Background: Chronic skin wounds are a growing financial burden for healthcare providers, causing discomfort/immobility to patients. Whilst animal chronic wound models have been developed to allow for mechanistic studies and to develop/test potential therapies, such systems are not good representations of the human chronic wound state. As an alternative, human chronic wound fibroblasts (CWFs) ha...

OBJECTIVE To elicit prescribers' preferences for behavioural economics interventions designed to reduce inappropriate antibiotic prescribing, and compare these to actual behaviour. DESIGN Discrete choice experiment (DCE). SETTING 47 primary care centres in Boston and Los Angeles. PARTICIPANTS 234 primary care providers, with an average 20 years of practice. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES Re...

A bar-and-joint framework is a finite set of points together with specified distances between selected pairs. In rigidity theory we seek to understand when the remaining pairwise distances are also fixed. If there exists a pair of points which move relative to one another while maintaining the given distance constraints, the framework is flexible; otherwise, it is rigid. Counting conditions due...

This paper examines the notion of ‘irrelevant’alternatives in the context of social choice problems. It is shown that seemingly irrelevant alternatives could be relevant because of their information content. This leads to a consideration of aggregation rules where an endogenous condition of independence of irrelevant alternatives is imposed. The analysis leads to the characterization of a uniqu...

PERSONAL ATTENTION for each student—not a cliché but a reality in any size school enrollment —is the missing link in the overwhelming number of cases of youth who are labeled “unmotivated.” For most, a successful reversal to “motivated” requires a search for a confluence of mind, spirit, and body. Evaluating only cognitive growth through language and math scores begs the question, for almost al...

In the latest issue of this journal, Lefevre et al.’s paper [1] raises the important question of how to combine belief functions from different sources and how to manage conflicts. They propose a parametrized combination rule that includes several existing combination rules as special cases. Their method is based on so-called weighting factors that determine how conflicting masses are to be dis...

In many languages, quantificational and focusing elements may not intervene between a wh-phrase and the interrogative complementizer by which it is licensed. Among the semantic approaches to explaining this phenomenon, there are two that make different predictions as to the intervener status of focus particles. According to the first approach, all focus particles are interveners. According to t...