BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Dialysis patients are increasingly characterized by older age, multiple comorbidities, and shortened life expectancy. This study investigated whether the "surprise" question, "Would I be surprised if this patient died in the next year?" identifies patients who are at high risk for early mortality. DESIGN, SETTING, PARTICIPANTS, & MEASUREMENTS This prospective cohort ...

An injective map from the vertex set of a graph G—its order may not be finite—to the set of all natural numbers is called an arithmetic (a geometric) labeling of G if the map from the edge set which assigns to each edge the sum (product) of the numbers assigned to its ends by the former map, is injective and the range of the latter map forms an arithmetic (a geometric) progression. A graph is c...

Bloom filters are a data structure for storing data in a compressed form. They offer excellent space and time efficiency at the cost of some loss of accuracy (so-called lossy compression). This work presents a yes–no Bloom filter, which as a data structure consisting of two parts: the yes-filter which is a standard Bloom filter and the no-filter which is another Bloom filter whose purpose is to...

AIMS Randomized trials have shown that beta-blockers (BBs) reduce mortality in chronic heart failure (HF). Less data are available on the role of BBs in patients with acute HF, specifically if BBs should be continued or temporarily withdrawn. The aim of this study was to evaluate the role of BBs on in-hospital outcomes of patients admitted for worsening HF in a Cardiology setting. METHODS AND...

BACKGROUND The whole-test Ebel and Yes/No Angoff methods offer the possibility of faster and easier standard-setting exercises for local, medium-stakes performance exams. PURPOSE We sought to establish if these less demanding methods might be substituted for the traditional but complex case-level Ebel. METHODS Six faculty judges each used all three methods to set standards for six standardi...

Most theories of lie detection assume that lying increases cognitive load, resulting in longer response latencies during questioning. However, the studies supporting this theory are typically laboratory-based, in settings with no specific validity in security contexts. Consequently, using virtual reality (VR), we investigated how response latencies were influenced in an ecologically valid envir...

Two experiments investigated the effect of encoding conditions and type of test (recall vs. recognition) on the phenomenon of hypermnesia (improved performance across repeated tests). Subjects in Experiment 1 studied a list of words using either imaginal or semantic elaboration strategies and then received three successive tests. Different groups of subjects received either free recall, four-al...

We present two experiments in which we measured lexical decision latencies and errors to words with few or many orthographic neighbors (ie., Coltheart's N). The main goal of the study was to examine whether or not the neighborhood size effect in a lexical decision task could be affected by the exposure duration of the stimulus item (unlimited vs. limited time exposure, 150 msec plus a backward ...

A standard correction for random guessing (cfg) formula on multiple-choice and Yes/Noexaminations was examined retrospectively in the scores of the intermediate female EFL learners in an English language school. The correctionwas a weighting formula for points awarded for correct answers,incorrect answers, and unanswered questions so that the expectedvalue of the increase in test score due to g...