bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Serum hepatic biochemical activity in two populations of workers exposed to styrene
Authors: Brodkin C A , Moon J-D , Camp J , Echeverria D , Redlich C A , Willson R A , Checkoway H 
Published: July 2002

OBJECTIVETo determine whether hepatic biochemical changes, as measured by routinely available tests indicative of hepatocellular necrosis, cholestasis, or altered hepatic clearance of bilirubin, occur in association with low to moderate exposure to styrene commonly experienced in industrial production.METHODSTwo independent cross sectional studies were performed comparing serum hepatic transaminases (alanine aminotransferase (ALT) and aspartate aminotransferase (AST)), cholestatic enzymes (alkaline phosphatase (AP) and γ glutamyl transpeptidase (GGT)), and bilirubin in (a) 47 workers of fibreglass reinforced plastics who were exposed to styrene and (b) 21 boat and tank fabricators, with separate referent groups of unexposed workers. Exposure to styrene was assessed in air by dosimetry, and in venous blood by headspace analysis. Hepatic biochemical variables were assessed across strata of exposure to styrene defined as 25 ppm in air, or 0.275 mg/l in blood, adjusting for age, sex, body mass index, and ethanol consumption.RESULTSA consistent and significant linear trend for increasing direct bilirubin and direct/total bilirubin ratio was found in association with increasing exposure to styrene, by both air and blood monitoring, in both studies. Mean direct bilirubin concentrations increased from 0.05–0.08 mg% in referents to 0.12–0.19 in workers exposed above 25 ppm, with a significant exposure-response trend (p<0.005). Significantly increased direct/total bilirubin ratios, ranging from 0.22 to 0.35 were associated with exposure to styrene (p<0.001), indicating diminished hepatic clearance of conjugated bilirubin. Also, a significant linear association between the hepatic transaminases ALT and AST and exposure to styrene was found in pooled regression analyses, with an increase in AP of about 10 IU/ml in workers exposed above 25 ppm air or 0.275 mg/l blood styrene in pooled analyses from both studies.CONCLUSIONSThe consistent finding of increased direct bilirubin and AP concentrations in these two independent studies provides evidence for diminished hepatic clearance of conjugated bilirubin with associated cholestasis in workers exposed to styrene. The finding of a significant linear association between hepatic transaminase concentrations and exposure to styrene in pooled analyses is consistent with mild hepatic injury and associated metabolic dysfunction.
Decreased white blood cell counts in semiconductor manufacturing workers in Taiwan
Authors: Luo J-C J , Hsieh L L , Chang M J W , Hsu K-H 
Published: July 2002

Objectives: To assess the systematic health effects on the liver, kidney, and haematological function tests of workers in semiconductors in Taiwan.Methods: 926 workers of a semiconductor plant in Taiwan in July 1995 were investigated. Complete blood tests including liver, kidney, and haematological functions were available from 227 workers.Results: There was a significantly lower mean (SD) white blood cell (WBC) count in male workers of photolithography (5870 (1190)/mm3, p=0.003) and implantation (6190 (1150)/mm3, p=0.018) than that of male control workers (7350 (1660)/mm3). There was a significantly higher prevalence of leukopenia in male photolithography workers (6 of 20; 30%) than in male control workers (1 of 18; 5.6%), the crude odds ratio (OR) was 7.3 (95% confidence interval (95% CI) 1 to 55.6), and the multivariate adjusted OR was 8.1 (95% CI 0.83 to 78.3). The tests for serum glutamic oxaloacetic transaminase (SGOT), serum glutamic pyruvic transaminase (SGPT), γ glutamyl transferase (RGT), and creatinine were not significant among male workers. Female workers in photolithography had abnormal SGPT and RGT of borderline significance, the multivariate adjusted ORs were 9.6 (95% CI 0.86 to 107) and 6.35 (95% CI 0.53 to 75.8), respectively.Conclusions: This study suggests that leukopenia is a potential health effect in male fabrication workers of the semiconductor industry. The tasks of the process, maintenance, and equipment engineers which consisted mostly of men put them at risk for intermittent short term peak exposure to glycol ethers, ionising radiation, arsenic, or other toxins. The findings of this medical surveillance are significant; however, a further investigation of the aetiological factors and the subsequent health effects is necessary.
Pericardial tamponade caused by Pasteurella multocida infection after a cat bite
Authors: Al-Allaf A K , Harvey T C , Cunnington A R 
Published: July 2002

