BACKGROUND A laboratory-free test for assessing recovery from pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) would be extremely beneficial in regions of the world where laboratory facilities are lacking. Our hypothesis is that analysis of cough sound recordings may provide such a test. In the current paper, we present validation of a cough analysis tool. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Cough data was collected f...

Moody's endorses the Basel Committee's proposal to use banks' internal risk assessments to re®ne the Basel Accord's risk weights on bank assets and commitments. External risk assessments, such as Moody's credit ratings, will likely play a supporting role as direct inputs into banks' internal rating systems and as tools for benchmarking and validating those systems. However, the widespread use o...

BACKGROUND Current tuberculosis (TB) reporting protocols are insufficient to achieve the goals established by the Stop TB partnership. Some countries have recommended implementation of active case finding program. We assessed the effect of Cough Officer Screening (an active screening system) on the rate of TB detection and health care system delays over the course of four years. METHODS Patie...

mainstream sociology under positivism has sought to provide universal theory, in one hand, and the historiography has attempted to narrative description of events, in the other hand. pathological studies show that both are suffering from extremism; so that mainstream sociology have neglected to study of special affairs and historiography  has not been able to build and provide theoretical gener...

This paper compares and contrasts financial strength ratings assigned by Value Line, Standard and Poor's, and Moody's. All of these rating agencies use modified ratings. When modifiers are considered, these agencies agree between 85 97 percent of the time. A model using stock market information as well as liquidity, leverage, activity and profitability ratios is presented. Cronbach's alpha, a m...

This study aimed to determine whether cough at night keeps children awake, to describe the relationship between children's cough and sleep and to report parents' perceptions of their children's cough and sleep. Thirty-nine children with reported persistent cough at night (>3 weeks) were recruited and studied for 6 nights by video-recording. Coughs were counted and sleep state was coded for awak...

We review the intimate connection between (super-)gravity close to a spacelike singularity (the "BKL-limit") and the theory of Lorentzian Kac-Moody algebras. We show that in this limit the gravitational theory can be reformulated in terms of billiard motion in a region of hyperbolic space, revealing that the dynamics is completely determined by a (possibly infinite) sequence of reflections, whi...