The objective of this study was to assess whether living in proximity to a roofing fiber cement factory in southern Thailand was associated with physical, mental, social, and spiritual health domains measured in a self-reported health risk assessment (HRA) questionnaire. A cross-sectional study was conducted among community members divided into two groups: near population (living within 0-2km o...

The failure probability of the structures is one of the challenging problems in structural engineering. To obtain the reliability index introduced by Hasofer and Lind, one needs to solve a nonlinear equality constrained optimization problem. In this study, four of the most recent metaheuristic algorithms are utilized for finding the design point and the failure probability of problems with cont...

Scientific literature suggests that exposure to nanoparticles (NPs) might be associated with adverse health effects. A well-developed human risk assessment (HRA) that applies to NPs has never been established and optimized—until now. Furthermore, no government regulations are in place that establish what is considered to be an adequate and secure level of exposure and supported by a strong scie...

This study was carried out to assess the validity of the SPADI, (Shoulder pain and Disability Index), a self assessment of shoulder pain and disability in community based patients.The authors gave a fair introduction on the development of the SPADI and briefly critiqued the 2 studies that initially supported the validity of the subjective outcome measure. I note only moderate test-retest reliab...

Objective. The Tuck Jump Assessment (TJA), a clinical plyometric assessment, identifies 10 jumping and landing technique flaws. The study objective was to investigate TJA interrater and intrarater reliability with raters of different educational and clinical backgrounds. Methods. 40 participants were video recorded performing the TJA using published protocol and instructions. Five raters of var...

[Context and motivation] It is desirable that requirement engineering methods are reliable, that is, that methods can be repeated with the same results. Risk assessments methods, however, often have low reliability when they identify risk mitigations for a system based on expert judgement. [Question/problem] Our goal is to assess the reliability of an availability risk assessment method for tel...

Advances in technology-enabled dietary assessment include the advent of web-based food frequency questionnaires, which may reduce costs and researcher burden but may introduce new challenges related to internet connectivity and computer literacy. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the intra- and inter-version reliability, feasibility and acceptability of the paper and web Canadian Diet H...

The assessment of maintaining variables with the goal of developing prosocial intervention plans has become a driving force in the intellectual disabilities (ID) literature. One particularly crucial variable is whether the behavior is low or high rate and whether the challenging behavior is best characterized by self-injury or aggression. Because low rate behaviors present such a challenge to e...

OBJECTIVES Insufficient attention has been given to how information from computer-based clinical case simulations is presented, collected, and scored. Research is needed on how best to design such simulations to acquire valid performance assessment data that can act as useful feedback for educational applications. This report describes a study of a new simulation format with design features aim...