Background: Health care employees are often women, a group that has high degrees of sick leave and perhaps problems attaining occupational balance. However, people think differently about their everyday activities and it is therefore important to take their perceptions into account but occupational balance has not yet been measured in health professionals. The aim was to describe occupational bala

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a chronic inflammatory autoimmune disease which can affect most organ systems including skin, joints and the kidney. Clinically, SLE is a heterogeneous disease and shares features of several other rheumatic diseases, in particular primary Sjögrens syndrome (pSS) and systemic sclerosis (SSc), why it is difficult to diagnose The pathogenesis of SLE is not comple

The question of whether proteins originate from random sequences of amino acids is addressed. A statistical analysis is performed in terms of blocked and random walk values formed by binary hydrophobic assignments of the amino acids along the protein chains. Theoretical expectations of these variables from random distributions of hydrophobicities are compared with those obtained from functional pr

An implicit water all-atom model is used to study folding, aggregation and mechanical unfolding of small proteins. Physically reasonable results obtained for a variety of applications indicate healthy global properties of the interaction potential.

Designing amino acid sequences that are stable in a given target structure amounts to maximizing a conditional probability. A straightforward approach to accomplish this is a nested Monte Carlo where the conformation space is explored over and over again for different fixed sequences. In this paper we discuss an alternative Monte Carlo approach, multisequence design, where conformation and sequenc

To increase the market share of hybrid vehicles within the automotive industry, it is necessary to minimize the cost increase related to the hybridization. In this context a methodology to estimate the cost of the electrical machine and transmission is developed. Insights on the selection of a cost effective electrical machine topology are provided and the benefits and disadvantages of different d

OBJECTIVE:: Early postoperative pain correlates to persisting pain, psychosocial distress, and delayed mobilization with thromboembolic and infectious complications. Electrical pain thresholds (EPT) have shown promising results in being able to predict postoperative pain, but the results are conflicting. The aim of this study was to test whether EPT levels can be used to predict postoperative pain

The nutritional quality of infant food is an important consideration in the effort to prevent a further increase in the rate of childhood obesity. We hypothesized that the canning of composite infant meals would lead to elevated contents of carboxymethyl-lysine (CML) and favor high glycemic and insulinemic responses compared with milder heat treatment conditions. We have compared composite infant

According to the fictitious crack model, the crack width is infinitely thin at crack initiation and with further loading the crack opens, but no material exists in the cohesive zone. Despite that, the crack is assumed to able to sustain a load. While this is possible at the atomic level, it is not a realistic assumption for the macroscopic behavior we are considering. Invoking the mass conservatio

This paper examines the statistical properties of the narrowband Doppler volume backscattering process and analyzes its evolutionary spectrum. After clarifying the mechanism of both the finite duration Doppler effect and the continuously space-shifted integration process, the first two order time-varying statistics under a more general assumption, i.e., von Mises distribution, of random phase are

Effective utilization of the spatial domain enhances the capacity of a mobile radio network. A common technique is to use sector antennas, where the sectors are formed by weighting the outputs from the antenna elements. This results in spatial domain selectivity, which significantly improves the signal-to-(noise and interference) ratio in the received signals. However, the operation of the sector

[Context & motivation] This research preview paper presents ongoing work on the metamodel of a free software requirements modeling tool called reqT that is developed in an educational context. The work aims to make an initial validation of a survey instrument that elicits views on the metamodel of the reqT tool, which aims to engage computer science students in Requirements Engineering (RE) th

Request PermissionsThis paper analyzes subband beamforming schemes mainly aimed at speech enhancement and acoustic echo suppression applications such as hands-free telephony for both mobile and office environments, Internet telephony and video conferencing. Analytical descriptions of both causal finite-length and noncausal infinite-length subband microphone array structures are given. More specifi

Objective: To determine if exercise therapy is superior to arthroscopic partial meniscectomy for knee function in middle aged patients with degenerative meniscal tears. Design: Randomised controlled superiority trial. Setting: Orthopaedic departments at two public hospitals and two physiotherapy clinics in Norway. Participants: 140 adults, mean age 49.5 years (range 35.7-59.9), with degenerative m