onveying a strong message within a language stems from not only a linguistically appropriate utterance but also a pragmatically appropriate discourse. Broadly considering various facets of pragmatics, pragmatic assessment has not been potentially brought into perspective. To address this discourse gap, this study, guided by the principles of mixed-method design, pursued three purposes: ...

In this paper, we propose a biclustering-based approach to identify dishonest advisors (who provide misleading opinions about sellers), while evaluating seller trustworthiness on multiple criteria. It considers correlation between advisors’ ratings to various criteria and trust transitivity to accurately filter the dishonest advisors. Evaluation results demonstrate the robustness of our approac...

Conflict of interest: none. ABSTRACT Objective: To evaluate the diagnostic sensitivity, specificity, and agreement of the Dementia Rating Scale with clinical diagnosis of cognitive impairment and to compare its psychometric measures with those from Mini Mental State Examination. Methods: Eighty-six elders from a long-term care institution were invited to participate in a study, and fifty-eight ...

BACKGROUND Congenital talipes equino-varus (CTEV), also known as clubfoot, is one of the most common congenital musculoskeletal malformations. Despite this, considerable variation exists in the measurement of deformity correction and outcome evaluation. This study aims to determine the criteria for successful clubfoot correction using the Ponseti technique in low resource settings through Afric...

BEST TOOL: The adapted Beers’ Criteria (HCFA Guidelines for Potentially Inappropriate Medications in the Elderly) identifies medications noted by an expert panel to have potential risks that outweigh potential benefits of the drug. The criteria are appropriate for persons older than 65 years of age, regardless of their level of frailty. The criteria provide a rating of severity for adverse outc...

BACKGROUND Developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH) is the most common orthopaedic disorder in newborns. Despite this considerable variation in practice exists. The aim of this study was to determine the clinical relevance and a ranking order for the diagnostic criteria in DDH amongst paediatric orthopaedic surgeons practicing in the UK. METHOD One hundred members of the British Society of Ch...

The studies conducted so far on the effectiveness of resolution methods including the discussion method in resolving discrepancies in rating have yielded mixed results. What is left unnoticed in the literature is the potential of discussion to be used as a training tool rather than a resolution method. The present study addresses this research gap by exploring the data coming from rating behavi...

OBJECTIVE Developed by the Ministry of Education, the Qualis evaluation criteria have strongly impacted the scientific production of Post-Graduation Programs. A new set of more stringent criteria has been proposed for Qualis. Our aim was to evaluate the impact of the new Qualis criteria on the scientific production of Post-Graduation Programs in psychiatry over the last 10 years. METHOD We ex...

In this thesis, we propose a method for modeling utility (rating) functions based on a novel concept called Fuzzy Operator Tree (FOT for short). As the notion suggests, this method makes use of techniques from fuzzy set theory and implements a fuzzy rating function, that is, a utility function that maps to the unit interval, where 0 corresponds to the lowest and 1 to the highest evaluation. Eve...