Is it true that “the orang-utan could be virtually extinct within five years”, as reported by [1] in a recent issue of Current Biology? The dire conservation status of this ape warrants a sense of urgency [2], but we would like to present a more balanced view and highlight the emergence of some positive trends. Illegal logging, forest conversion and associated fires occur in most Indonesian nat...

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS — We examined participants in the San Antonio Heart Study, a prospective population-based study of Mexican Americans and non-Hispanic whites residing in San Antonio, Texas. BMI was stratified into four categories: normal ( 25 kg/m), overweight ( 25 kg/m and 30 kg/m), obese ( 30 kg/m and 35 kg/m), and very obese ( 35 kg/m). The number and proportion of incident cases ...

BACKGROUND Prenatal maternal intent to breastfeed can indicate postnatal breastfeeding practices and may serve to indicate potential barriers to breastfeeding. Breastfeeding rates in West Virginia, a primarily rural state, are among the lowest in the United States, and minimal research has been published to date on population-based prenatal intent to breastfeed among rural women. METHODS Seco...

Natural stress and disturbances are important factors affecting the structure and function of ecosystems. However, the magnitude of stress has escalated due to anthropogenic activities. Environmental monitoring and toxicity assessments try to protect ecosystems from unwanted human alterations. The major aim of this Doctoral thesis was to increase the understanding of the complex effects that en...

The origin of the population health approach is an historic debate over the relationship between economic growth and human health. In Britain and France, the Industrial Revolution disrupted population health and stimulated pioneering epidemiological studies, informing the early preventive public health movement. A century-long process of political adjustment between the forces of liberal democr...

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS Adenosquamous carcinoma (ASC) is a rare entity, with fewer than 100 cases having been reported in the upper aerodigestive tract. Thus, no large samples characterizing its clinical behavior are available in the literature. Investigation of ASC has been further limited by difficulty in establishing histopathologic diagnosis. Our objective was to use a national population-bas...

With a number of students, the purpose of collaborative learning is to assign these students to the right teams so that the promotion of skills of each team member can be facilitated. Although some team formation solutions have been proposed, the problem of extracting more effective features to describe the skill proficiency of students for better collaborative learning is still open. To that e...

Models provide an alternative perspective for the understanding of a software system. However, models reflect the state of the system at the time of their creation (or last updating) but they do not reflect intermediate changes during the system’s evolution. Depicting perspectives without showing changes is like watching a movie through a small set of still pictures (i.e., no motion). This pape...

Teaching software engineering in an applied setting with projects provided by clients from industry creates a realworld learning experience for students. While clients are domain experts well-aware of the system’s requirements, they often lack technical knowledge required to make decisions regarding the system architecture or the technologies involved in the project. Therefore, it is challengin...

In this paper the architecture and implementation of Cooperative Information Agents (CIA) is described. Taking a language-action perspective to the design of CIAs allows for the specification of obligations and authorizations, and results in the separation of tasks (things the agent must do) and contracts (mutually agreed commitments to the course of communication). The architecture describes t...