OBJECTIVES Evidence regarding the cost-effectiveness of joint protection and hand exercises for the management of hand OA is not well established. The primary aim of this study is to assess the cost-effectiveness (cost-utility) of these management options. In addition, given the absence of consensus regarding the conduct of economic evaluation alongside factorial trials, we compare different an...

Objectives. Evidence regarding the cost-effectiveness of joint protection and hand exercises for the management of hand OA is not well established. The primary aim of this study is to assess the costeffectiveness (cost-utility) of these management options. In addition, given the absence of consensus regarding the conduct of economic evaluation alongside factorial trials, we compare different an...

BACKGROUND Vaccination is a mainstay of preventive healthcare, reducing the incidence of serious childhood infections. Ecological studies have demonstrated an inverse association between markers of high ambient ultraviolet (UV) radiation exposure (e.g., sunny season, low latitude of residence) and reduction in the vaccination-associated immune response. Higher sun exposure on the day prior to a...

The literature of the last 50 years abounds with research papers and reviews of how floral biodiversity might affect the numbers and impact of indigenous natural enemies. However, it is only relatively recently that practical advice is available to any farmer who might wish to exploit such biodiversity in an economically viable fashion. “Practice” in the title of this paper is therefore used in...

Experimental studies on decision making based on advice received from others find that the weight put on the advice is negatively related to the distance between the advice and the decisionmaker’s initial opinion. In this paper, we show that the distance effect can follow from rational signal extraction when the decisionmaker has imperfect knowledge about the advisor’s competence. What drives t...

Both TCP and ICMP are applied in network measurement, while investigating differences between the measured results of them is important but has been less addressed. To compare the differences between TCP and ICMP when they are used in measuring host connectivity, RTT, and packet loss rate, we designed two groups of comparison programs, after careful evaluating of the program parameters, we exec...

Drawing upon James Carey’s ritual model of communication as a framework, we argue that rituals, especially religious rituals, are important resources for technology design. We suggest that a ritual view of ICT interaction represents an alternative and significant model for ICT development and evaluation, and that the observance of religious rituals affords researchers the opportunity to see cul...

Acknowledgments I would like to thank both my promoters Peter van Roy and Sabri Skhiri for their insightful comments, critics and advices about my work during the whole academic year. I also want to thank Boris Mejias for his continuous support and for pushing me to make a talk at FOSDEM 2011. This talk really helped moved forward my work by making it more public and brought back a lot of inter...

Although prior studies have found that people generally underweight advice from others, such discounting of advice is not universal. Two studies examined the impact of task difficulty on the use of advice. In both studies, the strategy participants used to weigh advice varied with task difficulty even when it should have not. In particular, the results show that people overweight advice on diff...

In this paper, we present an analysis method, a set of rules, lexical resources dedicated to discourse relation identification, in particular for explanation analysis. The following relations are described with prototypical rules: instructions, advice, warnings, illustration, restatement, purpose, condition, circumstance, concession, contrast and some forms of causes. Rules are developed for Fr...