B.G. is currently employed with the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in its BIOCONTAM Unit that provides scientific and administrative support to EFSA’s scientific activities in the area of Microbial Risk Assessment. The positions and opinions presented in this article are those of the authors alone and are not intended to represent the views or scientific works of EFSA. The other authors ...

Clinical effect is of great importance to traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), and the rigorous and scientific methods for clinical effect assessment should be highly stressed in the clinical research of TCM. In this article, the authors analyzed the current status of the effect assessment of TCM and proposed some measures to improve the current effect assessment of TCM, in the hope of establish...

Underwater video services could be a key application in the better scientific knowledge of the vast oceanic resources in our planet. However, limitations in the capacity of current available technology for underwater networks (UWSNs) raise the question of the feasibility of these services. When transmitting video, the main constraints are the limited bandwidth and the high propagation delays. A...

collection, and innovation. Inspired by the original book on the subject, Scientific Teaching (Handelsman et al., 2006), we have chosen to introduce the reader to key terminology in biology education by organizing these terms with respect to the three main tenets of scientific teaching—active learning; assessment; and the related ideas of equity, diversity, and inclusivity—along with a fourth s...

Trichloroethylene (TCE) is a common environmental contaminant at hazardous waste sites and in ambient and indoor air. Assessing the human health risks of TCE is challenging because of its inherently complex metabolism and toxicity and the widely varying perspectives on a number of critical scientific issues. Because of this complexity, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) drew upon sc...

The number of habitat conservation plans (HCP) has risen dramatically since the first plan was written over 18 years ago. Until recently, no studies have quantitatively investigated the scientific foundations underlying these documents. As part of a larger study of HCPs, we examined 43 plans primarily to assess the availability and use of scientific data and secondarily to determine the extent ...

objectives due to the lack of a standard tool for assessing patients’ capacity to consent to medical treatment in iran, the present study was carried out aiming to devise a persian version of a cross-cultural adaptation of the macarthur competence assessment tool. conclusions in the present study, we are able to focus on and prove the efficacy and benefits of this measurement tool. results the ...

I n t e r n a t i o n a l I n s t i t u t e f o r E n v i r o n m e n t a n d D e v e l o p m e n t ( I I E D ) , L o n d o n , U K , s a l e e m u l . h u q @ i i e d . o r g 2 D e p t . o f E n v i r o n m e n t a l S c i e n c e a n d T e c h n o l o g y , F a c u l t y o f L i f e S c i e n c e s , L o n d o n , U K , m i c h a e l . g r u b b @ i c . a c . u k Scientific assessment of the ...

Risk assessment can be either quantitative, i.e. providing a numeric estimate of the probability of risk and the magnitude of the consequences, or qualitative, using a descriptive approach. The French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety (ANSES), formerly the French Food Safety Agency (AFSSA), bases its assessments on the opinions of scientific panels, such as the A...

The Semantic Web is becoming a major platform for disseminating and sharing scientific data and results. Quality of these information is a critical factor in selecting and reusing them. Existing quality assessment approaches in the Semantic Web largely focus on using general quality dimensions (accuracy, relevancy, etc.) to establish quality metrics. However, specific quality assessment tasks m...