BACKGROUND Developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH) is the most common orthopaedic disorder in newborns. Despite this considerable variation in practice exists. The aim of this study was to determine the clinical relevance and a ranking order for the diagnostic criteria in DDH amongst paediatric orthopaedic surgeons practicing in the UK. METHOD One hundred members of the British Society of Ch...

The studies conducted so far on the effectiveness of resolution methods including the discussion method in resolving discrepancies in rating have yielded mixed results. What is left unnoticed in the literature is the potential of discussion to be used as a training tool rather than a resolution method. The present study addresses this research gap by exploring the data coming from rating behavi...

OBJECTIVE Developed by the Ministry of Education, the Qualis evaluation criteria have strongly impacted the scientific production of Post-Graduation Programs. A new set of more stringent criteria has been proposed for Qualis. Our aim was to evaluate the impact of the new Qualis criteria on the scientific production of Post-Graduation Programs in psychiatry over the last 10 years. METHOD We ex...

In this thesis, we propose a method for modeling utility (rating) functions based on a novel concept called Fuzzy Operator Tree (FOT for short). As the notion suggests, this method makes use of techniques from fuzzy set theory and implements a fuzzy rating function, that is, a utility function that maps to the unit interval, where 0 corresponds to the lowest and 1 to the highest evaluation. Eve...

Graph-based notations form a significant subclass of visual languages. Studies of the use of such notations in practice have shown that users often employ pragmatic aspects, such as layout, to capture important domain information. Moreover this pragmatic information can support and guide reasoning over such representations. However, typical formalisations of graph-based notations often pay scan...

The use of politeness strategies can help interlocutors promote and/or maintain social harmony in telephone interactions. Using the Rapport Management Model proposed by Spencer-Oatey (2008), this study aimed primarily to reinvestigate the closing structures of telephone conversation (hereafter abbreviated as TC) in Persian and to discover the common politeness strategies used by native Persian ...

OBJECTIVE Mixed episodes have been described as more severe than manic episodes, especially due to their longer duration and their association with higher rates of suicide attempts, hospitalization and psychotic symptoms. The purpose of this study was to compare the severity between mixed and pure manic episodes according to DSM-IV criteria, through the evaluation of sociodemographic data and c...

OBJECTIVE To conduct a 1-year follow-up of anxious-depressed school-refusing adolescents who participated in an 8-week study of imipramine versus placebo, each in combination with cognitive-behavioral therapy. METHOD Sixty-five percent (41 of 63) of the randomly assigned subjects returned for follow-up evaluation, which consisted of diagnostic interviews, clinician rating scales for anxiety a...

BACKGROUND Researchers and academic institutions need assessment and rating to measure their performance. The criteria are designed to evaluate quality and adequacy of research and welcome by most universities as an international process to increase monitoring academic achievements. The study aimed to evaluate the increasing trend in global ranking of Iranian medical universities websites empha...

Purpose: To analyze the longitudinal performance of children with Language Impairments (LI) on a pragmatic test, in order to observe the development of communicative abilities through speech and language therapy (SLT). Methods: Fifty six children from both sexes and ages ranging from 1;10 (years;months) and 5;11 in the first evaluation participated of this study. All subjects were diagnosed wit...