We study crowdsourcing quality management, that is, given worker responses to a set of tasks, our goal is to jointly estimate the true answers for the tasks, as well as the quality of the workers. Prior work on this problem relies primarily on applying ExpectationMaximization (EM) on the underlying maximum likelihood problem to estimate true answers as well as worker quality. Unfortunately, EM ...

OBJECTIVES To examine associations between sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) and behavioral sleep problems (BSPs) through 5 years of age and special educational need (SEN) at 8 years. METHODS Parents in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children reported on children's snoring, witnessed apnea, and mouth-breathing at 6, 18, 30, 42, and 57 months, from which SDB symptom trajectories, or...

In fact, patients with these conditions are particularly prone to developing refractoriness to platelet transfusions, and treatment of bleeding in this situation represents a major clinical problem. The data presented by Colucci et al provide a rationale for hoping that DDAVP can be effective in these emergencies as well as in preparation of patients for surgery or invasive procedures. Much wor...

APRIL 2003 | C ategorical, or conditional, statistics quantify the skill in the prediction of the occurrence of rain, and are based on the familiar 2 × 2 (yes/no) contingency table. Given a set of matched rain forecasts and observations, the contingency table is a matrix giving the frequencies of predicted and observed rain occurrence and nonoccurrence. “Hits,” H, are correct predictions of rai...

According to the query logs in search engines, yes/no questions are issued frequently. One example yes/no question is “is Obama the 42nd president of the United States”, and the expected answer is “No”. However, the most advanced search engines only return a list of ranked documents containing the keywords within the query. Then users have to go through those returned documents in order to figu...

Introduction: The PRISMA-7 tool [1] has been introduced in two emergency rooms (ERs) in Sherbrooke to identify older people with significant disabilities. The seven yes/no questions had been included in the triage instrument for people aged 75 years and over. The positive cases were directed to the single entry point of the local health and social services centre, which then conducted assessmen...

BACKGROUND The growing body of data on prevalence of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) usage means there is a need to standardize measurement on an international level. An international team has published a questionnaire (I-CAM-Q), but no validation has yet been provided. The aim of the present study was to provide a German measurement instrument for CAM usage (I-CAM-G) which closely...

Background The purpose of the study was to determine if clinician predicted prognosis is associated with patient outcomes. Methods The study was a secondary analysis of data that were collected in 8 physiotherapy outpatient clinics. Nine physiotherapists with post-graduate training in manual therapy (mean 20.3 years of experience) were asked at baseline to project the outcome of the patients ...