Guidelines on long-term opioid therapy recommend frequent reassessment of harm, efficacy, and misuse of these potentially harmful and sometimes ineffective medications. In primary care, there is a need for a brief, patient-reported instrument. This report details the initial steps in the development of such an instrument. An interdisciplinary team of clinician-scientists performed four discrete...

The Teacher Education Law states that a certified teacher has to complete one-year teaching internship after graduating from the university. Evaluating pre-service teachers of living technology at junior high schools and selecting the evaluation norms are urgent issues for educators. Therefore, it is very necessary to develop a Portfolio Instrument, along with a user’s manual, and establish its...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the reliability of the public health event notification assessment process under the International Health Regulations (2005) (IHR). METHODS In 2009, 193 National IHR Focal Points (NFPs) were invited to use the decision instrument in Annex 2 of the IHR to determine whether 10 fictitious public health events should be notified to WHO. Each event's notifiability was asse...

Abstract A thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) series for automotive panels with high durability have been newly synthesized using the reacting process based on polyester polyol (BTG), polycaprolactone triol (PCL), hexamethylene diisocyanate (HDI), isophorone (IPDI), and 1,4-butanediol chain extender as a function of NCO/OH ratio (NCO index). The dependence varying NCO index TPUs tensile strength ...

This paper examines the validity of a well known user information satisfaction instrument. A first contribution of this study is the replication of earlier findings by an independent researcher. However, more important are the extensions to earlier studies provided in this paper. First, this paper does not only test the validity of the instrument by a confirmatory factor analysis; in addition s...

Large vibrating plates are used as thunder sheets in orchestras. We have extended the use of flat plates by cementing a flat panel electroacoustic transducer on a large brass sheet. Because of the thickness of the panel, the output is subject to nonlinear distortion. When combined with a real-time input and signal processing algorithm, the active brass plate can become an effective musical inst...

The study confirmed the reliability and validity of the instrument for the objective evaluation of the appropriateness of surgical bed occupancy in a colorectal unit. A Canadian report on the American appropriateness evaluation protocol showed a poor validity against a panel of experts ( =0.25). A European version of the protocol has been suggested but has not been validated in a substantial st...