BACKGROUND Confidence intervals (or associated standard errors) facilitate assessment of the practical importance of the findings of a health study, and their incorporation into a meta-analysis. For paired design studies, these items are often not reported. Since the descriptive statistics for such studies are usually presented in the same way as for unpaired designs, direct computation of the ...

A new nonparametric test of independence between the components of bivariate random vectors .X; Y / is motivated and evaluated in practice. The test statistics is based on the fact that under independence, every quantile of Y given X D x is constant. This is in contrast to the most commonly used basis that the joint probability density or distribution function ofX and Y , equals to the product ...

Recently Abbasbandy and Hajjari (Computers and Mathematics with Applications57 (2009) 413-419) have introduced a ranking method for the trapezoidalfuzzy numbers. This paper extends theirs method to all fuzzy numbers,which uses from a defuzzication of fuzzy numbers and a general weightingfunction. Extended method is interesting for ranking all fuzzy numbers, and itcan be applied for solving and ...

A new steganographic method via the use of numeric data on public websites with a self-authentication capability is proposed. The proposed technique transforms a secret message into partial shares by Shamir’s (k, n)-threshold secret sharing scheme with n = k + 1. The generated k+1 partial shares then are embedded into the numeric items to be disguised as part of the website’s numeric content, y...

The decision to transfuse a hospitalized patient must balance the known risks of transfusion with the need to provide adequate tissue oxygenation and the appropriate utilization of blood as a scarce resource. The minimum tolerated hemoglobin level is not well established, and considerable variation exists in intensivists' transfusion practices. Conventional transfusion triggers of 100 g/l have ...