BACKGROUND Medical device procurement processes for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are a poorly understood and researched topic. To support LMIC policy formulation in this area, international public health organizations and research institutions issue a large body of predominantly grey literature including guidelines, manuals and recommendations. We propose to undertake a systematic r...

A large literature has been concerned with the impacts of recent welfare reforms on income, earnings, transfers, and labor-force attachment. While one strand of this literature relies on observational studies conducted with large survey-sample data sets, a second makes use of data generated by experimental evaluations of changes to means-tested programs. Much of the overall literature has focus...

In this paper, we present a TDMA based multiple access technique for ATM over satellite. We consider an scenario where a large number of remote stations are connected to the ATM cloud via satellite. We focus on performance evaluation for CBR, VBR and ABR traffic with markovian analysis and simulation. We calculate equivalent bandwidth for VBR traffic in order to gain statistical multiplexing, w...

It is well established that consumers infer value from scarcity, which Cialdini (1984) called the scarcity principle. We demonstrate the reverse of this effect of scarcity on perceived value – consumers infer scarcity of product supply from product attractiveness. We show that this effect arises from the operation of what we call “the value heuristic”. In addition, we show that the value heuris...

This paper discusses the experience of the Kansas Event Data System (KEDS) project in developing event data sets for monitoring conflict levels in five geographical areas: the Levant (Arab-Israeli conflict), Persian Gulf, former Yugoslavia, Central Asia (Afghanistan, Armenia-Azerbijan, former Soviet republics), and West Africa (Liberia, Sierra Leone). These data sets were coded from commercial ...

OBJECTIVE Urinary incontinence (UI) is a prevalent health issue that has significant detrimental effects on quality of life. The Internet offers a unique vehicle for incontinent women to access information that could facilitate conservative self-help therapy. An evaluation of Canadian websites offering female UI information was conducted to determine their quality and readability. METHODS We ...

We investigate the effects of improper use of diacritics in the Turkish alphabet on information retrieval. A diacritic is simply a supplementary sign added to a letter to change the sound value of the letter, and the Turkish alphabet has 5 special letters derived from Latin by adding different diacritics. The statistical analysis performed in this study shows that retrieval performance signific...

BACKGROUND Procedural pain assessment and management have been extensively studied through multiple research studies over the past decade. Results of this research have been included in numerous pediatric pain practice guidelines. OBJECTIVE To systematically review the quality of existing practice guidelines for acute procedural pain in children and provide recommendations for their use. ME...

In modern processors, the interactions between performance, power, thermal, and reliability are complex. Neglecting one aspect, such as reliability, might lead to unrealistically optimistic evaluations of the other aspects due to the (implicit) assumption on non-faulty devices [15]. The sheer size and the compute, power, and mean-time-to-intervention (MTTI) requirements of an exascale system fu...

Do professional psychologists use motion pictures in clinical practice? If so, do they consider motion pictures to have therapeutic value? Of 827 licensed practicing psychologists, 67% reported the use of motion pictures to promote therapy gains. Most of these practitioners (88%) considered the use of motion pictures as effective in promoting treatment outcome, and only a minority (1%) reported...