PURPOSE To compare four standard-setting procedures for an objective structure clinical examination (OSCE). METHODS A 12-station OSCE was administered to 84 students in each of the final (fourth-) year medical classes of 1996 and 1997 at Dalhousie University Faculty of Medicine. Four standard-setting procedures (Angoff, borderline, relative, and holistic) were applied to the data to establish...

Deterministic chaos, and even maximum computational complexity, have been discovered within Newtonian dynamics. Encouraged by comparisons of the economy with the weather, a Newtonian system, economists assume that prices and price changes can also obey abstract mathematical laws of motion. Meanwhile, sociologists and other postmodernists advertise that physics and chemistry have outgrown their ...

The transition towards renewable energies is not only a technical, but also an economic and social challenge. Without an economic perspective that takes into account risk and uncertainty, a technically feasible scenario can easily lead to financial losses. Likewise, a technically and economically feasible scenario which is not in line with public acceptance is difficult to implement and the dif...

Urgent care for older people is a major public health issue and attracts much policy attention. Despite many efforts to curb demand, many older people with frailty and urgent care needs to access acute hospital services. The predominant model of care delivered in acute hospitals tends to be medically focussed, yet the evidence-based approaches that appear to be effective invoke a holistic model...

Systems Intelligence attempts to combine the holistic orientation of systems approaches to an appreciation of the everyday subtleties which continually mould the systems we are a part of. George H. Mead’s theory of the emergence of individuals and social organizations holds that neither individuals nor organizations are stored anywhere but that both are continuously being formed by each other. ...

This paper presents relevant interoperability approaches and solutions applied to global/international networked (collaborative) enterprises or organisations and conceptualise an enhanced enterprise interoperability framework. The paper covers several key aspects including how holistic approaches of architecting principles, standards and semantics contribute to the development of an interoperab...

In ubiquitous computing the provisioning of context-aware services is typically aided by a context provisioning middleware. The essential functionalities undertaken by the middleware include distributed data acquisition from sensors, context modelling, context synthesis, reasoning and context dissemination. This paper focuses on the evaluation methodologies of context-aware systems that aim to ...

Plant biology, especially the fields of molecular genetics and molecular physiology, is currently undergoing a change in paradigm from 'vertical' analysis of the role(s) of one or a few genes to 'horizontal' holistic approaches, studying the function of many or even all of the genes of an organism simultaneously. This change is leading us beyond genomes to transcriptomes, proteomes and metabalo...

This article presents the rst results of a system developed to recognize automatically handwritten dates on Brazilian bankchecks. Considering an omni-writer context, we detail here our recognition module dedicated to process the month eld. This module is based on the combination of holistic and analytical approaches with a limited lexicon. Both approaches operate with a single explicit segmenta...

Chronic neurological illnesses such as Alzheimer’s Disease are the most pressing public health problems in aging societies. Biomedical and mechanistic approaches to these degenerative conditions are limited by incomplete knowledge of the initiating causes and basic mechanisms of pathogenesis. Proposed treatments such as monoclonal antibodies are built on disputed notions of the role of patholog...