Ecological networks are a useful tool to study the complexity of biotic interactions at a community level. Advances in the understanding of network patterns encourage the application of a network approach in other disciplines than theoretical ecology, such as biodiversity conservation. So far, however, practical applications have been meagre. Here we present a framework for network analysis to ...

Given that women in rural communities in developing countries are responsible for the nutrition and health-related decisions affecting children in their care, their empowerment may influence the health status of their children. The association between women's empowerment, measured by using a recently developed Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index, and children's health status is examined fo...

INTRODUCTION The Community Health Status Indicators Project was undertaken to produce county-specific reports assessing the status of community health for local jurisdictions throughout the United States. To accomplish this assessment, the Community Health Status Indicators Project team selected peer groupings of counties to monitor and analyze the health of local communities relative to peer c...

Safety measurement and its analysis has been a challenging and well-researched topic in transportation. Conventionally, surrogate safety measures have been used as safety indicators in simulation models for safety assessment, in control formulations for driver assistance systems, and in data analysis of naturalistic driving studies. However, surrogate indicators give partial insights on traffic...

Qualitative probabilistic networks are designed for probabilistic inference in a qualitative way. They capture qualitative influences between variables, but do not provide for indicating the strengths of these influences. As a result, trade-offs between conflicting influences remain unresolved upon inference. In this paper, we investigate the use of order-of-magnitude kappa values to capture st...

There is a growing effort worldwide to develop objective indicators for animal welfare assessment, which provide information on an animal's quality of life, are scientifically trustworthy, and can readily be used in practice by professionals. Animals are sentient beings capable of positive and negative emotion, and so these indicators should be sensitive not only to their physical health, but a...

This paper presents a heuristic evaluation method for online documentation to identify specific usability problems, which are observed with such documentation. We have used qualitative indicators for all heuristics, which are summed up to provide a usability index (with base 100). This index quantifies the goodness of online documentation under consideration. We have considered both types of on...

Introduction: hospitals performance indicators will help monitoring, evaluation and decision making and therefore must be selected and ranked accurately. The aim of present study is identifying and selecting key hospitals performance indicators. Materials and methods: This is a descriptive and mixed (quantitative-qualitative) study. literature review and expert panel has been done to identif...

The Health Status Indicators (HSIs) were developed as part of the Healthy People 2000 process to facilitate the comparison of health status measures at national, State and local levels. In this report, the number of HSIs where the national target has been attained and the number of HSIs that have improved significantly are enumerated for the United States, the District of Columbia, and each Sta...