Value of career-decision-making self-efficacy in predicting career-decision-making attitudes and skills.

233 undergraduates (162 women and 71 men) completed a demographics questionnaire and measures of career-decision-making (CDM) self-efficacy (K. M. Taylor and N. E. Betz, 1983), CDM attitudes (J. O. Crites, 1978), and CDM skills (D. E. Super et al, 1981). Results revealed that CDM self-efficacy was moderately and positively related to CDM attitudes and age of participants (p?     

A review of bacteriological culture of removed intrauterine contraceptive devices

The management of pain in patients with burn wounds is complex and problematic. Burn-wound pain is severe, inconsistent and underestimated. Patients experience severe pain, especially during procedures, until wound healing has occurred. A multi-modality approach is needed for effective management of pain, which requires an understanding of the mechanisms of pain. Altered pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics in burn-wound patients makes drug actions unpredictable. Opioids alone are seldom sufficient for pain control. The multi-modality approach includes the use of opioids and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory, anxiolytic and alternative drugs. Ketamine has been found to be a useful agent for analgesia in burn-wound patients; a dose of 10 mg/kg qid per os was found to be an effective adjunct to pain therapy.     

Patient's self-interpretation of tuberculin skin tests

BACKGROUND: In the outpatient use of tuberculin skin testing (purified protein derivative [PPD]), it is at times inconvenient to have a patient revisit for interpretation. Therefore, we assessed patients' ability to self-interpret these test results. METHODS: In keeping with prior custom, patients were seen by an experienced nurse, who performed skin testing with PPD intermediate strength as well as mumps and Candida anergy control tests in some cases, and explained the procedure. The patients were asked to return 48 to 72 h later, at which time one of the researchers recorded their test interpretations before they were again evaluated by the nurse. RESULTS: Sixty-eight patients were studied, of whom 59 returned at appropriate interval. Eighteen patients had a positive PPD test reaction of 10 to 20 mm induration, which only one patient correctly identified as a positive test result. However, positive anergy control tests were correctly interpreted in 10 of 27 cases. CONCLUSION: The small number of positive PPD test result recognition by these patients may be partially attributed to their lack of education, as well as foreign birth and denial of illness. PPD results should be checked by an experienced professional.     

Quantitative reflectometry of the ocular fundus

This review shows that quantitative measurements of fundus reflectance can be described by models that explicitly incorporate anatomical and physical properties of the fundus tissue. Newer techniques examine the fundus in ways fundamentally different from conventional optics, and must be included in this approach of measurement and modeling. The importance of the “inner surface reflector” (ISR) for tomographic imaging warrants more study of its optical properties, particularly its directional reflectance. For example, because the surface of a glaucomatous optic disc can slope steeply into the cup, the directional reflectance of the ISR may affect its apparent topography and thus the reproducibility of measurements of cup size     

Distributed channel assignment strategies using coexistenceetiquettes for land based radio environment

The performance of two distributed channel assignment algorithms which use coexistence etiquettes for point to point links are considered by the authors. It has been found that selecting channels prior to transmission at the transmitter as opposed to the receiver, supports greater offered traffic with the additional advantage of a less complex protocol     

Thermally insulating behaviour of single and multiple layers of textiles under wind assault

One or more layers of textiles can provide a thermal resistance between the human body and its environment, and so help maintain the body in a thermally comfortable state. The effect of wind on and its penetration through such thermal cladding is examined experimentally.     

Comparison between normal and reverse thin crystalline silicon solar cells

The newly developed ingot growing techniques, as the three-grain and the columnar multigrain ingot processes, are now offering the possibility of slicing thinner wafers (≤ 100 μm). In this paper we present the results obtained on p type large area (≥ 100 cm²) and 100 μm thick wafers by using both conventional and reverse cell manufacturing technologies.The conventional cells are provided with aluminium or boron BSF plus screen-printed silver mirror or a silver-aluminium net; the reverse cells have a FSF and the deep back junction completely covered by a screen-printed or CVD silver layer.The constructing parameters have been chosen on the base of one and two dimensions modeling and both raw material and devices have been completely characterized.This work shows that very thin wafers do not introduce serious problems for the conventional manufacturing of solar cells. The efficiencies of the normal and of the reverse cells are found to be comparable and are of the same order than those of thicker cells, however at a significant lower cost. The main obtained result has to be related to the demonstration of a cell manufacturing feasibility starting from very thin wafers.     

Determining the core of journals of a research centre: The example of researchers from the Department of Rural Economy and Sociology of the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique,France

This paper analyses the determination of visibility of journals in which researchers of INRA (National Institute for Agricultural Research) publish. The corpus is comprised of 671 articles published over a period of four years in 258 journals. The advantage of the method applied for determining the visibility of journals is that it combines two approaches: a) bibliometric indicators (coverage by the ISI-publications and by two specific French databases) and b) experts' opinions (10 economists and sociologists). The main results are: a) There is a convergence between the opinion of the experts and «visibility» in the databases, b) The impact factor confirms the main opinions of the experts. The first journals ranked by the experts and JCR Social Sciences are the same but represent only 40 per cent of the total journals analysed. The other journals were revealed by the experts and French databases.«Whoever seeks to pass a balanced but lucid judgement on the general trends of the activity carried out by the profession to which he belongs, is liable to say either banalities or to hurt his colleagues»The notion which we retain of core is that which is successively and conjointly validated by the experts and by the major databases representative of the field.This study was financed by the Department of Rural Economy and Sociology of INRA.     

The application of transmission-line modelling to the simulation ofan induction motor drive

The simulation of a complete induction motor drive is presented. The entire network is modelled using the transmission-line modelling (TLM) technique. The network is split into three sections which are solved independently and are joined together by link transmission-line models. Advantages of this approach are the explicit nature of the algorithm which remains unaltered irrespective of the network topology, unconditional stability, and straightforward modelling of switching elements. Results are presented for a complete drive which illustrate the capabilities and flexibility of the simulation technique