this study was designed to present and compare iranian hospitals` performance applying ratio analysis technique.this cross-sectional survey was conducted to present an instant image of 139 iranian hospitals` performance status applying ratio analysis as one of the non parametric technical efficiency assessment methods in 2008. data was collected using nine dimensional questionnaires supported b...

draw-a-man test (dam) as projection of a person’s inner world can provide information about people interests, anxieties, defenses and inhibitions. the aim of this study was to investigate indicators of aggression in dam test in primary male school students. materials and methods: in this explanatory study 57 male student in third grade of a primary school of khorramabad city were selected by co...

The paper develops a non-parametric, non-stationary framework for business-cycle dating based on an innovative statistical methodology known as Adaptive Weights Smoothing (AWS). The methodology is used both for the study of the individual macroeconomic time series relevant to the dating of the business cycle as well as for the estimation of their joint dynamic. Since the business cycle is defin...

Many applications across sciences and technologies require a careful quantification of non-deterministic effects to a system output, for example when evaluating the system’s reliability or when gearing it towards more robust operation conditions. At the heart of these considerations lies an accurate yet efficient characterization of uncertain system outputs. In this work we introduce and analyz...

BACKGROUND The most common way of accounting for the countryside in health studies has been to compare it, as a whole, to the city. Furthermore, most of the work on small area health inequalities has been confined to major urban centres. To counter this trend, in this paper, we explore small area health inequalities in the predominantly rural county of Portneuf (population = 44,545), Québec. Su...

A systematic review was conducted of 13 peer-reviewed articles and eight reports focused on indicators of quality abortion care. A total of 75 indicators of quality abortion were identified; these indicators address a variety of issues including policy, health systems, trained-provider availability, women's decision making, and morbidity and mortality. There is little agreement about indicators...

Possibilities of the assessment of a landscape with the use of succession development stages, monitored with the value of the Mean Individual Biomass (MIB) of carabid beetles and the occurrence of bird species are discussed on the basis of an example from Poland. Higher variability of the MIB value in space signifies a greater biodiversity. Apart from the variability of MIB, it is suggested to ...