AB STRACT: The pur pose of this cross-cultural study is to under stand and com pare affec tive dis po si tions toward crit i cal think ing across Chi nese and Amer i can cul tures. Two con ve nience sam ples of 214 and 196 under grad u ate nurs ing stu dents were obtained in Tai wan and the USA, respec tively. The Cal i for nia Crit i cal Thinking Dis po si tions Inven tory (CCTDI) was used to ...

Objective To assess the accuracy of preoperative staging of rectal cancer with magnetic resonance imaging to predict surgical circumferential resection margins. Design Prospective observational study of rectal cancers treated by colorectal multidisciplinary teams between January 2002 and October 2003. Setting 11 colorectal units in four European countries. Participants 408 consecutive patients ...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Pleuritic chest pain, a symptom of pulmonary embolism, is a common presenting symptom in the emergency department. The aim of this study was to validate an algorithm for the diagnosis of pulmonary embolism in emergency department patients with pleuritic chest pain. METHODS This was a prospective, diagnostic cohort study conducted in a large UK city centre emergency d...

HLA-B27 is highly associated with ankylosing spondylitis (AS), but the mechanism is unknown. Among the HLA-B27 alleles, B*2709, which differs by one amino acid from the susceptible B*2705, is not associated with the disease. Here, we analyze the reactivity, in patients with AS and in healthy controls carrying the B*2709 or B*2705 alleles, to an EBV epitope derived from LMP2 (236-244) and to a s...

OBJECTIVE To assess the accuracy of preoperative staging of rectal cancer with magnetic resonance imaging to predict surgical circumferential resection margins. DESIGN Prospective observational study of rectal cancers treated by colorectal multidisciplinary teams between January 2002 and October 2003. SETTING 11 colorectal units in four European countries. PARTICIPANTS 408 consecutive pat...

In 1942, Hirst found that chicken erythrocytes were agglutinated when the cells were mixed with influenza virus at 4 °C and that the agglutinated cells were eluted spontaneously when the temperature was raised to 37 °C. The washed cells once eluted from the virus were never agglutinated by a newly added influenza virus. This phenomenon made him to introduce a new concept that a specific recepto...

D eciding whether to move to an electronic health record (EHR) system and which system to choose can be paralyzingly difficult questions. We hope this article can help. In the February 2005 issue of Family Practice Management, we published a survey instrument designed to elicit advice from family physicians already using EHR systems, and over the past several months we have collected more than ...

We usually think of a graph visually, i.e. we see vertices as points on a plane or in space, with edges as lines connecting them. When speci ed algebraically (e.g. by its adjacency matrix), the geometrical association is not present. Can we nd a natural embedding of a graph in the plane or in space given the adjacency matrix? This is the question for the lecture. It will turn out that such an e...