This study assessed the antecedents of continued use of an education program to prevent passive smoking in infants. It consists of a booklet for parents and a manual for health professionals describing a five-step procedure for discussing passive smoking. A questionnaire was sent to 67 managers, 670 nurses, and 335 physicians working in well-baby clinics (response rate: 70%, 53%, 47% respective...

In this article, we propose a combination of an noise-reduction algorithm based on Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA) and a standard feedforward neural prediction model. Basically, the proposed algorithm consists of two different steps: data preprocessing based on the SSA filtering method and step-by-step training procedure in which we use a simple feedforward multilayer neural network with backp...

We set up an early warning system for financial crises based on the Random Forrest approach. use a novel of predictors that comprises development indicators in addition to conventional imbalances measures. The evaluation model is conducted using three-step procedure (i.e. training, validation and testing sub-samples). results indicate combining helps improve out-of-sample accuracy system.

In this study, we explored the impact of the decision agency (Student vs. Tutor) and granularity (Problem vs. Step) across students with different levels of incoming competence (High vs. Low). Students were randomly assigned to four conditions and split into High and Low groups based on their pre-test scores. All students used the same Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) called Pyrenees, followed...

OBJECTIVE By exploiting video games technology, serious games strive to deliver affordable, accessible and usable interactive virtual worlds, supporting applications in training, education, marketing and design. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effectiveness of such a serious game in the teaching of major incident triage by comparing it with traditional training methods. DESIG...

a shortcut procedure as quick, easy-to use method for design and simulation of multicomponent batch distillation is used to predict the operating condition of recovering xylene from solvent in an existing batch distillation column in benzol refinery. the procedure can be used to investigate the effect of the operating parameters on the operation of column for three possible modes of batch disti...

The Evalita 2011 contest proposed two forced alignment tasks, word and phone segmentation, and two modalities, “open” and “closed”. A system for each combination of task and modality has been proposed and submitted for evaluation. Direct use of silence/activity detection in forced alignment has been tested. Positive effects were shown in the acoustic model training step, especially when dealing...

Although fast adversarial training has demonstrated both robustness and efficiency, the problem of "catastrophic overfitting" been observed. This is a phenomenon in which, during single-step training, robust accuracy against projected gradient descent (PGD) suddenly decreases to 0% after few epochs, whereas sign method (FGSM) increases 100%. In this paper, we demonstrate that catastrophic overf...