background and purpose: special attention has been paid to instructor and preceptor in nursing and midwifery education. this study aims to explore the experiences and perceptions of midwifery students about implementing preceptorship program in delivery setting. methods: the current study is a qualitative research. the focus groups and in-depth interviews were used as data collection tools. tar...

We show that two popular discounted reward natural actor-critics, NAC-LSTD and eNAC, follow biased estimates of the natural policy gradient. We derive the first unbiased discounted reward natural actor-critics using batch and iterative approaches to gradient estimation and prove their convergence to globally optimal policies for discrete problems and locally optimal policies for continuous prob...

Few studies have compared the interactive use of Boolean and natural language searching systems. We studied the use of three retrieval systems by senior medical students searching on queries generated by actual physicians in a clinical setting. The searchers were randomized to search on two of three different retrieval systems: a Boolean system, a word-based natural language system, and a conce...

We study online bipartite matching settings inspired by parking allocation problems, where rational agents arrive sequentially and select their most preferred parking slot. In contrast to standard online matching setting where edges incident to each arriving vertex are revealed upon its arrival, agents in our setting have private preferences over available slots. Our focus is on natural and sim...

The setting of metric spaces is very natural for numerous questions concerning manifolds, norms, and fractal sets, and a few of the main ingredients are surveyed here.

trend- setting for the field of persian language and literature is the subject of the present paper. the author believes in setting of such a trend, and criticizes the reasons of opposing ones, citing his own proofs. he also enumerates his considerations about trend-setting circumstances at the end. trend- setting for the field of persian language and literature is the subject of the present pa...

The natural gradient method has been used effectively in conjugate Gaussian process models, but the non-conjugate case has been largely unexplored. We examine how natural gradients can be used in non-conjugate stochastic settings, together with hyperparameter learning. We conclude that the natural gradient can significantly improve performance in terms of wall-clock time. For illconditioned pos...

use of herbal extracts and essences as natural antibacterial compounds has become increasingly popular for the control of oral infectious diseases. therefore, finding natural antimicrobial products with the lowest side effects seems necessary. the present study sought to assess the effect of punica granatum l. water extract on five oral bacteria and bacterial biofilm formation on orthodontic wi...