objectives: within the context of health-related quality of life studies, it was necessary to translate and evaluate the psychometric properties of the sf-12 health survey version 2. the aim of this study was to investigate the factorial structure, convergent validity and reliability of this instrument in a healthy iranian sample, following translation and establishment of content and face vali...

We present a new approach for site survey by autonomous surface robots. In our method the agent constructs an intelligent map, a multi-scale model of the explored environment incorporating in situ and remote sensing data. The agent learns the model’s parameters on the fly and exploits its predictions to guide adaptive navigation and sampling. In this manner the agent can respond appropriately t...

A fast and inexpensive spectrometer system has been developed to record extreme-UV impurity spectra in a magnetic-fusion-research device. To simplify the vacuum system, light is passed out of the spectrometer's vacuum to the detector with a sodium-salicylate-coated, fiber-optic coupler. This coupler is positioned so that the focal field is nearly flat over its aperture. The system's detector is...

Partial nitritation/anammox (PN/A) has been one of the most innovative developments in biological wastewater treatment in recent years. With its discovery in the 1990s a completely new way of ammonium removal from wastewater became available. Over the past decade many technologies have been developed and studied for their applicability to the PN/A concept and several have made it into full-scal...

We report the results of a national quality-control survey on glycohemoglobin (GHb), monitored in France by the Société Française de Biologie Clinique on behalf of the authority of the "Agence du Médicament." A sample of lyophilized hemolysate was sent to 3109 laboratories. Results were obtained from 2770 laboratories. HbA1C, HbA1, and total GHb were measured by 50%, 24%, and 26% of the partici...

Ganglion cells in an isolated wholemount preparation of the rat retina were labeled using the "DiOlistic" labeling method (Gan et al., 2000) and were classified according to their morphological properties. Tungsten particles coated with a lipophilic dye (DiI) were propelled into the wholemount retina using a gene gun. When a dye-coated particle contacted the cell membrane, the entire cell was l...

We observed the clustered star forming complex NGC1333 with the BIMA and FCRAO telescopes in the transitions HCO(1–0) and N2H (1–0) over an 11 × 11 area with resolution ∼ 10 (0.015 pc). The N2H emission follows very closely the submillimeter dust continuum emission, while HCO emission appears more spatially extended and also traces outflows. We have identified 93 N2H + cores using the CLUMPFIND...

While online survey systems facilitate the collection on copious records on diet, exercise and other healthrelated data, scientists and other public health experts typically must download data from those systems into external tools for conducting statistical analyses. A more convenient approach would enable researchers to perform analyses online, without the need to coordinate additional analys...

We analyse the Las Campanas Redshift Survey using the integrated conditional density (or density of neighbors) in volume-limited subsamples up to unprecedented scales (200 Mpc/h) in order to determine without ambiguity the behavior of the density field. We find that the survey is well described by a fractal up to 20-30 Mpc/h, but flattens toward homogeneity at larger scales. Although the data a...