BACKGROUND Since 2002, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health has invited all hospitals and long-term care facilities for elderly (LTCFs) to participate in two annual point-prevalence surveys covering the most frequent types of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs). In a comprehensive evaluation we assessed how well the system operates to meet its objectives. METHODS Surveillance protocol...

Population aging and changing family patterns have made elder care an important issue. In 1994, German lawmakers enacted a major reform in the country’s long-term care policy, the Dependency Insurance Act (DIA). How, and in what way, will the relative use of formal and informal long-term care services change in response? We address this question using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Eco...

Although most cases of syncope are benign, an adequate evaluation, which begins in the emergency department, is required to exclude life-threatening disorders. In addition, life-threatening disorders such as QT prolongation as well as confounding alternative diagnoses (e.g., seizure disorder) are also discussed.

A distributed connectionist model of spiking neurons (INFERNET) is used to simulate various aspects of Short Term Memory. In INFERNET, short term memory is the transient activation of long term memory elements. This single store model has a human-like performance in short term memory span tasks, but also displays serial position effects, similarity effects, and double dissociation between short...

Controlling for idiosyncratic volatility, large stocks earn higher returns than small stocks. Idiosyncratic volatility is positively related to return, but negatively related to size. Failure to control for idiosyncratic volatility generates a downward omitted variable bias, leading to the widely documented negative size-return relation. We explain the two contrasting sizereturn relations in a ...

This paper proposes a semi-supervised relation acquisition method that does not rely on extraction patterns (e.g. “X causes Y” for causal relations) but instead learns a combination of indirect evidence for the target relation — semantic word classes and partial patterns. This method can extract long tail instances of semantic relations like causality from rare and complex expressions in a larg...

Geographical location and landforms of various types have strong effects on the developments of many cities and associated street networks. This study presents new results of landform effects, in particular the geometry of shorelines, on the grid street networks (a total of 10,442 streets) of three Brazilian coastal cities. The results are compared with the street networks of three coastal citi...