Wide spread variation in measurement results of total 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) confounds international efforts to develop evidence-based clinical guidelines. Accordingly, NIH Office of Dietary Supplements (ODS) in collaboration with CDC National Center for Environmental Health (NCEH), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Ghent University established the Vitamin D Stand...

OBJECTIVE Given the complexities of the healthcare environment, efforts to develop standardized handoff practices have led to widely varying manifestations of handoff tools. A systematic review of the literature on handoff evaluation studies was performed to investigate the nature, methodological, and theoretical foundations underlying the evaluation of handoff tools and their adequacy and appr...

Performance criteria, such as efficiencies and coefficients of performance, for energy systems, are commonly used but often without sufficient understanding and consistence. The situation becomes particularly incoherent when simultaneous energy interactions of different types, such as work, heating and cooling, take place with a system. Also, the distinction between exergy and Second Law effici...

Increasingly, effort has been devoted to surveying ontology-related research studies from various aspects. However, no survey is available for the ontology library system. For this reason, we decided to examine existing library systems in this paper. First, we identified the main criteria (management, adaptation, and standardization) for evaluating the functionality of the library systems. Then...

We describe a variation of the Prêt-à-Voter voting protocol that keeps the same ballot layout but borrows and slightly modifies the underlying cryptographic primitives from Punchscan, which is based on bit commitments. By using unconditionally hiding bit commitments, our protocol obtains unconditional privacy. We suggest a way to make cheating on the computational binding bit commitments imposs...

The Helios voting scheme is well studied including formal proofs for verifiability and ballot privacy. However, depending on its version, the scheme provides either participation privacy (hiding who participated in the election) or verifiability against malicious bulletin board (preventing election manipulation by ballot stuffing), but not both at the same time. It also does not provide receipt...

A task common to nearly all types of election auditing is that of human auditors physically counting ballots by hand. This task, fundamental to the goal of accuracy in an audit, can be a source of error. While somewhat basic in its nature, the process of counting can be strongly influenced by many procedural and legal factors. In the current study, we examine how specific group counting procedu...

PURPOSE Persistent uncertainty over the clinical significance of various pathological continuous electroencephalography (cEEG) findings in the intensive care unit (ICU) has prompted efforts to standardize ICU cEEG terminology and an ensuing debate. We set out to understand the reasons for, and a satisfactory resolution to, this debate. METHOD We review the positions for and against standardiz...

Performance in proficiency testing (PT) schemes is an objective measure of a laboratory's best performance. We examined the performance of participants in two parasitology PT schemes in South Africa from 2004 through 2010. The average rates of acceptable scores over the period were 58% and 66% for the stool and blood parasite schemes, respectively. In our setting, participation in PT alone is i...

Introduction The most widely used classification criteria for systemic lupus erythematous (SLE) are those derived and validated in adult patients, by the American College of Rheumatology (ACR). However, some of their limitations raise concerns, such as: inclusion of the most typical features only, possible duplication of highly correlated cutaneous manifestations, omission of many neurologic ma...