PURPOSE To survey the general public's attitude towards preoperative assessment and commonly perceived fears about general anesthesia. METHODS A province wide telephone survey was conducted in Alberta. General and regional anesthesia were defined, a scenario involving major knee surgery was described, and participants were asked to choose between regional and general anesthesia. Respondents u...

Open Mind Common Sense is a knowledge acquisition system designed to acquire commonsense knowledge from the general public over the web. We describe and evaluate our first fielded system, which enabled the construction of a 400,000 assertion commonsense knowledge base. We then discuss how our second-generation system addresses weaknesses discovered in the first. The new system acquires facts, d...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate whether patients seeking reduction rhinoplasty hold a different concept of the ideal nose than does the general public, and to determine what features characterize the ideal nasal profile. METHODS Twenty-seven patients seeking reduction rhinoplasty and 15 randomly selected members of the public evaluated a series of computer-manipulated photographic profiles using a pic...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to assess the level of awareness and knowledge about signs and risk factors of oral cancer in the general population in Saudi Arabia. MATERIALS AND METHODS A self-administered questionnaire was used to collect information from Saudi adults aged 15 years and older. A total of 679 persons participated in the survey. Descriptive statistics were calculated and...

Retail sales of prescription drugs totaled $154.5 billion in 2001. The National Institute for Health Care Management estimates annual sales will exceed $400 billion by the year 2010. This paper analyzes the welfare and distributional effects of two policy families that could be used to cope with high and rising pharmaceutical costs. We employ a general-equilibrium approach to contrast the curre...

OBJECTIVE To identify characteristics of patients who abscond from general hospital wards, and to determine patient outcomes. DESIGN Retrospective study. SETTING In-patient wards of a public general hospital, Hong Kong. SUBJECTS AND METHODS Incident reports of 116 absconding episodes over a 20-month period from 1 November 1998 to 30 June 2000 were reviewed. Clinical characteristics, time ...

Objectives. The objectives of this study were to elicit health utility scores for moderate Alzheimer's disease (AD) using members of the general public. Methods. Five-hundred Canadians were chosen randomly to participate in a telephone interview. The EQ-5D was administered to estimate the health utility score for respondents' current health status (i.e., no AD) and for a hypothetical moderate A...

this paper examines the dimensions of accountability that the executive must fulfil in the islamic republic of iran and the role of accounting in meeting accountability obligations as they are at present. accountability continues to be interpreted, almost exclusively, in terms of the fiduciary stewardship of resources appropriated by parliament. public sector resource accounting information sys...

ion-filtration-comparison method has been developed in the United States case Computer Associates International v. Altai. Ravicher has found evidence that this method is nowadays the dominant way of interpreting derivative works of computer programs in the United States district courts. The method has been also applied in Europe. The idea is in short that the similarity between two source codes...