Abstract
An unusual case of meningitis and pericardial tamponade caused by Pasteurella multocida after a cat bite is reported. The patient was successfully treated by antibiotics and pericardiocentesis and made an uneventful recovery from a life threatening condition. This case illustrates the potential dangers that can arise from a seemingly trivial and commonplace injury.
Smoking cessation activities by general practitioners and practice nurses
Authors: McEwen Andy , West Robert 
Published: July 2002

OBJECTIVESTo assess general practitioners' and practice nurses' self reported behaviour, attitudes, and knowledge in relation to smoking cessation.DESIGN AND SETTINGTwo postal surveys of random national samples of 303 GPs (survey 1) and 459 practice nurses (survey 2) covering England and Wales; effective response rates were 75% and 96%, respectively.RESULTSSurvey 1 found that 96% of GPs accepted that intervening against smoking was part of their role and almost all (99%) said that they recorded smoking status when patients registered; 57% reported that they routinely updated their records on smoking status, 50% said they advised smokers to stop during most or all consultations, and 76% said they advised smokers to cut down if they cannot stop. A large majority (83%) said they either recommended or prescribed nicotine replacement therapy (NRT). Although most GPs (86%) thought that NRTs were effective, only a minority thought they were worth the cost (47%) or should be on National Health Service (NHS) prescription (32%). There was little evidence that previous training in smoking cessation was associated with more activity, more positive attitudes, or greater knowledge. Survey 2 found that almost all practice nurses (99%) agreed that intervening against smoking was part of their role and 95% said they advised patients to stop at least occasionally; 71% said they advised smokers to stop at most or all consultations. A majority (74%) said that they recommended NRT to their patients. As with the GPs most practice nurses thought that nicotine replacement was effective (79%), but fewer (42%) thought the cost was justified, and only about half (53%) thought it should be available on NHS prescription. Nurses who said they had been trained in smoking cessation engaged in more activity relating to smoking cessation, had more positive attitudes, and were more knowledgeable.CONCLUSIONGPs and practice nurses accepted that intervening with smoking was an important part of their role and a large majority reported that they intervened at least with some smokers. This represents a promising baseline from which to proceed in terms of implementation of the new smoking cessation guidelines, but it is hoped that improvements can be made in terms of the frequency of updating records and intervening, and acceptance of the cost-effectiveness of NRT as a life preserving intervention.
DIRECT: a query facility for multiple databases
Authors: Merz Ulla , King Roger 
Published: July 2002

The subject of this research project is the architecture and design of a multidatabase query facility. These databases contain structured data, typical for business applications. Problems addressed are: presenting a uniform interface for retrieving data from multiple databases, providing autonomy for the component databases, and defining an architecture for semantic services.
DIRECT is a query facility for heterogeneous databases. The databases and their definitions can differ in their data models, names, types, and encoded values. Instead of creating a global schema, descriptions of different databases are allowed to coexist. A multidatabase query language provides a uniform interface for retrieving data from different databases. DIRECT has been exercised with operational databases that are part of an automated business system.
Finding a happy medium
Authors: Markus M. L. 
Published: July 2002

The sometimes observed negative social effects of electronic communication technology are often attributed to the characteristics of the technology itself. Electronic mail, for instance, filters out personal and social cues and provides new capabilities not found in traditional media, and it has been argued that these factors have consequences such as “flaming” and depersonalization. Alternative theoretical perspectives on the impacts of information technology suggest that our ability to explain these outcomes might be enhanced by attending to users' intentional choices about how to use technology and to unpredictable technology usage patterns that emerge when users interact with the technology and each other. These alternative perspectives are examined in the context of an exploratory case study of a complex organization in which electronic mail was heavily used.
Users were found to select email deliberately when they wished to avoid unwanted social interactions. At the same time, they actively took steps to avoid negative outcomes, such as depersonalization of their relationships with subordinates. However, despite their well-intentioned efforts, some negative social effects did occur that cannot entirely be attributed to the technological characteristics of electronic communication. Instead, they appear to be ironic side effects of users' thoughtful efforts to use email effectively. These results suggest the value of according a prominent role in explanations of technology impacts to users' intended and unintended technology uses. The results also imply that negative social effects from using electronic communication technology may not prove easy to eradicate, despite technological developments such as multimedia integration, and despite efforts to train users in the best email “etiquette.”
Organization of clustered files for consecutive retrieval
Authors: Deogun J S. , Raghavan V V. , Tsou T K.W. 
Published: July 2002

