Spearman distance is a permutation distance which might prove useful for coding, e.g. for codes on permutations. It turns out, however, that the Spearman geometry of strings is rather unruly from the point of view of error correction and error detection, and special care has to be taken to discriminate between the two notions of codeword distance and codeword distinguishability. All of this str...

Methods Study was conducted in ART centre, IMS, BHU. Patients who failed on first line ART (NACO criteria) were included in the study after consent. Virological, immunological and clinical response was assessed at 24 weeks. Independent t-test /Mann-Whitney U test was used for making comparison among the independent groups. Chi-square test was used to test the association between categorical var...

Original scientific paper The present study aims to investigate some mechanisms of corporate governance on profit smoothing. In fact, it studies the relationship between institutional investors, outside board members, internal audit and profit smoothing. A hypothesis was formulated for each of these options and their effect on profit smoothing was tested. A regression model was used to test the...

This study aims to assess the psychometric properties of the Brazilian version of the Vulnerable Elders Survey-13 (VES-13). Interviews were carried out with individuals aged 60 years and over receiving care at an ambulatory cancer centre. Test-retest reliability was assessed using the Spearman correlation coefficient, intraclass correlation coefficients and Cohen’s kappa coefficient. Construct ...

BACKGROUND We aimed to compare the clinical judgments of a reference panel of emergency medicine academic physicians against evidence-based likelihood ratios (LRs) regarding the diagnostic value of selected clinical and paraclinical findings in the context of a script concordance test (SCT). FINDINGS A SCT with six scenarios and five questions per scenario was developed. Subsequently, 15 emer...

Nevirapine (NVP) is associated with severe liver and skin toxicity through sulfotransferase (SULT) bioactivation of the phase I metabolite 12-hydroxy-NVP [1-3]. The female sex, a well-known risk factor for NVP-induced toxicity, is associated with higher SULT expression (4) and lower plasma levels of 12-hydroxy-NVP [3]. Interestingly, apolipoprotein A1 (ApoA1) increases SULT2B1 activity and ApoA...

BACKGROUND Death by neurological criteria is often misunderstood by laypersons even though they make decisions about withdrawal of care and organ donation. No validated questionnaire for determining laypersons' understanding of brain death exists. Such a tool could be useful in clinical, educational, and research settings. METHODS Brain death experts and a focus group of laypersons were used ...