Identification of confounding factors, evaluation of their influence on cause-effect associations, and the introduction of appropriate ways to account for these factors are important considerations in designing case-control studies. This paper presents designs useful for these purposes, after first providing a statistical definition of a confounding factor. Differences in the ability to identif...

Over the last 30 years, the nutritional status of Chinese children has greatly improved due to economic development and improved incomes. In this review, the status of childhood malnutrition and obesity in China is evaluated based on the National Nutrition and Health Survey of 2002 (NNHS2002) and the survey on National Student Health and Physical Fitness in China of 2005. Compared with the NNHS...

'National Cancer Institute, Biometric Research Branch, DCTD, Executive Plaza North, Room 739, 6130 Executive Boulevard, MSC 7434, Bethesda, Maryland 20892-7434, U.S.A. 2National Cancer Institute, Biometry Research Group, DCP, Executive Plaza North, Room 344, 6130 Executive Boulevard, Bethesda, Maryland 20892, U.S.A. 3F0x Chase Cancer Center, 7701 Burholme Avenue, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1911...

Public health systems have been developed over many years and are costly to maintain or replace. Service-oriented architectures (SOA) have provided a way for these systems to remain viable and responsive to increasing demands for information and analysis. As healthcare entities look for strategies to effectively achieve “meaningful use:” of their EHR systems, SOA will emerge as one key technica...

Autonomy is a quality for devices and creatures that perform tasks with relative independence from their designers and sources of authority. We discuss the idea and present two case studies to illustrate that the parameters for Autonomy are highly domain dependent.

as in developing insight?although there is no discussion of occupational rehabilitation. They also discuss the difficulties which a therapeutic team may encounter when caring for the patients, rivalries, and conflicts over setting limits, for example. Drugs do not get much of a mention; but one patient was put on stelazine three and a half years after admission and appeared to improve remarkabl...

DR. LEONARD: The patient, a 42-year-old civil engineer, was admitted to the Isolation Division of the New Haven Hospital complaining of difficulty in breathing. The present illness began 5 days before admission, after the patient had driven for about six hours through a heavy snowstorm. He arrived home at 10 P.M., feeling cold and "chilly," took a hot bath, and retired. The next morning the pat...

The goal of every author is to write a paper that readers (and reviewers) find convincing. Since writers of papers based on case research do not have recourse to the canonical statement “results are significant at p 0.05” that helps assuage readers’ skepticism of empirical papers, researchers using case research often feel they are fighting an uphill battle to persuade their readers. In this sh...

Data models that are induced in classifier construction often consist of multiple parts, each of which explains part of the data. Classification methods for such multi-part models are called multimodal classification methods. The model parts may overlap or have insufficient coverage. How to deal best with the problems of overlapping and insufficient coverage? In this paper we propose a hierarch...