BACKGROUND Physicians do not routinely recommend smokers to undergo spirometry unless they are symptomatic. OBJECTIVE To test the hypothesis that there are a significant number of asymptomatic smokers with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), we estimated the prevalence of COPD in a group of asymptomatic smokers. METHODS Two thousand nine hundred and sixty-one smokers with a cumula...

The class of median filters has been extended to include weighted order statistics (WOS) filters, to improve the flexibility of the filtering operation. The WOS filter weights each input within a sample window, and thus retains the original temporal order information. In this paper, we present efficient VLSI architectures for nonrecursive and recursive WOS filters based on (i) array (ii) stack ...

We describe our initial experiments with several state-of-the-art automated theorem provers on the problems in Tarskian Geometry created by Beeson and Wos. In comparison to the manually-guided OTTER proofs by Beeson and Wos, we can solve a large number of problems fully automatically, in particular thanks to the recent large-theory reasoning methods.

The results of bibliometric studies provided by bibliometric research groups, e.g. the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) and the Institute for Research Information and Quality Assurance (iFQ), are often used in the process of research assessment. Their databases use Web of Science (WoS) citation data, which they match according to their own matching algorithms – in the case of CW...

The “Walk On Spheres” (WOS) algorithm and its relatives have long been used to solve a wide variety of boundary value problems [Ann. Math. Stat. 27 (1956) 569; J. Heat Transfer 89 (1967) 121; J. Chem. Phys. 100 (1994) 3821; J. Appl. Phys. 71 (1992) 2727]. All WOS algorithms that require the construction of random walks that terminate, employ an -shell to ensure their termination in a finite num...

In this paper we examine the rate of convergence of one of the standard algorithms for emulating exit probabilities of Brownian motion, the Walk on Spheres (WoS) algorithm. We obtain a complete characterization of the rate of convergence of WoS in terms of the local geometry of a domain.

We analyze the optimization of the running times of Green’s function first-passage (GFFP) algorithms. The running times for these new first-passage (FP) algorithms [J. Chem. Phys. 106 (9) (1997) 3721; Phys. Fluids A 12 (7) (2000) 1699; J. Comput. Phys. 174 (2) (2001) 925; Monte Carlo Meth. Appl. 7 (3–4) (2001) 213], which use exact Green’s functions for the Laplacian to eliminate the absorption...

We present a novel routine, namely medlineR, based on R language, that enables the user to match data from MEDLINE/PubMed with records indexed in the ISI Web of Science (WoS) database. The matching allows exploiting the rich and controlled vocabulary of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) of MEDLINE/PubMed with additional fields of WoS. The integration provides data (e.g. citation data, list of cit...

A lexical decision experiment tested visual field stimulation of word targets after priming the central visual field by the target word outline shape and/or an incomplete sentence. In general, RT was shorter and accuracy better for target words presented to the RVF. Responses were quicker and more accurate to target words presented to either visual hemifield after priming by either a congruent ...

This paper presents a scientometric study of articles from journals indexed in Web of Science (WoS), subject category “Information Science & Library Science”. The results confirm the Anglo-American dominance in the library and information science literature (included in WoS), which is even stronger if only research-oriented information science journals are considered. The two major exceptions a...