The widespread use of molecular biological tools has led to a pronounced increase in the number of signals that are now implicated in the controls of food intake and body weight. However, a complete understanding of the roles of these multiple signals requires that we assess how they interact with one another to alter ingestive behavior. Although many such experiments are being conducted, the m...

Earlier studies have shown that thwarting of feeding behaviour in the laying hen is expressed through a specific vocalisation, the gakel-call. The first aim of this study was to investigate whether the effect of deprivation per se on the occurrence of gakel-calls can be distinguished from the effect of the additional frustration. Frustration is defined as the state of an animal that results fro...

Food neophobia and picky/fussy eating behavior are presented as the two main forms of children's food rejections which are responsible for a reduction of their dietary repertoire. We review the key factors, presented in the literature, that are involved in food rejections during childhood. We first consider a range of "cognitive factors", such as food perception, mental representations, categor...

This study reports the development and validation of the 20 item Family Food Behavior Survey, a measure designed to assess broad components of the family food environment that may contribute to child overweight. In a diverse sample of 38 parents, factor analyses verified 4 domains: (1) maternal control of child eating behavior; (2) maternal presence during eating; (3) child choice, and (4) orga...

aim and background: poor nutritional behaviors currently are a widespread issue. poor nutritional behaviors include inability to maintain control over eating, food restriction with the purpose of influencing on weight and shape, and tendency toward overeating in response to the negative emotions. this study was conducted to review the relationship between the perceived body satisfaction, perfec...

the set covering problem (scp) is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem. this paper investigates development of a local branching approach for the scp. this solution strategy is exact in nature, though it is designed to improve the heuristic behavior of the mixed integer programming solver. the algorithm parameters are tuned by design of experiments approach. the proposed method is te...

Several heuristic optimization algorithms have been applied to solve engineering problems. Most of these are based on populations that evolve according different rules and parameters reach the optimal value a function cost through an iterative process. Different parallel strategies proposed accelerate algorithms. In this work, we combined coarse-grained strategies, multi-populations, with fine-...

Operating rooms have become the most important areas in hospitals because of the scarcity and cost of resources. The present study investigates operating room scheduling and rescheduling considering the priority of surgical patients in a specialized hospital. The ultimate purpose of scheduling is to minimize patient waiting time, surgeon idle time between surgeries, and penalties for deviations...

background nowadays, the patients’ satisfaction is used as a criterion to measure the hospitals’ service quality. however, there are controversial results about the aspect of caring behaviors which mostly affects the patients’ satisfaction. objectives the current study aimed to assess the relationship between caring behaviors and patients’ satisfaction. patients and methods a descriptive correl...