background: multiple severity scoring systems have been devised and evaluated in adult sepsis, but a simplified scoring model for pediatric sepsis has not yet been developed. this study aimed to develop and validate a new scoring model to stratify the severity of pediatric sepsis, thus assisting the treatment of sepsis in children. methods: data from 634 consecutive patients who presented with ...

In this work, an equation of state has been utilized for thermodynamic modeling of aqueous electrolyte solutions. The proposed equation of state is a combination of simplified statistical associating fluid theory (SAFT) equation of state (similar to simplified PC-SAFT) to describe the effect of short-range interactions and mean spherical approximation (MSA) term to describe the effect of long-r...

One of the proposed functions of human smiling is to advertise cooperative dispositions and thereby increase the likelihood that a social partner would invest resources in a relationship. In particular, smiles involving an emotional component would be honest signals of altruistic dispositions because they are not easy to produce voluntarily. In this study, 60 people were covertly filmed while i...

The phenomenon of contagion is analysed in terms of the intensification explanation of the effect of crowding (high density) on humans. According to the analysis, high density should be expected to increase contagion of a model’s behavior. Groups of three subjects and a confederate listen to humorous tapes under low or high density conditions. In half of the groups the confederate smiles and la...

This paper investigates the impact of geometric semantic crossover operators in a wide range of symbolic regression problems. First, it analyses the impact of using Manhattan and Euclidean distance geometric semantic crossovers in the learning process. Then, it proposes two strategies to numerically optimize the crossover mask based on mathematical properties of these operators, instead of simp...

In this paper, we investigate the usefulness of work and school absenteeism surveillance as an early warning system for influenza. In particular, time trends in daily absenteeism rates collected during the A(H1N1)2009 pandemic are compared with weekly incidence rates of influenza-like illness (ILI) obtained from the Belgian Sentinel General Practitioner (SGP) network. The results indicate a ris...

A major objective of the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program is to test and improve parameterizations for cloud and radiative processes. A common strategy adopted for this purpose within the ARM science team is to utilize single-column models (SCMs) driven by appropriate boundary conditions derived from observations, so as to isolate the parameterizations themselves. In practice, ac...