Estimation of small failure probabilities is one of the most important and challenging problems in reliability engineering. In cases of practical interest, the failure probability is given by a high-dimensional integral. Since multivariate integration suffers from the curse of dimensionality, the usual numerical methods are inapplicable. Over the past decade, the civil engineering research comm...

Soft constraints hypothesis (SCH) is a rational analysis approach that holds that the mixture of perceptual-motor and cognitive resources allocated for interactive behavior is adjusted based on temporal cost-benefit tradeoffs. Alternative approaches maintain that cognitive resources are in some sense protected or conserved in that greater amounts of perceptual-motor effort will be expended to c...

Manual material handling (MMH) tasks were evaluated and compared under different lifting conditions. For the theoretical evaluations, a two-dimensional sagittally symmetric human-body model was established to compute the moment and joint load time histories for MMH tasks for a variety of different lift specifications and constraints such as lifting durations, loads, and modes. Nonlinear control...

The circadian clock generates daily rhythms in mammalian liver processes, such as glucose and lipid homeostasis, xenobiotic metabolism, and regeneration. The mechanisms governing these rhythms are not well understood, particularly the distinct contributions of the cell-autonomous clock and central pacemaker to rhythmic liver physiology. Through microarray expression profiling in Met murine hepa...

BACKGROUND Postoperative pain associated with Milligan Morgan haemorrhoidectomy (MMH) remains problematic. Most patients complaint a severe pain on defecation and in the 1st postoperative week because of secondary infection and sphincter spasm. We studied the effect of metronidazole, lactulose and glyceryl-trinitrate on pain after MMH. METHOD Thirty patients were randomly assigned to two grou...

Background: A combination of epithelial cells and lymphocytes results in a varied histomorphology of thymomas and consequent varied classification systems. Aim: To correlate the Marino and Muller-Hermelink (MMH) classification with the invasive behaviour of

has been widely accepted as the main surgical treatment of hemorrhoids for a long history, but it is notorious for the level of post operative pain the patient must endure, coupled with a long recuperation period. Stapled hemorrhoidopexy was presented as a procedure for prolapsed hemorrhoids (PPH) in 1998 by Longo. From the view points of lesser post operative pain and short recuperation period...

Environmental protection agencies have begun imposing stringent regulations on the existing refineries to control levels of gasoline additives. In this context, a novel compound, 2-methoxy-2-methylheptane (MMH), had drawn attention as fuel additive for cleaner combustion. The conventional process MMH production features three distillation columns in direct sequence. These are used maintain requ...