Online discussion forum (ODF) has been touted to enrich the process of acquiring, sharing and exchanging knowledge among students and has increasingly being utilized to complement the conventional ways of teaching. Despite the widespread recognition of the benefits brought about by ODF, antecedent evidence indicates that the forum may not be utilized to its full potential due to lower than expe...

Normal dynamic loading prevents bone resorption; however, the means whereby biophysical factors reduce osteoclast activity are not understood. We show here that mechanical strain (2% at 10 cycles per minute) applied to murine marrow cultures reduced 1, 25(OH)(2)D(3)-stimulated osteoclast formation by 50%. This was preceded by decreased expression of osteoclast differentiation factor (ODF/TRANCE...

Background: Retinal vein pulsation is often absent in glaucoma, but can be induced by applying a graded ophthalmodynamometric force (ODF) to the eye, which is elevated in glaucoma. Aim: To assess whether ODF has a predictive value in determining glaucoma progression. Methods: 75 patients with glaucoma and suspected glaucoma were examined prospectively in 1996, and then re-examined at a mean of ...

In this work, a novel method for determining the principal directions (maxima) of the diffusion orientation distribution function (ODF) is proposed. We represent the ODF as a symmetric high-order Cartesian tensor restricted to the unit sphere and show that the extrema of the ODF are solutions to a system of polynomial equations whose coefficients are polynomial functions of the tensor elements....

BACKGROUND The similarities between gametogenic and carcinogenesis processes have been noted for more than decades. Among prominent similarities between these two processes is expression of a group of antigens, namely cancer-testis antigens in both the testes and various cancer tissues. Outer dense fiber (ODF) proteins are testis-specific proteins localized to sperm tails and involved in sperm ...

The online discussion forum (ODF) is one of the most widely used e-learning tools in open distance learning (ODL) environments. A popular line of research focuses on producing instruments that can be used to assess the level and amount of learning that takes place via transcript analysis of ODF-discourse. Of current interest is the influential community of inquiry (CoI) theoretical framework, f...

Introduction. The geometric median is a classic robust estimator of centrality for data in Euclidean spaces, and it has been generalized in analytical manifold in [1]. Recently, an intrinsic Riemannian framework for Orientation Distribution Function (ODF) was proposed for the calculation in ODF field [2]. In this work, we prove the unique existence of the Riemannian median in ODF space. Then we...

Opportunistic Data Forwarding (ODF) has drawn much attention in mobile adhoc networking research in recent years. The effectiveness of ODF in MANET depends on a suitable routing protocol which provides a powerful source routing services. PLSR is featured by source routing, loop free and small routing overhead. The update messages in PLSR are integrated into a tree structure and no need to time ...

Independent component analysis (ICA) does not follow the superposition rule. This motivates us to study a negative event-related potential - mismatch negativity (MMN) estimated by the single-trial based ICA (sICA) and averaged trace based ICA (aICA), respectively. To sICA, an optimal digital filter (ODF) was used to remove low-frequency noise. As a result, this study demonstrates that the perfo...

A software package for the calculation of diffraction elastic constants (DEC) for materials both with and without preferred orientation was developed. All grain-interaction models that can use the crystallite orientation distribution function (ODF) are incorporated, including Kröner, Hill, inverse Kröner, and Reuss. The functions of the software include: reading the ODF in common textual format...