OBJECTIVES General practitioners (GPs) in the UK may be commissioned to provide long-acting reversible contraception (LARC), which may have a role in reducing rates of abortion and unintended pregnancies. Primary care trusts (PCTs) in England had commissioning arrangements with GPs to provide LARC but little is known about such contractual arrangements. We studied the commissioning arrangements...

Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) is a long term, evolving process without a priori known results. Different countries try to develop a National SDI (NSDI) not always with a successful outcome. Although the successes are presented thoroughly (e.g. SDI best practice), it is equally important to highlight unsuccessful efforts in order to comprehensively examine different aspects of the SDI develo...

Do children who practice bullying have more sleep disturbances than those who do not practice bullying? The research questions for this study were 1) Are there are differences in sleep quality between aggressors and non-aggressors and between victims and non-victims? 2)Do aggressors have higher SDI than non-aggressors? 3)What are the sleep characteristics in aggressors, non-aggressors, victims ...

Aneuploidy, the relative excess or deficiency of specific chromosome types, results in gene dosage imbalance. Plants can produce viable and fertile aneuploid individuals, while most animal aneuploids are inviable or developmentally abnormal. The swarms of aneuploid progeny produced by Arabidopsis triploids constitute an excellent model to investigate the mechanisms governing dosage sensitivity ...

BACKGROUND Left ventricular (LV) mechanical dyssynchrony (LVMD) has emerged as a therapeutic target using cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) in selected patients with chronic heart failure. Current methods used to evaluate LVMD are technically difficult and do not assess LVMD of the whole LV simultaneously. We developed and validated real-time 3D echocardiography (RT3DE) as a novel method ...

In peer-to-peer (P2P) systems a very large number of autonomous computing nodes (the peers) pool together their resources and rely on each other for data and services. P2P systems are application level virtual or overlay networks that have emerged as a natural way to share data and resources. The main application scenario considered in recent P2P data sharing systems is that of one-time queryin...