May 22, 2006 issue Imagine tears, lots of tears. Imagine a trail of tears trickling across upstate New York. Judie Comerford and her husband, Michael, are in their minivan on a highway somewhere between Potsdam and their home in Buffalo. They've just bid farewell to their oldest child, Meghan, who's starting college. "I cried, and then I cried some more, and then I cried again," Judie recalls. ...

OBJECTIVES The Affordable Care Act eliminated patient cost sharing for evidence-based preventive care, yet the impact of this policy on colonoscopy and mammography rates is unclear. We examined the elimination of cost sharing among small business beneficiaries of Humana, a large national insurer. STUDY DESIGN This was a retrospective interrupted time series analysis of whether the change in c...

The relationship between asymptomatic shedding of bacterial enteropathogens and the hygiene habits of families who have had a child with typhoid fever (TF) are investigated. The sample was made up of 80 families: 40 families in which one child had had TF (Group A) and 40 in which no children or either of the parents had had a history of TF (Group B). In each group 20 families belonged to a low ...

Textual information in the world can be broadly categorized into two main types: facts and opinions. Facts are objective expressions about entities, events and their properties. Opinions are usually subjective expressions that describe people’s sentiments, appraisals or feelings toward entities, events and their properties. The concept of opinion is very broad. In this chapter, we only focus on...

Critical reflection is integral to the action learning cycle (Kolb 1984) which underpins much present day extension theory. How often, however, do extension programs conduct an impact analysis to formally evaluate achievements against desired outcomes and so gain insights into the effectiveness of different extension strategies used? In 2008, two Integrated Pest Management (IPM) project teams w...

This article reviews statistical techniques for combining multiple probability distributions. The framework is that of a decision maker who consults several experts regarding some events. The experts express their opinions in the form of probability distributions. The decision maker must aggregate the experts' distributions into a single distribution that can be used for decision making. Two cl...