background & aim: a meta-analysis refers to the statistical synthesis of results from a series of studies and has been used to estimate pooled prevalence of human diseases. in this study, we review some statistical issues regarding the meta-analysis of the prevalence of human diseases such as statistical software and programs, transformations of prevalence rate, assessment of heterogeneity, and...

Modern diagnostic methods enable clinicians to look beyond a diagnosis of chronic Q fever and discern whether patients instead have persistent focalized Coxiella burnetii infection(s). Use of these methods and development of criteria to define and treat such infections, especially cardiovascular infections, will improve the prognosis for patients previously thought to have chronic Q fever.

Given that the core issues of attention research have been recognized for millenia, we do not know as much about attention as we should. I argue that the reasons for this failure are (1) we create spurious dichotomies, (2) we reify attention, treating it as a cause, when it is an effect, and (3) we equate a collection of facts with a theory. In order to correct these errors, we need a new techn...

Is the Introspection Thesis true? It certainly isn’t obvious. Introspection is the faculty by which each of us has access to his or her own mental states. Even if we were to suppose that mental states are identical to brain states, it doesn’t follow immediately from this supposition that we can introspect our mental states as brain states. This point is analogous to the following. It doesn’t fo...

In this paper we analyze biased Maker-Breaker games and Avoider-Enforcer games, both played on the edge set of a random board G ∼ G(n, p). In Maker-Breaker games there are two players, denoted by Maker and Breaker. In each round, Maker claims one previously unclaimed edge of G and Breaker responds by claiming b previously unclaimed edges. We consider the Hamiltonicity game, the perfect matching...

conomists love to say that there is no such thing as a free lunch. But the Chilean government agency responsible for school grants, Junta Nacional de Auxilio Escolar y Becas (JUNAEB), is an exception to the rule. During the school year, JUNAEB provides breakfast and lunch for 2 million children in primary and secondary public schools. In a developing country where about 14 percent of children u...

Previous studies have demonstrated that a multitude of options can lead to choice overload, reducing decision quality. Through controlled experiments, we examine sequential choice architectures that enable the choice set to remain large while potentially reducing the effect of choice overload. A specific tournament-style architecture achieves this goal. An alternate architecture in which subjec...