INTRODUCTION In 2012 in China, 52.9% of men were reported to smoke while only 2.4% of women smoked. This study explored the smoking-related Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices (KAP) among young adult male smokers. METHODS A cross-sectional study was conducted in four municipal areas of Chongqing using a questionnaire administered to 536 natives young male smokers aged 18-45 years old. RESULT...

Recommender systems apply knowledge discovery techniques to the problem of making personalized recommendations for information, products or services during a live interaction. In this paper we analyze three different recommendation generation algorithms. We look into three different techniques for computing similarities for obtaining recommendations from them. On the basis of various parameters...

UNLABELLED Estimating pairwise correlation from replicated genome-scale (a.k.a. OMICS) data is fundamental to cluster functionally relevant biomolecules to a cellular pathway. The popular Pearson correlation coefficient estimates bivariate correlation by averaging over replicates. It is not completely satisfactory since it introduces strong bias while reducing variance. We propose a new multiva...

In this paper we describe the three approaches we submitted to the Semantic Textual Similarity task of SemEval 2012. The first approach considers to calculate the semantic similarity by using the Jaccard coefficient with term expansion using synonyms. The second approach uses the semantic similarity reported by Mihalcea in (Mihalcea et al., 2006). The third approach employs Random Indexing and ...

BACKGROUND C-reactive protein concentration has continuous associations with risk of coronary artery disease, ischemic stroke and death from several cancers. In addition, several studies have shown that CRP could be used to predict first ever myocardial infarction and stroke in healthy subjects, as well as outcome in acute setting. High levels of another biomarker, D-dimer, have been found to b...

Degree assortativity is the tendency for nodes of high degree (resp. low degree) in a graph to be connected to high degree nodes (resp. to low degree ones). It is usually quantified by the Pearson correlation coefficient of the degree–degree correlation. Here we extend this concept to account for the effect of second neighbours to a given node in a graph. That is, we consider the two-walks degr...

BACKGROUND Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) are a serious problem among the nursing staff. Mental workload is the major cause of MSDs among nursing staff. The aim of this study was to investigate the mental workload dimensions and their association with MSDs among nurses of Alzahra Hospital, affiliated to Isfahan University of Medical Sciences. MATERIALS AND METHODS This descriptive cross-sec...

The main objectives of this article are the assessment of agreement between measure-based and report-based information on weight and height, besides the identification of the main characteristics related to 150 pregnant women who could report (versus could not report) their pre-gestational weight, weight at delivery, and height. According to the results, report-based information on previous wei...

We studied the between-therapist reliability and the validity of four instruments in measuring lumbar spine curvature and pelvic tilt. The four instruments and their measurements were 1) a tape measure to measure the change in lumbar curvature during trunk flexion; 2) a gravity goniometer to measure pelvic angle and lumbar curvature during stance, trunk flexion, and trunk extension; 3) a parall...

OBJECTIVE The Disability of Arm, Shoulder and Hand (DASH) questionnaire is a tool for measuring physical function and symptoms of the upper extremity. Although widely used, it is not validated for rheumatoid arthritis (RA). In this study the DASH was validated for this patient group. METHODS In total, 102 patients participated in this study. For the validation, the questionnaires of the DASH,...