CONTEXT The yield of in-hospital stool cultures performed more than 72 hours after admission is low, and a commonly used policy dictates that laboratories reject these cultures to save costs. However, enteropathogenic bacteria other than Clostridium difficile (EPB) may cause nosocomial illness that would be missed by use of such a "3-day rule." OBJECTIVE To develop guidelines for hospital use...

Model selection is a necessary step in many practical regression analyses. But for methods based on estimating equations, such as the quasi-likelihood and generalized estimating equation (GEE) approaches, there seem to be few well-studied model selection techniques. In this article, we propose a new model selection criterion that minimizes the expected predictive bias (EPB) of estimating equati...

Role of Soil Plasticity in Evaluating Clay Conditioning for EPB Tunnelling Soil clogging occurred at the early construction stage of Nanchang Metro Line 1, China, when an earth balance pressure (EPB) shield passed through the argillaceous siltstone with a total content of clay minerals of 40.5%. To avoid the reappearance of soil clogging at the later stage, a new scheme was proposed to determin...

This paper analyzes various schemes for the Euler-Poisson-Boltzmann (EPB) model of plasma physics. This model consists of the pressureless gas dynamics equations coupled with the Poisson equation and where the Boltzmann relation relates the potential to the electron density. If the quasi-neutral assumption is made, the Poisson equation is replaced by the constraint of zero local charge and the ...

In response to the sustainable development goal of agriculture put forward by United Nations, countries have introduced a series agricultural environmental protection policies. However, effectiveness these policies has been hindered insufficient responses from farmers. This study begins with fundamental logic farmers’ production behavior and first introduces family place identities into theoret...

BACKGROUND It is important to understand the anatomical relationship between the medial and lateral branches of superficial radial nerve (SRN) and the first dorsal compartment to prevent and minimize possible injury to these nerves during various procedures around the tip of radial styloid process (RSP). OBJECTIVE To delineate the anatomical location of the SRN in relation to the extensor pol...

The 'impassable' Eastern Pacific Barrier (EPB), ca 5000 km of deep water separating the eastern from the central Pacific, is the World's widest marine biogeographic barrier. Sequencing of mitochondrial DNA in 20 reef fish morphospecies encountered on both sides of the barrier revealed cryptic speciation in two. Among the other 18 species only two showed significant differentiation (as revealed ...

Using 1024 nights of data from 2002–2005 taken by the Cornell Narrow Field Imager (CNFI), we examine equatorial plasma bubble (EPB) zonal drift velocity characteristics. CNFI is located at the Maui Space Surveillance Site on the Haleakala Volcano (geographic: 20.71 N, 203.83 E; geomagnetic: 21.03 N, 271.84 E) on the island of Maui, Hawaii. The imager is set up to view in a magnetic fieldaligned...

Airglow imaging at mid-latitude stations often show intensity modulations associated with medium scale travelling ionospheric disturbances (MSTID), while those carried out near the equatorial regions reveal depletions caused by equatorial plasma bubbles (EPB). Two all sky cameras are used to observe plasma depletions in the 630.0 nm emission over the equatorial ionization anomaly (EIA) region, ...

The purpose of this study was to compare the range of motion (ROM) and strength of the metacarpophalangeal (MP) and interphalangeal (IP) joints among massage practitioners with and without thumb pain and control subjects. Sixteen massage practitioners with thumb pain, 16 practitioners without thumb pain, and 16 control subjects participated in this study. ROM of flexion, extension, and abductio...