With interest in health economics growing, there is a demand for valid methods for measuring health-related quality of life (HRQL) in asthma using utilities. The aims of this study were to develop disease-specific versions of the standard gamble and rating scale, to compare their measurement properties with those of the Asthma Quality of Life Questionnaire (AQLQ) and the Medical Outcomes Survey...

Today, a large volume of hotel reviews is available on many websites, such as TripAdvisor (http://www.tripadvisor.com) and Orbitz (http://www.orbitz.com). A typical review contains an overall rating and several aspect ratings along with text. The rating is perceived as an abstraction of reviewers’ satisfaction in terms of points. Although the amount of reviews having aspect ratings is growing, ...

We have developed a prototype system with image discrimination for the filtering and rating of web pages displaying inappropriate content. We used the SafetyOnline rating standard for the system. The rating standard defines five categories having five levels. The system rates web pages and classifies them into five levels of inappropriateness for each category according to the rating standard. ...

BACKGROUND Appropriate patient information materials may support the consumer's decision to attend or not to attend colorectal cancer (CRC) screening tests (fecal occult blood test and screening colonoscopy). The aim of this study was to develop a list of criteria to assess whether written health information materials on CRC screening provide balanced, unbiased, quantified, understandable, and ...

This study examined the efficacy of combining two promising approaches to treating children's specific phobias, namely attention training and one 3-h session of exposure therapy ('one-session treatment', OST). Attention training towards positive stimuli (ATP) and OST (ATP+OST) was expected to have more positive effects on implicit and explicit cognitive mechanisms and clinical outcome measures ...

The study investigated the perceived roles of Religious and Cultural Teachers in Implementing Curriculum towards Achieving Sustaining Peace Imo State. was guided by two research questions one hypothesis. Descriptive survey design adopted for study. Multistage proportionate stratified random sampling techniques were used to draw a sample 224 Christian religious teachers from population 602 junio...

This paper considers a model of a rating agency with multiple clients, in which each client has a separate market that forms a belief about the quality of the client after the agency issues a rating. When the clients are rated separately (individual rating), the credibility of a good rating is limited by the incentive of the agency to exaggerate the quality of its client. In centralized rating,...

Previous studies have shown a strong correlation between topographic/soil features and agricultural production; however, linkages these insurance products are scarce. Agricultural is an ever-growing means of governmental support for producers globally. However, failure to set premiums that accurately reflect risk exposure can lead low participation rates and/or adverse selection. The U.S. feder...