background: indicators of the level of education are the most important parameters infl uencing each country’s development. social indicators considered to be a determinant of one’s health consists of two constituents namely; (1) rate of students enrolled in elementary, guidance, secondary and higher education and (2) the rate of adult literacy. this study is aimed to evaluate the situation of ...

the hermit crab fauna of the larak island was investigated, which revealed seven species representing five genera and two families. the family diogenidae represents six species namely areopaguristes perspicax (nobili, 1906), clibanarius signatus heller, 1861, dardanus lagopodes (forskål, 1775), d. tinctor (forskål, 1775), d. avarus heller, 1865, d. tirmiziae siddiqui & mclaughlin, 2003, while t...

To understand why some categorization tasks are more difficult than others, we consider five factors that may affect human performance--namely, covariance complexity, optimal accuracy level with and without internal noise, orientation of the optimal categorization rule, and class separability. We argue that covariance complexity, an information-theoretic measure of complexity, is an excellent p...

BACKGROUND Valid estimates of health-related quality-of-life (HRQoL) are often difficult to obtain from persons with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and family caregiver proxies. To help assess whether the general public can serve as an alternate source of proxy HRQoL estimates in AD, we examined whether the general public can use vignettes to discriminate between AD health states. METHODS We admini...

BACKGROUND Generic preference-based health-related quality of life instruments are widely used to measure health benefit within economic evaluation. The availability of multiple instruments raises questions about their relative merits and recent studies have highlighted the paucity of evidence regarding measurement properties in the context of spinal cord injury (SCI). This qualitative study ex...

AIMS To investigate the feasibility of discrete choice experiments for valuing EQ-5D-5L states using computer-based data collection, the consistency of the estimated regression coefficients produced after modeling the preference data, and to examine the similarity of the values derived across countries. METHODS Data were collected in Canada, England, The Netherlands, and the United States (US...