AIMS AND OBJECTIVES To explore which knowledge sources newly graduated nurses' use in clinical decision-making and why and how they are used. BACKGROUND In spite of an increased educational focus on skills and competencies within evidence-based practice, newly graduated nurses' ability to use components within evidence-based practice with a conscious and reflective use of research evidence ha...

A computerized assessment package for general practitioner trainees has been developed in order to measure the impact of teaching during the trainee year and to help identify areas of possible weakness in the knowledge base of trainees. The programme consists of an electronic questionnaire asking for background educational details, confidence rating scales, 60 multiple choice questions divided ...

The withdrawal, withholding, or implementation of life-sustaining treatments such as artificial nutrition and hydration challenge nurses on a daily basis. To meet these challenges, nurses need the composite skills of moral and ethical discernment, practical wisdom and a knowledge base that justifies reasoning and actions that support patient and family decision making. Nurses' moral knowledge d...

INTRODUCTION The importance of building and strengthening effective infrastructures within the field of public health has increasingly been recognized. A wide variety of actors and structures can be identified for alcohol policy, including systems for policy development, monitoring, research and work-force development, but too little is known about the complex systems of infrastructure availabl...

Information fusion is the process of deriving a single consistent knowledgebase from multiple knowledgebases. This process is important in many cognitive tasks such as decision-making, planning, design, and speciication, that can involve collecting information from a number of potentially connicting perspectives or sources, or participants. In this brief overview, we focus on the problem of inc...

One of the urgent directions of efficiency enhancement of production processes and enterprises activities management is creation and use of corporate knowledge bases. The article suggests a concept of problem-oriented corporate knowledge bases (PO CKB), in which knowledge is arranged around possible problem situations and represents a tool for making and implementing decisions in such situation...

BACKGROUND In order to select priority hotspots for environment and health research in Flanders (Belgium), an open procedure was organized. Environment and health hotspots are strong polluting point sources with possible health effects for residents living in the vicinity of the hot spot. The selection procedure was part of the work of the Flemish Centre of Expertise for Environment and Health,...

There are many methods introduced to solve the credit scoring problem such as support vector machines, neural networks and rule based classifiers. Rule bases are more favourite in credit decision making because of their ability to explicitly distinguish between good and bad applicants.In this paper multi-objective particle swarm is applied to optimize fuzzy apriori rule base in credit scoring. ...

Recent research on the neural bases of decision making has focused on the role of the striatum and dopamine in learning to predict and obtain rewards. These studies have illuminated the processes by which repeated experiences of choice and reward feedback lead to the updating of value representations, allowing an organism to use past experience to improve choices when encountering the same situ...