This paper studies the problem of storing single-level and multilevel clustered files. Necessary and sufficient conditions for a single-level clustered file to have the consecutive retrieval property (CRP) are developed. A linear time algorithm to test the CRP for a given clustered file and to identify the proper arrangement of objects, if CRP exists, is presented. For the single-level clustered files that do not have CRP, it is shown that the problem of identifying a storage organization with minimum redundancy is NP-complete.
Consequently, an efficient heuristic algorithm to generate a good storage organization for such files is developed. Furthermore, it is shown that, for certain types of multilevel clustered files, there exists a storage organization such that the objects in each cluster, for all clusters in each level of the clustering, appear in consecutive locations.
Decomposition of tautologies into regular formulas and strong completeness of connection-graph resolution
Authors: Bibel W. , Eder E. 
Published: July 2002

This paper addresses and answers a fundamental question about resolution. Informally, what is gained with respect to the search for a proof by performing a single resolution step? It is first shown that any unsatisfiable formula may be decomposed into regular formulas provable in linear time (by resolution). A relevant resolution step strictly reduces at least one of the formulas in the decomposition while an irrelevant one does not contribute to the proof in any way. the relevance of this insight into the nature of resolution and of the unsatisfiability problem for the development of proof strategies and for complexity considerations are briefly discussed.
The decomposition also provides a technique for establishing completeness proofs for refinements of resolution. As a first application, connection-graph resolution is shown to be strongly complete. This settles a problem that remained open for two decades despite many proff attempts. The result is relevant for theorem proving because without strong completeness a connection graph resolution prover might run into an infinite loop even on the ground level.
Profiles in computing: Brian K. Reid: a graphics tale of a hacker tracker
Authors: Frenkel Karen A. 
Published: July 2002

"When the Securities Exchange Commission was created by Franklin Roosevelt, he was trying to fix a lot of problems on Wall Street. There were various Ivan Boesky-type crimes being committed on the stock market, and Roosevelt wanted to create a regulatory agency that would keep it in line. He wanted to hire a sheriff to police Wall Street. What he did was he hired the person who was absolutely, unarguably, the biggest criminal on Wall Street—the person who was guilty of the most crimes. And he put him in charge of the Securities Exchange Commission, figuring that that person, being the most successful Wall Street bandit, knew all the tricks and could police his friends. And that person did a really good job of cleaning up Wall Street actually, because he did know all the tricks."
"In a certain sense, I got my start in the computer business by bending the rules, or not knowing what the rules were. I was extremely good at penetrating everyone's computer security when I was a kid. And, because of my tremendous knowledge in this area, I have frequently been called in to help catch people who break in. . . ."
Heuristics for trie index minimization
Authors: Comer Douglas 
Published: July 2002

A trie is a digital search tree in which leaves correspond to records in a file. Searching proceeds from the root to a leaf, where the edge taken at each node depends on the value of an attribute in the query. Trie implementations have the advantage of being fast, but the disadvantage of achieving that speed at great expense in storage space. Of primary concern in making a trie practical, therefore, is the problem of minimizing storage requirements. One method for reducing the space required is to reorder attribute testing. Unfortunately, the problem of finding an ordering which guarantees a minimum-size trie is NP-complete. In this paper we investigate several heuristics for reordering attributes, and derive bounds on the sizes of the worst tries produced by them in terms of the underlying file. Although the analysis is presented for a binary file, extensions to files of higher degree are shown.
Another alternative for reducing the space required by a trie is an implementation, called an Ο-trie, in which the order of attribute testing is contained in the trie itself. We show that for most applications, Ο-tries are smaller than other implementations of tries, even when heuristics for improving storage requirements are employed.
On an Application of Dynamic Programming to the Synthesis of Logical Systems
Authors: Bellman Richard , Holland John , Kalaba Robert 
Published: July 2002

In this paper we wish to initiate the study of the application of dynamic programming to the domain of problems arising in the synthesis of logical systems.
In a number of fields one encounters the problem of converting a system in one state into another state in a most efficient fashion—in mathematical economics, in the theory of control processes, in network theory, and in trajectory processes. Here we wish to consider a type of question which arises in the design of computers and switching circuits.
We shall first treat the problem in general terms, and then consider a special example to illustrate the methods.
A tutorial on default logics
Authors: Antoniou Grigoris 
Published: July 2002

Default logic is one of the most prominent approaches to nonmonotonic reasoning, and allows one to make plausible conjectures when faced with incomplete information about the problem at hand. Default rules prevail in many application domains such as medical and legal reasoning.
Several variants have been developed over the past year, either to overcome some perceived deficiencies of the original presentation, or to realize somewhat different intuitions. This paper provides a tutorial-style introduction to some important approaches of Default Logic. The presentation is based on operational models for these approaches, thus making them easily accessible to a broader audience, and more easily usable in practical applications.
Reentrant polygon clipping
Authors: Sutherland Ivan E. , Hodgman Gary W. 
Published: July 2002

