Although the cancer research community has supported a "nondisclosure" position about the return of individual results to research subjects, new technologies, such as genome wide association studies, will reveal clinically relevant findings, some of which cannot be ignored. What recommendations exist that can guide researchers and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) about this issue? This articl...

BACKGROUND Despite substantial investment in health capacity building in developing countries, evaluations of capacity building effectiveness are scarce. By analysing projects in Africa that had successfully built sustainable capacity, we aimed to identify evidence that could indicate that capacity building was likely to be sustainable. METHODS Four projects were selected as case studies usin...

The selection and use of chemicals and materials with less hazardous profiles reflects a paradigm shift from reliance on risk minimization through exposure controls to hazard avoidance. This article introduces risk assessment and alternatives assessment frameworks in order to clarify a misconception that alternatives assessment is a less effective tool to guide decision making, discusses factor...

BACKGROUND Equity focused health impact assessments (EFHIAs), or health equity impact assessments, are being increasingly promoted internationally as a mechanism for enhancing the consideration of health equity in the development of policies, programs and projects. Despite this there are relatively few examples of examples of completed EFHIAs available. This paper presents a case study of a rap...

As meteorological disaster systems are large complex systems, disaster reduction programs must be based on risk analysis. Consequently, judgment by an expert based on his or her experience (also known as qualitative evaluation) is an important link in meteorological disaster risk assessment. In some complex and non-procedural meteorological disaster risk assessments, a hesitant fuzzy linguistic...

The multiphase optimization strategy (MOST) is a framework for not only evaluating but also optimizing behavioral interventions. A tool critical for MOST is the screening experiment, which enables efficient gathering of information for deciding which components to include in an optimized intervention. This article outlines a procedure for making decisions based on data from a factorial screenin...

Intuitionistic preference relations constitute a flexible and simple representation format of experts’ preference on a set of alternative options, while at the same time allowing to accommodate degrees of hesitation inherent to all decision making processes. In comparison with fuzzy preference relations, the use of intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations in decision making is limited, which i...

The proposed self-adaptive predictive pursuing policy consists of an action decision-making procedure and a procedure of adjusting the estimation of evader’s action preference. Since correct estimation of opponent’s intention would do good to win adversarial games, it introduces the conception of action preference to model opponent’s decision-making. Because evader often has different action pr...

Background: Venepuncture is a minimally invasive procedure, which is commonly performed in hospitals; if the pain is inadequately managed, it can cause negative feelings in children. Distraction can reduce pain through affecting the central nervous system and releasing neurotransmitters that inhibit pain. Aim: In this study, we aimed to compare the effects of play-dough and bubble making as dis...

The present paper presented a methodology for prioritizing the innovative and entrepreneurial indicators using Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), taking into account three individual, organizational and cultural dimensions simultaneously in decision making procedure. This methodology has two main advantages: first, the speed of operation in the accounti...