I n order to examine quantitatively the evidence for an index cycle, 21 years of daily 700-mb. zonal index data for the western longitudes of the Northern Hemisphere were subjected to cross-spectral analyses. The annual variation of the mean and standard deviation of the three zonal indices (polar, temperate, and subtropical) was removed by a standardizing procedure utilizing time-smoothed annu...

BACKGROUND Echocardiographic assessment of left atrial (LA) size and function in horses is not standardized. OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to establish reference intervals for echocardiographic indices of LA size and function in Warmblood horses and to provide proof of concept for allometric scaling of variables and for the clinical use of area-based indices. ANIMALS Thirty-one healt...

Glaucoma diagnosis is one of the most challenging situation in ophthalmology. In daily clinical practice, many of glaucoma patients are missed on diagnosis and a lot of those receiving antiglaucoma therapy may not have the disease. This difficulty may be attributed to sensitivity and specificity of the diagnostic tools as well as the nature of disease in its early stages. In the past, subjectiv...

Patient-reported, subjective outcomes are promoted as a standard for ethical, valid studies in many neurological disorders. Such outcomes are considered potentially more sensitive and specific to important therapeutic effects, and may be more linked to disability and disease-related life losses than conventional assessments of impairment (e.g. ability to walk, performance on language tests, ser...

The convergent validity of popularly used open-ended and closed-ended self-report measures of smoking was examined. Carbon monoxide (CO) samples were obtained as an independent method of assessing recent smoking. In addition to CO, 5 known psychosocial correlates of smoking (attitude, subjective norm, risk-taking, best friend's smoking, and other friends' smoking) were used to estimate converge...

Crohn's disease is a chronic disease with an unpredictable course. Patients with Crohn's disease will have to undergo numerous imaging tests. Crohn's disease often affects young people, who are more vulnerable to the harmful effects of repeated exposure to ionizing radiation. The high resolution of tissues on MR enterography give it a diagnostic accuracy similar to that of CT; however, MR enter...

The Connectedness to Nature Scale (CNS) is used as a measure of the subjective cognitive connection between individuals and nature. However, to date, it has not been analyzed at the item level to confirm its quality. In the present study, we conduct such an analysis based on Item Response Theory. We employed data from previous studies using the Spanish-language version of the CNS, analyzing a s...

This study examines the use of journal rankings and proposes a new method of measuring IS journal impact based on the Hirsch family of indices (Hirsch 2005; Sidiropoulos et al. 2006). Journal rankings are a very important exercise in academia since they impact tenure and promotion decisions. Current methods employed to rank journal influence are shown to be subjective. We propose that the Hirsc...

The present study aimed at providing a comprehensive analysis of individual differences in the regulation of attachment distress as measured through different components of the emotional response, including neuroendocrine reactions, subjectively experienced affect, and proximity seeking behaviour. Emotional responses were measured before, during, and after the induction of attachment distress i...

During early stages of product development process, a vast amount of knowledge and information is generated. However, most of it is subjective (imprecise) in nature and remains unutilized. This paper presents a formal structure for capturing this information and knowledge and utilizing it in reliability improvement estimation. The information is extracted as improvement indices from various des...