The aim of this study was to determine if a change in neck compliance would influence the risk of sustaining a TBI by quantifying its effects on maximum principal strain in the brain. This was done by impacting a Hybrid III headform with a 16.6 kg impactor arm at 5.5 m·s. Three different Hybrid III neckforms were used: 1) one 50 percentile male neck – standard neck; 2) one 50 percentile male ne...

Anomaly detection is a pattern recognition task whose goal is to report the occurrence of abnormal or unknown behavior in a given system being monitored. In this paper we propose a general procedure for the computation of decision thresholds for anomaly detection in mobile communication networks. The proposed method is based on Kohonen’s Self-Organizing Map (SOM) and the computation of nonparam...

In the 1970s, childhood, and particularly the part of childhood before adolescence, was considered a low–cardiovascular risk state. With the exception of specific conditions such as diabetes mellitus type 1, familial hypercholesterolemia, end stage renal disease, and secondary hypertension, assessment of cardiovascular risk in children seemed unnecessary. Childhood risk factor distributions wer...

Methods 369 parents completed a multidimensional questionnaire (the JAMAR), including Juvenile Arthritis Functionality Scale (JAFS) (score 0–30), Pediatric Rheumatology Quality of Life (PRQL) questionnaire (score 0–30) and traditional JIA outcome measures, and stated whether they considered their children's status satisfactory or not. PASS thresholds were estimated based on parent opinion and t...

PURPOSE To determine the intrarater-reliability, interrater-reliability and normal reference scores of the Semmes Weinstein Monofilament test (SWM) of the feet of healthy subjects. In addition, the stability of the SWM for prospective use was assessed by determining systematic changes in sensory thresholds. METHODS Interrater-reliability was assessed on five locations of the plantar side of b...

Cutaneous sensory thresholds were measured at the index fingertipof eight normal subjects. Electric shocks were applied with the finger at rest or tracking a target, which oscillated at one of three frequencies. For each subject, the sensory threshold was positively correlated with the frequency of oscillation. The correlations between sensory suppression and speed of movement agree with previo...

Potelunas, Meixner and Hardy (1) suggested the possibility that the pain threshold was not uniform in all areas of the body when they found wide variation in such thresholds in normal and pathological skin. Bishop (2) reported that the number, distribution and accessibility of the sensory receptors of the skin varied in different areas. The cutaneous sensory threshold was shown by the author (3...

We propose an incentive pay scheme for educators that links educator compensation to the ranks of their students within appropriately defined comparison sets. Because this scheme employs only ordinal information, it allows education authorities to employ new assessments at each testing date without ever having to equate various assessment forms. Thus, our scheme mitigates incentives for teacher...

Four algorithms for percentile filtering are compared. The ways they can be implemented in hardware and software, their flexibility and their speed are taken into account.

BACKGROUND The prevalence of overweight/obesity, which is an important cardiovascular risk factor, is rapidly increasing worldwide. Abdominal obesity, a fundamental component of the metabolic syndrome, is not defined by appropriate cutoff points for sub-Saharan Africa. OBJECTIVE To provide baseline and reference data on the anthropometry/body composition and the prevalence rates of obesity ty...