BACKGROUND Treatment benefits and harms are often communicated as relative risk reductions and increases, which are frequently misunderstood by doctors and patients. One suggestion for improving understanding of such risk information is to also communicate the baseline risk. We investigated 1) whether the presentation format of the baseline risk influences understanding of relative risk changes...

BACKGROUND Research investigating prognosis in musculoskeletal pain conditions has only been moderately successful in predicting which patients are unlikely to recover. Clinical decision making could potentially be improved by combining information taken at baseline and re-consultation. METHODS Data from four prospective clinical cohorts of adults presenting to UK and Dutch primary care with ...

Many papers have studied the probability of majority cycles, also called the Condorcet paradox, using the impartial culture or related distributional assumptions. While it is widely acknowledged that the impartial culture is unrealistic, conclusions drawn from the impartial culture are nevertheless still widely advertised and reproduced in textbooks. We demonstrate that the impartial culture is...

Given the time, cost and risk associated with drug development, biopharmaceutical companies typically need to have a portfolio of drugs in development to be successful. Current pressures of cost and speed to market are driving the need for more effective means of assessing the value and risks of such drug portfolios. This paper presents research to generate a prototype computer tool developed t...

Ten Do It Better, Do They? An Empirical Analysis of an Old Football Myth In this paper we investigate how the expulsion of a player influences the outcome of a football match. Common sense implies a negative impact for the affected team. However, an old football myth suggests that such an expulsion might also be beneficial since it increases the team spirit as well as the efforts of the affecte...

Scenarios have proven useful to elicit, validate and document requirements but cannot be used in isolation. Our concern in this paper is to integrate scenario-based techniques in existing methods. We propose a set of operators to support such an integration. This set is classified in two sub-sets: the one dealing with the integration of the product models of the two initial methods and the one ...

Nowadays standard technologies play important roles in enhancing sharability, reusability and interoperability of learning contents. However, there is a lack of pedagogical justification of the contents implemented with the standards. This paper discusses the standard-compliance of our ontology-based modeling framework and how the framework gives theoretical justification to standardcompliant l...

BACKGROUND Evaluating the net exchange of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in conjunction with soil carbon sequestration may give a comprehensive insight on the role of agricultural production in global warming. MATERIALS AND METHODS Measured data of methane (CH(4)) and nitrous oxide (N(2)O) were utilized to test the applicability of the Denitrification and Decomposition (DNDC) model to a winte...