Regional Difference

Studies suggest that between 30% and 50% of the adult population in industrialized nations use some form of complementary and/or alternative medicine (CAM) to prevent or treat a variety of health-related problems. A comprehensive literature search identified 25 surveys conducted between 1982 and 1995 that examined the practices and beliefs of conventional physicians with regard to 5 of the more prominent CAM therapies: acupuncture, chiropractic, homeopathy, herbal medicine, and massage. Six studies were excluded owing to their methodological limitations. Across surveys, acupuncture had the highest rate of physician referral (43%) among the 5 CAM therapies, followed by chiropractic (40%) and massage (21%). Rates of CAM practice by conventional physicians varied from a low of 9% for homeopathy to a high of 19% for chiropractic and massage therapy. Approximately half of the surveyed physicians believed in the efficacy of acupuncture (51%), chiropractic (53%), and massage (48%), while f...

In this paper, we have proposed an approach for building extraction from very high resolution (VHR) multispectral images using NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) based segmentation and morphological operations. This approach uses both spatial and spectral properties of an image scene for building detection. Spectral properties are related to NDVI based segmentation and spatial properties are related to the morphological

There is increasing evidence that consumption of raw fresh produce is a major factor contributing to human gastrointestinal illness. A wide variety of pathogens contribute to food-borne illnesses, including bacteria (e.g., Salmonella, pathogenic Escherichia coli), protozoa (e.g., Cryptosporidium, Giardia), and viruses (e.g., noroviruses). Large-scale production of produce typically requires some form of irrigation during the growing season. There is a rapidly growing body of research documenting and elucidating the pathways of produce contamination by water-borne pathogens. However, many gaps still exist in our knowledge and understanding. The purpose of this review is to provide a comprehensive approach to the issue, including the most recent research. Topics covered include: temporal and spatial variability, and regional differences, in pathogen and indicator organism concentrations in water; direct and circumstantial evidence for contaminated water as a source of food-borne patho...

Sea surface temperature (SST) is an important parameter in oceanography and meteorology due to its major influence on the exchange processes at the air-sea interface. Ever-increasing complexity and resolution of global and local, oceanographic, ...

A detailed analysis of the location and composition of Iberian vegetation types during the whole Pleistocene and Holocene periods shows a complex patched landscape with persistence of different types of ecosystems, even during glacial times. In addition, recent, high-resolution palaeoecological records are changing the traditional picture of post-glacial vegetation succession in the Iberian Peninsula. The main available charcoal and pollen sequences include, coniferous and deciduous forest, steppes, shrublands, savannahs and glacial refugia during the Pleistocene for Meso-thermophytes (phytodiversity reservoirs), in different proportions. This panorama suggests an environmental complexity that relates biotic responses to climate changes forced by Milankovitch cycles, suborbital forcings and by the latitudinal and physiographic particularities of the Iberian Peninsula. Thus, many factors are critical in the course of vegetational developments and strong regional differences are obser...

Radiocarbon measurements of nine known age shells from the Mediterranean and the Aegean Seas combined with previous measurements provide an updated value for δR, the local variation in the reservoir correction for marine samples. Comparison of pre-1950s samples from the Algerian coast, with one collected in 1954, indicates early incorporation of nuclear weapons testing14C into the shallow surface waters of the Mediterranean. Comparisons between different basins indicate the surface waters of the Mediterranean are relatively homogenous. The recommended δR for calibration of the Mediterranean marine samples with the 1998 marine calibration dataset is 58 ± 8514C yr, but variations in the reservoir age beyond 6000 cal BP should be considered.

This chapter describes the procedures used to scale the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) questionnaire data (for students, teachers, and schools) and the indices based on them. In general, it is possible to distinguish two general types of indices derived from the ICCS questionnaires: 1. Simple indices constructed through arithmetical transformation or recoding, for example, ratios between teachers and students; and 2. Scale indices derived from scaling of items, a process typically achieved by using item response modeling of dichotomous or Likert-type items. The first part of this chapter lists the simple indices that were derived from the ICCS data and describes how they were created. The second part outlines the scaling procedures used in ICCS. The third and final part, lists the scaled indices, along with statistical information on item parameters, scale reliabilities, and the factor structure of related item sets. The cross-country validity of item dim...

A new macroeconomic evaluation of EU enlargement is undertaken with a world macroeconomic model taking into account all possible integration effects: trade effects, Single Market effects, factor movements (FDI, migration) and the costs of enlargement. Due to the differences in size of the regions involved, on average the CEEC – measured in terms of real GDP – will gain around

In this study we implement a set of econometric models to analyze the determinants of household hurricane evacuation choice for a sample of 1,355 households in Florida. This article contributes to the literature by accounting for two issues normally neglected in previous studies; namely, time and space. The empirical results suggest that households living in risky environments (mobile home and flooding areas) are more likely to evacuate. In addition, households with kids and those who have experience the treat of a hurricane ...

Patterns of substitution in chloroplast encoded trnL-F regions were compared between species of Actaea (Ranunculales), Digitalis (Scrophulariales), Drosera (Caryophyllales), Panicoideae (Poales), the small chromosome species clade of Pelargonium (Geraniales), each representing a different order of flowering plants, and Huperzia (Lycopodiales). In total, the study included 265 taxa, each with >900-bp sequences, totaling 0.24 Mb. Both pairwise and phylogeny-based comparisons were used to assess nucleotide substitution patterns. In all six groups, we found that transition/transversion ratios, as estimated by maximum likelihood on most-parsimonious trees, ranged between 0.8 and 1.0 for ingroups. These values occurred both at low sequence divergences, where substitutional saturation, i.e., multiple substitutions having occurred at the same (homologous) nucleotide position, was not expected, and at higher levels of divergence. This suggests that the angiosperm trnL-F regions evolve in ...