BACKGROUND A lack of physical activity and overconsumption of energy dense food is associated with overweight and obesity. The neighbourhood environment may stimulate or hinder the development and/or maintenance of a healthy lifestyle. To improve research on the obesogenicity of neighbourhood environments, reliable, valid and convenient assessment methods of potential obesogenic characteristics...

When there is no central administrator to control the actions of nodes in a distributed system, the users may deviate for personal gain. The BAR model describes the three types of nodes in these environments: Byzantine nodes deviate arbitrarily, Altruistic nodes follow the protocol, and Rational nodes deviate for gain. Previous attempts at writing BAR-Tolerant protocols have relied on a form of...

BACKGROUND Conservationists frequently use nest count surveys to estimate great ape population densities, yet the accuracy and precision of the resulting estimates are difficult to assess. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We used mathematical simulations to model nest building behavior in an orangutan population to compare the quality of the population size estimates produced by two of the comm...

The aim of this study was to establish the reliability of the observation of movement (OM) method for obtaining motor threshold (MT) in transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). MTs were obtained on separate days, following separate hunting procedures, for both left and right motor cortex (M1), with one or multiple estimates obtained from the same hemisphere within a single session. MTs obtained...

BACKGROUND A mission statement (MS) sets out the long-term goals of an institution and is supposed to be suited for studying learning environments. Yet, hardly any study has tested this issue so far. The aim of the present study was the development and psychometric evaluation of an MS-Questionnaire (MSQ) focusing on explicit competencies. We investigated to what extent the MSQ captures the cons...

Systemic inflammatory response (SIR) has actually been shown as an important prognostic factor associated with lower postoperative survival in several types of cancer. Thus, the challenge for physicians is to find specific, low-cost, and highly reliable inflammatory markers, clearly correlated with prognosis and able to preoperatively stratify patient's risk. Inflammation is a promising target ...

OBJECTIVE To explore the validity, reliability, and applicability of using a short, psychometrically sound survey instrument to measure population attitudes toward tobacco control policies. DESIGN Surveys. SUBJECTS AND SETTING Student respondents attending university in Australia (n = 403), Hong Kong (n = 336), the Netherlands (n = 351), South Africa (n = 291), the United Kingdom (n = 164) ...

OBJECTIVE The present study aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Parental Bonding Instrument (PBI) for Turkish university students. METHOD A total of 336 (% 61.5) female and 211 (%38.5) male students attending Ankara and Pamukkale Universities participated in the study. The mean age of the participants is 21.55 (SD=1.65) with a range of 18-26. The construct validity is examine...

Alginate is used extensively in microfluidic devices to produce discrete beads or fibres at the microscale. Such structures may be used to encapsulate sensitive cargoes such as cells and biomolecules. On chip gelation of alginate represents a significant challenge since gelling kinetics or physicochemical conditions are not biocompatible. Here we present a new method that offers a hitherto unpr...

OBJECTIVE Several factors, such as homeostatic and circadian influences, may affect the density of cortical and subcortical arousals (AR). The purpose of this study was to examine the time-of-night and the first night effect on AR response. METHODS AR were classified into microarousals (MA), phases of transitory activation (PAT), delta (D-burst) and K-complex burst (K-burst). The AR density a...