Objective: To measure weight perception among Haitian American outpatients in Miami-Dade County, and to compare weight perception by gender, body mass index (BMI) status, socioeconomic status, marital status and duration of United States residency. Design: A cross-sectional survey utilizing a BMI-based silhouette matching test. Setting: Recruitment and data collection were performed at four urb...

AIM This study assesses the association between pesticide exposure in pregnancy, preterm birth (PTB) and shortened gestation. METHODS Pregnancy information was abstracted from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Non-Public Use Natality Datasets 1990-2005. Pesticide use in maternal county of residence was calculated using California Pesticide Use Reporting (PUR) data 1990-2005. Counties were...

The first cases of Ebola virus disease (Ebola) in West Africa were identified in Guinea on March 22, 2014. On March 30, the first Liberian case was identified in Foya Town, Lofa County, near the Guinean border. Because the majority of early cases occurred in Lofa and Montserrado counties, resources were concentrated in these counties during the first several months of the response, and these co...

OBJECTIVE To develop and test a statistical model which correctly predicts the approval of outpatient referrals when reviewed by a specialty service based on nine discriminating variables. DESIGN Retrospective cross-sectional study. SETTING Large public county hospital system in a southern US city. PARTICIPANTS Written documents and associated data from 500 random adult referrals made by ...

BACKGROUND The self-consciousness and practicality of preferentially prescribed essential medicines (EMs) are not high enough in county hospitals. The purposes of this study were to use the information-motivation-behavioral skills (IMB) model to identify the predictors of essential medicines prescribing behavior (EMPB) among doctors and to examine the association between demographic variables, ...

We consider two settings of online learning to rank where feedback is restricted to top ranked items. The problem is cast as an online game between a learner and sequence of users, over T rounds. In both settings, the learners objective is to present ranked list of items to the users. The learner’s performance is judged on the entire ranked list and true relevances of the items. However, the le...