Background: Educational clinical environment has an important role in nursing students' learning. Any difference between actual and expected clinical environment will decrease nursing students’ interest in clinical environments and has a negative correlation with their clinical performance.   Methods : This descriptive cross-sectional study is an attempt to compare nursing students'perception...

We generalize the notion of statistical preference to the theory of imprecise probabilities, by proposing an alternative notion of desirability of a gamble. As a natural consequence, we derive a general definition of median, providing it with a behavioral meaning. Furthermore, we show that, when we restrict to absolutely continuous probability distributions, a random variable is statistically p...

We assessed the influence of instrumental outcome divergence – the extent to which actions differ in terms of their outcome probability distributions – on behavioral preference in a two-alternative forced choice task. We found that participants preferred a pair of available actions with high divergence to a pair with low divergence. The effect of outcome divergence, dissociated here from that o...

Choice questions, sometimes called stated-choice questions or attribute-based choice questions, along with data on observed fishing behavior, are used to estimate anglers’ willingness to pay (WTP) to reduce or remove Green Bay FCAs. A choice question presents an individual with a number of alternatives, each described in terms of the levels of their common set of characteristics, and asks the i...

Across all kingdoms of biological life, protein-coding genes exhibit unequal usage of synonymous codons. Although alternative theories abound, translational selection has been accepted as an important mechanism that shapes the patterns of codon usage in prokaryotes and simple eukaryotes. Here we analyze patterns of codon usage across 74 diverse bacteriophages that infect E. coli, P. aeruginosa,...

This note characterizes the ‘inverse plurality rule’, where voters specify only their least preferred alternative. This rule is characterized by a new minimal veto condition (MV) and the four well known conditions that characterize scoring rules; namely, Anonymity (A), Neutrality (N), Reinforcement (RE) and Continuity (C). Our new characterization result is related to the characterizations of a...

Methods for updating the LU factors of simplex basis matrices are reviewed. An alternative derivation of the Fletcher and Matthews method is given. This leads to generalizations of their method which avoids problems with both the Bartels and Golub method and the Fletcher and Matthews method. The improvements are to both numerical stability and data access locality. The resulting updating algori...