BACKGROUND A standardized practical method of post-dialysis blood sampling is required to improve the precision of using urea kinetics in the evaluation of haemodialysis dose and to permit comparative audit. The methods recommended in the Renal Association and Dialysis Outcomes Quality Initiative (DOQI) guidelines reduce the blood pump speed to a low rate at the end of haemodialysis before bloo...

conclusions: premature stop codon in the s gene was observed in all countries with evaluable hbv genome sequences. co-existence of detectable hepatitis b surface antigen (hbsag) and s gene premature stop codon was inconsistent with other studies. investigations on yield truncated hbsag are suggested to determine if they can affect elisa hbsag results. background: we have previously reported on ...

OBJECTIVE To describe the trends in the prevalence of smoking, quitting and initiation among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and women aged 18 years and over. METHODS Analysis of responses to smoking questions in national Indigenous surveys in 1994, 2002, 2004 and 2008. RESULTS Male Indigenous smoking prevalence fell significantly from 58.5% in 1994 to 52.6% in 2008, an absolute d...

Past research found that environmental uncertainty leads people to behave differently depending on their childhood environment. For example, economic uncertainty leads people from poor childhoods to become more impulsive while leading people from wealthy childhoods to become less impulsive. Drawing on life history theory, we examine the psychological mechanism driving such diverging responses t...

OBJECTIVE To describe the socioeconomic and geographic distribution of smoking behaviour in Canada among 19,383 individuals (51% women) aged 15-85 years. METHODS Current smoking and quitting were modeled using standard and multilevel logistic regression. Markers of socioeconomic status (SES) were education and occupation. Geography was defined by Canadian Provinces. RESULTS The adjusted pre...

AIMS To document accurately the amount of quitting, length of quit attempts and prevalence of plans and serious thought about quitting among smokers. DESIGN We used longitudinal data from 7 waves of the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Four Country Survey (ITC-4). We considered point-prevalence data and cumulative prevalence over the 7 years of the study. We also derived annual...

In working environments with large manipulators, accidental collisions can cause severe personal injuries and can seriously damage manipulators, necessitating the development of an emergency stop algorithm to prevent such occurrences. In this paper, we propose an emergency stop system for the efficient and safe operation of a manipulator by applying an intelligent emergency stop algorithm. Our ...

The Stop Signal Task (SST), a commonly used measure of response inhibition, uses standard psychophysical methods to gain an estimate of the time needed to withhold a prepotent response. Under some circumstances, conventional forms of the SST are impractical to use because of the large number of trials necessary to gain a reliable estimate of the speed of inhibition. Here we applied to the SST a...

In-frame stop codons normally signal termination during mRNA translation, but they can be read as 'sense' (readthrough) depending on their context, comprising the 6 nt preceding and following the stop codon. To identify novel contexts directing readthrough, under-represented 5' and 3' stop codon contexts from Saccharomyces cerevisiae were identified by genome-wide survey in silico. In contrast ...

This report presents a method for investigation of speech planning processes that uses a stop-signal paradigm. An experiment was conducted to investigate how produced speech rhythm and syllable stress influence the ability to halt speech in mid-utterance. Subjects produced three sentences with precisely controlled metrical patterns, and on 75% of trials were given a signal at a random time to s...