years, the US health care system is anticipating a historic spike in the need for care. Outsourcing medical and surgical care to other nations has expanded rapidly, and several ethical, legal, and financial considerations require careful evaluation. Ultimately, t...

Among the proposed network models, the hidden variable (or good get richer) one is particularly interesting, even if an explicit empirical test of its hypotheses has not yet been performed on a real network. Here we provide the first empirical test of this mechanism on the world trade web, the network defined by the trade relationships between world countries. We find that the power-law distrib...

Since 1990, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has published a series of annual Human Development Reports (HDRs) in which the human development index (HDI) is computed for each country. This index has become an important alternative to the traditional unidimensional measure of development (i.e. the gross domestic product). Although the index still fails to include any ecological co...

In this paper, a gas-kinetic Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (BGK) model is constructed for the Rayleigh-Bénard thermal convection in the incompressible flow limit, where the flow field and temperature field are described by two coupled BGK models. Since the collision times in the corresponding BGK models can be different, the Prandtl number can be changed to any value instead of a fixed Pr=1 in the orig...

gross domestic product plus a small percentage. If one used data from recent years, both of these metrics would only slow the growth of health spending relative to the size of the economy as a whole. We do not expect that Baumol’s hypothesis will be proved false, but one may reasonably hope that the previously inexorable expansion of the fraction of our national effort that is devoted to health...

OBJECTIVE To describe the number and distribution of pediatricians per child nationally and on a state-by-state basis relative to the economic conditions within each state. STUDY DESIGN Real inflation-adjusted gross domestic product (GDP) per capita (1996 dollars) was plotted against the number of all active physicians and pediatricians in the United States for all years data were available. ...