BACKGROUND Accurate tools for assessing household wealth are essential for many health studies in developing countries. Household survey and participatory wealth ranking (PWR) are two approaches to generate data for this purpose. METHODS A household survey and PWR were conducted among eight villages in rural South Africa. We developed three indicators of household wealth using the data. One i...

Given evidence on a set of variables in a Bayesian network, the most probable explanation (MPE) is the problem of finding a configuration of the remaining variables with maximum posterior probability. This problem has previously been addressed for discrete Bayesian networks and can be solved using inference methods similar to those used for finding posterior probabilities. However, when dealing...

The aim of the work was to develop and prove a Russian version of the Empathy Quotient, a new tool to measure empathy. A sample of 221 volunteers from the general population filled this questionnaire, the Questionnaire Measure of Emotional Empathy and the Quotient of Empathic Abilities. The coefficients of test-retest reliability, internal consistency and validity were high. In a factor analysi...

BACKGROUND Teaching and learning of clinical skills for undergraduate medical students usually takes place during the clinical clerkship. Therefore, it is of vital importance to ensure the effectiveness of the rotations within this clerkship. The aims of this study were to develop an instrument that measures the effectiveness of the clinical learning environment, to determine its factor structu...

Extensive research has been conducted on query log analysis. A query log is generally represented as a bipartite graph on a query set and a URL set. Most of the traditional methods used the raw click frequency to weigh the link between a query and a URL on the click graph. In order to address the disadvantages of raw click frequency, researchers proposed the entropy-biased model, which incorpor...

In recent years, there has been increased interest in measuring the climate for infection prevention; however, reliable and valid instruments are lacking. This study tested the psychometric properties of the Leading a Culture of Quality for Infection Prevention (LCQ-IP) instrument measuring the infection prevention climate in a sample of 972 infection preventionists from acute care hospitals. A...

This paper considers the portfolio management problem for an investor with finite time horizon who is allowed to consume and take out life insurance. Natural assumptions, such as different discount rates for consumption and life insurance lead to time inconsistency. This situation can also arise when the investor is in fact a group, the members of which have different utilities and/or different...

Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) systems typically support one consistency model [3, 5, 6]. However, recent work [1, 11, 12, 14, 16] proposes the use of adaptive consistency based on a heuristical analysis of recent access patterns. Although heuristic-based approaches can significantly improve runtime, the access pattern alone does not necessarily define the most appropriate consistency model. T...

objective: inventory drug-taking situations (idts) is a universal instrument used to determine high-risk situations resulting in drug abuse. the aim of this study was to translate this questionnaire to farsi, and to assess its validity and reliability by applying it to iranian drug users. methods: as a psychometric study, 300 drug users participated in a treatment program in national center of ...

background: in any research work the used tools to approach the designed project goals, should be evaluated. the purpose of the present study was to obtain validity and reliability of nutritional knowledge, illness perception and dietary adherence questionnaire. methods: the questionnaire of student ratings of teaching was evaluated in a descriptive study. in this study the views of 11 expert f...