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Out of 52 cases of ipsilateral femoral fractures treated at a level I trauma centre between June 1994 and March 2008, the diaphyseal fracture was accompanied by a intracapsular neck fracture in only 20 cases. In the rest of the cases, the diaphyseal fracture was combined with either an extracapsular or pertrochanteric fracture. Five of these patients also had fractures of the distal femur. In three of those patients we began treatment with osteosynthesis of the femoral neck and shaft, using a reconstruction nail, then stabilized the distal fracture with a 95° blade plate or with lag screws. In the other two cases, initial treatment dealt with the distal femoral fracture, stabilizing it with a 95° blade plate, which was also used for stabilization of the diaphyseal fracture. In these patients, the proximal fracture was treated using dynamic hip screws (DHS). All fractures healed, two after initial treatment, while the other three needed one reoperation. The follow-up period was 2-13 years after the injury. The order in which fractures are treated is best left to the discretion of the physician and the circumstances. In our experience, two implants are sufficient for osteosynthesis, one for stabilizing one end of the femur together with the shaft, and the other is used for treating the other end of the femur.

This paper deals with automatic dialogue act recognition. Dialogue acts (DAs) are utterance-level labels that represent different states of a dialogue, such as questions, statements, hesitations, etc. Information about actual DA can be seen as the first level of dialogue understanding. The main goal of this paper is to compare our dialogue act recognition approaches that model the utterance structure, and are particularly useful when the DA corpus is small, with n-gram based approaches. Our best approach is also combined successfully with prosodic models. We further show that sentence structure-based approaches significantly outperform n-gram based methods.

The minimum wage is one of the measures of economic policy, which raises contradictory reactions. The Czech Republic is one of twenty EU Member States that have implemented a statutory minimum wage. Since its introduction in 1991, the gross minimum wage was increased sixteen times by the government. In addition to increases in the gross minimum wage, the purchasing power of the minimum wage is affected by the development of price levels and also by changes in tax and social security and health insurance. In the Czech Republic three periods in the development of the minimum wage can be distinguished. In the first years after its introduction, the gross minimum wage did not increase significantly and its real value declined. The period 1999-2006 is a period of rapid growth in both the nominal and the real minimum wage. In the period 2007-2012, the nominal wage was constant and its real value gradually decreased. These three phases correspond to the political orientation of Czech governments. Leftist governments raised minimum wages faster than right-wing governments. The article also provides an analysis of the motivational function of the minimum wage. It compares the net minimum wage with the living minimum. It appears that the motivational function of the minimum wage has been reducing in recent years. This is true especially for persons with dependent children. The last part of the article includes an analysis of the relationship between the increase in the minimum wage and the unemployment rate in the Czech Republic. In addition to total unemployment, the impact of the minimum wage on unemployment of young people and people with low levels of education is analyzed. It shows that there is no clear relationship between the minimum wage and the unemployment rates in the Czech Republic.

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