BACKGROUND School tobacco control policies vary widely in their strength, extensiveness, and enforcement. Currently, no standardized method exists to assess the comprehensiveness of school tobacco policies. The purpose of this study was to develop a new practical rating system for school tobacco policies, assess its reliability, and present preliminary validation data. METHODS This study pres...

The advent of large-scale assessment, but also the more frequent use of longitudinal and multivariate approaches to measurement in psychological, educational, and sociological research, caused an increased demand for psychometrically sound short scales. Shortening scales economizes on valuable administration time, but might result in inadequate measures because reducing an item set could: a) ch...

BACKGROUND Medical revalidation decisions need to be reliable if they are to reassure on the quality and safety of professional practice. This study tested an innovative method in which general practitioners (GPs) were assessed on their reflection and response to a set of externally specified feedback. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS 60 GPs and 12 GP appraisers in the Tayside region of Scotland, UK....

The fidelity of an eyewitness's memory representation is an issue of paramount forensic concern. Psychological science has been unable to offer more than vague generalities concerning the relation of retention interval to memory trace strength for the once-seen face. A meta-analysis of 53 facial memory studies produced a highly reliable association (r=.18, d=0.37) between longer retention inter...

A 32-Item Japanese Medication Adherence Scale had been developed as a tool for evaluating the medication-taking behavior of hypertensive patients and predicting therapeutic efficacy, and an Internet survey of 990 hypertensive patients throughout Japan was performed. As a result, factor 1 “Expectation of pharmacological efficacy” (9 items), factor 2 “Motivation to be self-controlled in taking me...

A single two dimensional (2D) image does not contain depth information. An infinite number of points in the three dimensional (3D) space are projected to the same point in the image plane. But a single 2D image has some monocular depth cues, by which we can make a hypothesis of depth variation in the image to generate a depth map. This paper proposes an interactive method of depth map generatio...

BACKGROUND This study evaluated the reliability and validity of one extraoral [Ortho Insight 3D™ (Motionview Software, Hixson, TN/USA)] and two intraoral [ITero™ (Align Technologies, San Jose, CA/USA) and Lythos™ (Ormco Corp., Orange, CA/USA)] scanners. METHODS Fifteen dry human mandibles were scanned twice with each of the scanners, and digital models were generated. Five measurements were m...

BACKGROUND Growing evidence suggests that mixed methods approaches to measuring neighborhood effects on health are needed. The Wisconsin Assessment of the Social and Built Environment (WASABE) is an objective audit tool designed as an addition to a statewide household-based health examination survey, the Survey of the Health of Wisconsin (SHOW), to objectively measure participant's neighborhood...

Visual stimuli can be perceived at a broad, "global" level, or at a more focused, "local" level. While research has shown that many individuals demonstrate a preference for global information, there are large individual differences in the degree of global/local bias, such that some individuals show a large global bias, some show a large local bias, and others show no bias. The main purpose of t...

Russian Doll Search (RDS) is a clever procedure to solve overconstrained problems. RDS solves a sequence of nested subprob-lems, where two consecutive subproblems diier in one variable only. We present the Specialized RDS (SRDS) algorithm, which solves the current subproblem for each value of the new variable with respect to the previous subproblem. The SRDS lower bound is superior to the RDS l...