OBJECTIVES To determine whether the European Commission Eurobarometer survey of 27 European Union (EU) member states produces reliable smoking prevalence estimates when compared to national prevalence survey data, and to identify approaches to standardising the measurement of smoking prevalence in the EU. METHODS This was a direct comparison of questions, sampling methods and smoking prevalen...

OBJECTIVES To perform a systematic review of the frequency of (preventable) adverse events (AE/PAE) and to analyse contributing factors, such as sample size, settings, type of events, terminology, methods of collecting data and characteristics of study populations. REVIEW METHODS Search of Medline and Embase from 1995 to 2007. Included were original papers with data on the frequency of AE or ...

Outliers often pose problems in analyses of data in plant breeding, but their influence on the performance of methods for estimating predictive accuracy in genomic prediction studies has not yet been evaluated. Here, we evaluate the influence of outliers on the performance of methods for accuracy estimation in genomic prediction studies using simulation. We simulated 1000 datasets for each of 1...

The search for multivariate linear regression (MLR) in quantitative structure-property relationships (QSPR) is a hard problem, due to the dimension of the entire search space. A genetic algorithm (GA) was developed and assessed, to select proper descriptors for predicting the octan-1-ol/H2O partition coefficient of polychlorinated biphenyls. The GA was implemented as a Windows based FreePascal ...

Objective: We aimed at designing a cross sectional study to investigate the prevalence of psychiatric disorders in Iranian children and adolescents (IRCAP) and to determine its relationship with social capital, life style, and parents' personality disorders. Method: This cross sectional study was a national project implemented in all provinces of Iran. In this community-based study, using ‎mult...