Life in urban areas presents special challenges for maternal child care practices. Data from a representative survey of households with children less than 3 years of age in Accra were used to test a number of hypothesized constraints to child care, including various maternal (education, employment, marital status, age, health, ethnic group, migration status) and household-level factors (income,...

We evaluated the use of the Green-Red Vegetation Index (GRVI) as a phenological indicator based on multiyear stand-level observations of spectral reflectance and phenology at several representative ecosystems in Japan. The results showed the relationships between GRVI values and the seasonal change of vegetation and ground surface with high temporal resolution. We found that GRVI has the follow...

OBJECTIVE to evaluate the associations of 18 activities of daily living with self-rated health in older people. DESIGN AND SETTING cross-sectional study of a representative sample of 781 people aged 65 or over (response rate: 89.9%). METHODS self-rated health was assessed by the question: "Overall, how would you rate your current health status-very good, good, fair, poor or very poor?" We u...

This is a timely piece of work given the emphasis being placed on the patient in the process of health policy formulation and service design and commissioning. Duncan et al. therefore ask a very relevant and important question about the validation of patient and service user involvement and in particular the qualification of representative groups that purport to voice the views of people with a...

An important role of the NIH Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) biomedical and healthCAre Data Discovery Index Ecosystem (bioCADDIE) is to promote data integration through the adoption of content standards and alignment to common data elements and high-level schema. The objective of this study was to investigate how a combination of Semantic Web technologies and the ISO/IEC 11179 data element model c...

Nation-level differences in individuals' reports of helping strangers, donating money to charity, and volunteering time were analyzed, drawing on nationally representative survey data from 135 nations. Frequency of these three behaviors yielded a reliable index of prosocial behavior. All three behaviors were found to be more frequent in nations that score low on an index of in-group favoritism ...