INTRODUCTION In recent years, outcome assessment related to orthopedic surgeries has increasingly focused on patient-reported questionnaires. The Oxford Hip Score (OHS), self-administered questionnaire, is a reliable, valid, and responsive instrument for assessing hip in patients undergoing Arthroplasty. METHODS The study involved 105 adult Persian-speaking patients admitted for primary Total...

BACKGROUND The Oxford Knee Score (OKS) is a short patient-reported outcome instrument that measures pain and physical activity related to knee osteoarthritis. The purpose of this study is to evaluate, construct validity and consistent reliability of the Persian version of the OKS. METHODS The case series consisted of 80 patients who were clinically diagnosed with having knee osteoarthritis. A...

Many species of songbirds produce songs of unusually low amplitude during aggressive encounters (Dabelsteen et al. 1998); such low amplitude songs have been variously termed ‘soft songs’ (Nice 1943), ‘strangled songs’ (Snow 1958), and ‘quiet songs’ (Dabelsteen et al. 1998). In some species, soft songs are produced in courtship as well as in aggression, but in our study species, the song sparrow...

Male song sparrows,Melospiza melodia, sing highly variable songs. Traditionally, researchers have partitioned this variability by assigning songs to discrete categories termed ‘song types’, but researchers also have recognized that songs classified as the same song type are themselves variable. Territorial playbacks were used in a habituation/recovery design to investigate whether songs sparrow...

Choice of a particular mate phenotype may arise out of experience with the very phenotypes under consideration. Female European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) prefer males that sing predominantly long-bout songs over males that sing predominantly short-bout songs, and thus, song-bout length is a phenotypic parameter instrumental in releasing the female's mate choice. The preferred long-bout songs...

Animals use acoustic signals to defend resources against rivals and attract breeding partners. As with many biological traits, acoustic signals may reflect ancestry; closely related species often produce more similar signals than do distantly related species. Whether this similarity in acoustic signals is biologically relevant to animals is poorly understood. We conducted a playback experiment ...

A new attitude scale to measure the strength of motivation to find meaning in life is herein developed to complement the Purpose in Life Test (PIL), which measures the degree to which meaning has been found. Both instruments were designed from the orientation of Frankl's logotherapy, which holds the "will to meaning" to be the strongest human motivation. Ss were: Group 1 "abnormal," 128 logothe...

We use results from the 2011 MIREX “Audio Music Similarity and Retrieval” task for a meta analysis of the hub phenomenon. Hub songs appear similar to an undesirably high number of other songs due to a problem of measuring distances in high dimensional spaces. Comparing 17 algorithms we are able to confirm that different algorithms produce very different degrees of hubness. We also show that hub...

BACKGROUND Baecke Habitual Physical Activity Questionnaire (BHPAQ) has widely been employed in clinical and laboratorial studies as a tool for measuring subjects' physical activities. But, the reliability and validity of this questionnaire have not been investigated among Persian speakers. OBJECTIVES Therefore, the aim of the current study was examining the reliability and validity of the Per...