BACKGROUND Quality indicators are increasingly used to measure the quality of care and compare quality across hospitals. In the Netherlands over the past few years numerous hospital quality indicators have been developed and reported. Dutch indicators are mainly based on expert consensus and face validity and little is known about their construct validity. Therefore, we aim to study the constru...

in some quality control applications, the quality of a process or a product is described by the relationship between a response variable and one or more explanatory variables, called a profile. moreover, in most practical applications, the qualitative characteristic of a product/service is vague, uncertain and linguistic and cannot be precisely stated. the purpose of this paper is to propose a ...

the substances responsible for saffron’s characteristic quality are crocins, picrocrocin, and safranal. the drying process is critical to the saffron quality as measured by levels of secondary metabolites, crocin (color and anti-tumor properties), picrocrocin (taste), and safranal (aroma). four different dehydration methods were evaluated: iranian traditional method (room temperature); dehydrat...

This with the integration of distributed generation (DG) to meshed distribution systems, the operating time of the protective system becomes a major concern in order to avoid nuisance DG tripping. This paper proposes a new tripping characteristic for directional overcurrent relays (DOCRs) that can achieve a higher possible reduction of overall relays operating time in meshed distribution networ...

Many large-scale surveys measure subjective well-being (SWB) through a single survey item. This paper takes advantages of response time data to explore the relation between time taken to answer a single SWB item and the reliability and validity of answers to this SWB item. We found that reliability and validity of answers to the SWB item are low for fast respondents aged 70 and above and slow r...

Parenting style experienced during childhood has profound effects on children's futures. Scales developed in other countries have never been validated in the Tibetan context. The present study aimed to examine the construct validity and reliability of a Tibetan translation of the 23-item short form of the Egna Minnen Beträffande Uppfostran [One's Memories of Upbringing] (s-EMBU) and to test the...

One special subalgebra of the algebra of fuzzy truth values is the set of those elements that take only 0 and 1 as values. This subalgebra is in one-to-one correspondence with the subsets of the unit interval, but the operations do not correspond to ordinary union and intersection. The automorphisms of this subalgebra are studied here, resulting in showing that the subobjects corresponding to n...

Process capability indices show the ability of a process to produce products according to the pre-specified requirements. Since final quality characteristics of a product are usually interrelated to its previous amounts in earlier workstations, one need to model and consider the relationship among them to assess the process ca-pability properly. Hence, conducting process capability analysis in ...

in this paper, absorbing markov chain models are developed to determine the optimum process mean levels for both a single-stage and a serial two-stage production system in which items are inspected for conformity with their specification limits. when the value of the quality characteristic of an item falls below a lower limit, the item is scrapped. if it falls above an upper limit, the item is ...