OBJECTIVE To analyze the nursing staff opinion about the continuous quality improvement program at a University Hospital. METHODS A descriptive study designed as a case study, analyzing the quality program at a University Hospital, with the opinion of a sample stratified by nursing team category through a self-administered questionnaire, from May to July 2012. The answers were submitted to fa...

The rise of China/East Asia and the perceived decline of the US/West pose an emerging question about how International Relations (IR) Theory should respond to this change. Increasingly, there have been heated discussions within the Chinese IR academia over a desirable Chinese contribution to IR Theory, particularly the possibility of building a distinctive Chinese IR Theory. Inevitably, this dr...

This chapter offers evidence that as a means of understanding the functional and evolutionary biology of the primates, mathematical models are at least worth their weight in paper. The basic idea of mathematical models and the possibilities and the limits of their usefulness are outlined in Section 1, "Mathematical Models." As morphological arguments for evolutionary conclusions have become bet...

This paper presents a mathematical foundation and a rewriting logic infrastructure for the execution and property verification of synchronous set relations. The mathematical foundation is given in the language of abstract set relations. The infrastructure consists of an ordersorted rewrite theory in Maude, a rewriting logic system, that enables the synchronous execution of a set relation provid...

A method of correction and optimization of stamping processes is proposed. The experiment design and finite element methods are interfaced. This is applied on a part showing large springback. After the determination of the important process parameters to study, a fractional factorial experiment design is built and the corresponding numerical simulations are carried out. Their results are the de...

Mathematical models can be useful in decision-making processes whenever the amount of data and relations are too complex to be analyzed based solely on experience and/or intuition. Models, when properly developed and maintained, and equipped with proper tools for their analysis can integrate relevant knowledge available from various disciplines and sources. Most environmental decision problems ...

Following a pretest, 8 participants who were unfamiliar with algebraic and trigonometric functions received a brief presentation on the rectangular coordinate system. Next, they participated in a computer-interactive matching-to-sample procedure that trained formula-to-formula and formula-to-graph relations. Then, they were exposed to 40 novel formula-to-graph tests and 10 novel graph-to-formul...

This paper presents a mathematical foundation and a rewriting logic infrastructure for the execution and property verification of synchronous set relations. The mathematical foundation is given in the language of abstract set relations. The infrastructure, which is written in the Maude system, enables the synchronous execution of a set relation provided by the user. By using the infrastructure,...

We show that eigenvector decomposition can be used to extract a term taxonomy from a given collection of text documents. So far, methods based on eigenvector decomposition, such as latent semantic indexing (LSI) or principal component analysis (PCA), were only known to be useful for extracting symmetric relations between terms. We give a precise mathematical criterion for distinguishing between...

Despite empirical evidence that natural language dialog capabilities are necessary for the success of tutorial sessions, only few state-of-the-art tutoring systems use natural-language style interaction. Since domain knowledge, tutoring and pedagogical knowledge, and dialog management are tightly intertwined, the modeling and integration of proper natural language dialog capabilities in a tutor...