User attitudes towards a hospital virtual nurse agent are described, as evaluated in a randomized clinical trial involving 764 hospital patients. Patients talked to the agent for an average of 29 minutes while in their hospital beds, receiving their customized hospital discharge instructions from the agent and a printed booklet. Patients reported very high levels of satisfaction with and trust ...

In 1984 Scarsini introduced a set of axioms for measures of concordance of ordered pairs of continuous random variables. We exhibit an extension of these axioms to ordered n-tuples of continuous random variables, n ≥ 2. We derive simple properties of such measures, give examples, and discuss the relation of the extended axioms to multivariate measures of concordance previously discussed in the ...

Davis showed that the topological concordance class of a link in the 3-sphere is uniquely determined by its Alexander polynomial for 2-component links with Alexander polynomial one. A similar result for knots with Alexander polynomial one was shown earlier by Freedman. We prove that these two cases are the only exceptional cases, by showing that the link concordance class is not determined by t...

We give necessary conditions of a surface-knot to be ribbon concordant to another, by introducing a new variant of the cocycle invariant of surface-knots in addition to using the invariant already known. We demonstrate that twist-spins of some torus knots are not ribbon concordant to their orientation reversed images.

We study the eta-invariants of links and show that in many cases they form link concordance invariants, in particular that many eta-invariants vanish for slice links. This result contains and generalizes previous invariants by Smolinsky and Cha–Ko. We give a formula for the eta-invariant for boundary links. In several intersting cases this allows us to show that a given link is not slice. We sh...

BACKGROUND Few studies have assessed genital human papillomavirus (HPV) concordance and factors associated with concordance among asymptomatic heterosexual couples. METHODS Genotyping for HPV was conducted with male and female sex partners aged 18-70 years from Tampa, Florida. Eligibility included no history of HPV-associated disease. Type-specific positive concordance (partners with ≥ 1 geno...

Background and Objectives:Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women worldwide. Fine needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB) is one of the methods of breast biopsy which is fast, easy and cost effective. The aim of this study was to evaluate the concordance rate between pathologic results of sonography or stereotaxy guided FNAB and guided core needle biopsy (CNB) in the evaluation of breast le...

The frequency of giant arcs— highly distorted and strongly gravitationally lensed background galaxies— is a powerful test for cosmological models. Previous comparisons of arc statistics for the currently favored concordance cosmological model (a flat lambda-dominated universe) with observations have shown an apparently large discrepancy. We present here new ray-shooting results, based on a high...

The concordance genus of a knot is the least genus of any knot in its concordance class. Although difficult to compute, it is a useful invariant that highlights the distinction between the three-genus and four-genus. In this paper we define and discuss the stable concordance genus of a knot. The stable concordance genus describes the behavior of the concordance genus under connected sum, and ca...