Background Although there is a general agreement on the benefits of evidence informed health policy development given resource constraints especially in Low-Income Countries (LICs), the definition of what evidence is, and what evidence is suitable to guide decision-making is still unclear. Our study is contributing to filling this knowledge gap. We aimed to explore health policy actors’ views r...

Background and purpose: To determine an appropriate financial model for the health system of Iran, several studies have been conducted. But it seems that these studies were not comprehensive and further investigation is required. So to design a valid and enforceable mechanism, the study of policy interventions will be considered through consensus of all stakeholders. This investigation was done...

Tw o conflicting schools of thought have been dominating software engineering education. One school stresses on the popular software development methodologies, but horror stories on poorly designed systems are not uncommon. The other school advocates formal methods, but most practitioners regard them as impractical. We recommend that we should bridge the gap between the formal and informal by b...

While formal methods have promised essential benefits for the software development process, industrial development reality nevertheless relies mainly on informal and especially graphical description techniques. This article argues that formal techniques are indeed useful for practical application if put to indirect use. To demonstrate this approach, two pragmatic graphical description technique...

We survey formal methods as they are applied to the development of communication services. We report on industrial and academic projects, consider di erent communication architectures and work related to the feature interaction problem. Based on our survey and on extensive discussions with the industry, we investigate important industrial concerns and criticisms about the use of formal methods ...

objective: marital adjustment has been regarded as an important issue in chronic illnesses. some studies have addressed the effect of viral hepatitis on patients' spouses but there is still limited information on the topic. this study has compared marital adjustment in patients suffering from different stages of viral hepatitis with that of a healthy population. methods: in a cross-sectional st...

objective: vitrification has been shown as one of the most effective methods of cryopreservation for mammalian embryos. however, there is no consensus which stage of embryonic development is the most appropriate for vitrification with subsequent maximal development after thawing. this study was carried out to explore and compare the effect(s) of vitrification on mouse 2-cell, 4-cell, 8-cell, mo...

Formal methods can only gain widespread use in industrial software development if they are integrated into software development techniques, tools, and languages used in practice. A symbiosis of software testing and verification techniques is a highly desired goal, but at the current state of the art most available tools are dedicated to just one of the two tasks: verification or testing. We use...

The authors of this article reviewed the methodology of three common consensus methods: nominal group process, consensus development panels, and the Delphi technique. The authors set out to determine how a majority of researchers are conducting these studies, how they are analyzing results, and subsequently the manner in which they are reporting their findings. The authors conclude with a set o...

Background: Genetic analysis in mice has lead to find about maternal effect genes such as Filia. Filia knock out mice have a 50% decrease in fertility. Filia dysfunction causes disorders in pre-implantation development. Mutations in human Filia gene, cause FBHM (Familial Biparental Hydatidiform Mole) in women. Filia protein in mice is homologous to that of rat and human, so this idea has emerge...