In recent years, there has been much research on local search techniques for solving constraint satisfaction problems, including Boolean satisfiability problems. Some of the most successful procedures combine a form of random walk with a greedy bias. These procedures are quite effective in a number of problem domains, for example, constraint-based planning and scheduling, graph coloring, and ha...

The ideal diagnostic approach for ventilator-associated pneumonia currently is based on invasive procedures to obtain respiratory tract cultures. Given the lack of consensus and relatively poor acceptance of full bronchoscopic bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) and protected specimen brush (PSB), less invasive procedures have been developed. We review the nonbronchoscopic procedures (nonbronchoscopic...

1 Overview The multtest package contains a collection of functions for multiple hypothesis testing. These functions can be used to identify differentially expressed genes in microarray experiments, i.e., genes whose expression levels are associated with a response or covariate of interest. Introduction to multiple testing. This document provides a tutorial for using the multtest package. For a ...

Statistical ranking and selection (R&S) is a collection of experiment design and analysis techniques for selecting the “population” with the largest or smallest mean performance from among a finite set of alternatives. R&S procedures have received considerable research attention in the stochastic simulation community, and they have been incorporated in commercial simulation software. One of the...

Participation is one of important topics highly focused on in various social, political and cultural areas. Today the youth as an effective group in participation has taken a crucial role in political, social and cultural decisions of the society. This research aims to present a sociological analysis of the youth participation, causes, procedure, and the challenges concerned. To achieve this pu...

When set in strategic context and developed according to valuable criteria, performance indicators can be a powerful tool for different purposes in the public sector. Since their use in public services is evidently increasing, this review paper presents needed synthesis of important facts and findings about performance indicators: their advantages and shortcomings, characteristics, types and pu...

We examined the stability of retinol in blood and serum samples, kept in the dark, under different handling procedures. Samples not protected from contact with air oxygen were highly unstable, even when kept at ice temperature. Samples collected under anaerobic conditions, with Vacutainer Tubes, or treated with nitrogen after collection to displace the air from the tubes were stable during the ...