BACKGROUND In order to conduct studies on shared decision-making (SDM) and to implement SDM in routine practice, psychometrically tested measures are needed. The development of the short 5-item version of the OPTION scale (Observer OPTION5) allows to assess SDM from an observer perspective. Observer OPTION5 is so far only available in English and Dutch. The aim of this study was to translate th...

BACKGROUND The scapula locator method has associated intra-observer and inter-observer errors caused by the dependency on the observer to locate the scapular landmarks. The potential effect of the pressures applied by the observer on the measured scapular kinematics when this method is used has also been overlooked so far. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of using feedback on...

Archaeological evidence indicates that fishing was one of the earliest human production activities. Early fishing seems to have been mainly hunting and gathering along shores and inlets with fish farming emerging somewhat later in time. Capture fisheries expanded rapidly in the 19 and 20 centuries AD reaching the peak annual production of over 90 million metric tonnes in the early 1990s. Since ...

XML is increasingly used not only for data exchange but also to represent arbitrary data sources as virtual XML repositories. In many application scenarios, fragments of such a repository are distributed over the Web. However, design and query models for distributed XML data have not yet been studied in detail. In this paper, we introduce a distribution approach for a virtual XML repository. We...

The dimensionality of the physical units as seen by an observer only capable of observations along the momentum axis is investigated. The units fall into seven groups characterized in terms of their ’frame signature’, mainly interpreted as non-locality and/or impact. For example, momentum, power, resistance, magnetic charge, and electric potential are related and have a direct impact on the loc...

The problem of designing sliding-mode observers for systems with unknown inputs is considered when the so-called observer matching condition is not satisfied. This condition severely restricts the applicability of sliding-mode observers. To circumvent the observer matching condition, thereby broadening the class of systems for which sliding-mode observers can be constructed, a possible method i...

An important issue of the service oriented approach is the possibility to aggregate, through programmable coordination patterns, the activities involved by service interactions. Two different approaches can be adopted to tackle service coordination: orchestration and choreography. In this paper, we introduce a formal methodology purposed to handle coordination among services from the perspectiv...

In this paper, cointegration relationships among 26 global stock market indices over the periods of sub-prime and European debt crisis and their influence rank are investigated by constructing and analyzing directed and weighted cointegration networks. The obtained results are shown as follows: the crises have changed cointegration relationships among stock market indices, their cointegration r...

This article investigates an extension of General Relativity based upon a class of lifted metrics on the cotangent bundle of space-time. The dynamics of the theory is determined by a fixed section of the cotangent bundle, representing the momentum of a fluid flow, and Einstein’s equations for the fluid applied to the induced space-time metric on the submanifold of the cotangent bundle defined b...