A new family of clipping algorithms is described. These algorithms are able to clip polygons against irregular convex plane-faced volumes in three dimensions, removing the parts of the polygon which lie outside the volume. In two dimensions the algorithms permit clipping against irregular convex windows.
Polygons to be clipped are represented as an ordered sequence of vertices without repetition of first and last, in marked contrast to representation as a collection of edges as was heretofore the common procedure. Output polygons have an identical format, with new vertices introduced in sequence to describe any newly-cut edge or edges. The algorithms easily handle the particularly difficult problem of detecting that a new vertex may be required at a corner of the clipping window.
The algorithms described achieve considerable simplicity by clipping separately against each clipping plane or window boundary. Code capable of clipping the polygon against a single boundary is reentered to clip against subsequent boundaries. Each such reentrant stage of clipping need store only two vertex values and may begin its processing as soon as the first output vertex from the preceeding stage is ready. Because the same code is reentered for clipping against subsequent boundaries, clipping against very complex window shapes is practical.
For perspective applications in three dimensions, a six-plane truncated pyramid is chosen as the clipping volume. The two additional planes parallel to the projection screen serve to limit the range of depth preserved through the projection. A perspective projection method which provides for arbitrary view angles and depth of field in spite of simple fixed clipping planes is described. This method is ideal for subsequent hidden-surface computations.
The multistore parser for hierarchical syntactic structures
Authors: von Glasersfeld Ernst , Pisani Pier Paolo 
Published: July 2002

A syntactic parser is described for hierarchical concatenation patterns that are presented to the analyzer in the form of linear strings. Particular emphasis is given to the system of “significant addresses” by means of which processing times for large-scale matching procedures can be substantially reduced. The description makes frequent use of examples taken from the fully operational implementation of the parser in an experimental English sentence analyzer.
By structuring an area of the computer's central core storage in such a way that the individual locations of bytes and bits come to represent the data involved in the matching procedure, the shifting of information is reduced to a minimum, and the searching of lists is eliminated altogether. The matches are traced by means of binary masks and the state of single bits determines the operational flow of the procedure. The method could be implemented with any interpretive grammar, provided it can be expressed by the functional classification of the items composing the input hierarchical structures.
The LACONIQ monitor
Authors: Drew Daniel L. 
Published: July 2002

The LACONIQ (Laboratory Computer Online Inquiry) Monitor was developed primarily to support non-numerical applications such as retrieval from very large files by means of a “dialogue” between a system user and a retrieval application.
The monitor was designed so that it could work with a small computer (an IBM System 360/30). Therefore techniques for resource allocation were important. For this reason the use of core storage, computational facilities, and input-output were all scheduled.
An unusual feature of the system is that it is event-driven rather than clock-driven. The program segments called into execution by the remote CRT consoles are invariably run to completion rather than “rolled-out” to be brought back at a later time.
Further results on the security of partitioned dynamic statistical databases
Authors: McLeish Mary 
Published: July 2002

Partitioning is a highly secure approach to protecting statistical databases. When updates are introduced, security depends on putting restrictions on the sizes of partition sets which may be queried. To overcome this problem, attempts have been made to add “dummy” records. Recent work has shown that this leads to high information loss.
This paper reconsiders the restrictions on the size of partitioning sets required to achieve a high level of security. Updates of two records at a time were studied earlier, and security was found to hold if the sizes of the partition sets were kept even. In this paper an extended model is presented, allowing very general updates to be performed. The security problem is thoroughly studied, giving if and only if conditions. The earlier result is shown to be part of a corollary to the main theorem of this paper. Alternatives to adding dummy records are presented and the practical implications of the theory for the database manager are discussed.
View updates in relational databases with an independent scheme
Authors: Langerak Rom 
Published: July 2002

A view on a database is a mapping that provides a user or application with a suitable way of looking at the data. Updates specified on a view have to be translated into updates on the underlying database. We study the view update translation problem for a relational data model in which the base relations may contain (indexed) nulls.
The representative instance is considered to be the correct representation of all data in the database; the class of views that is studied consists of total projections of the representative instance. Only independent database schemes are considered, that is, schemes for which global consistency is implied by local consistency. A view update can be an insertion, a deletion, or a modification of a single view tuple.
It is proven that the constant complement method of Bancilhon and Spyratos is too restrictive to be useful in this context. Structural properties of extension joins are derived that are important for understanding views. On the basis of these properties, minimal algorithms for translating a single view-tuple update are given.