This study explained the use of standard scores otherwise known as z scores for research in educational management. Since a score is a unit distance between two limits, the individual given a score in percentage might have actually scored between the lower limit and the upper limit of that score. A score therefore represent the mid-point between the lower limit and the upper limit of the score....

OBJECTIVE To develop a composite patient safety score that provides patients, health-care providers, and health-care purchasers with a standardized method to evaluate patient safety in general acute care hospitals in the United States. METHODS The Leapfrog Group sought guidance from a panel of national patient safety experts to develop the composite score. Candidate patient safety performance...

We consider a new discriminative learning approach to sequence labeling based on the statistical concept of the Z -score. Given a training set of pairs of hidden-observed sequences, the task is to determine some parameter values such that the hidden labels can be correctly reconstructed from observations. Maximizing the Z -score appears to be a very good criterion to solve this problem both the...

OBJECTIVE To explore the effects of maternal smoking during pregnancy on offspring growth using three approaches: (1) multiple adjustments for socioeconomic and parental factors, (2) maternal-paternal comparisons as a test of putative intrauterine effects and (3) comparisons between two birth cohort studies. METHODS Population-based birth cohort studies were carried out in Pelotas, Brazil, in...

The growth in protein sequence data has placed a premium on ways to infer structure and function of the newly sequenced proteins. One of the most effective ways is to identify a homologous relationship with a protein about which more is known. While close evolutionary relationships can be confidently determined with standard methods, the difficulty increases as the relationships become more dis...

BACKGROUND Pathways leading to socioeconomic inequalities in young children's body mass index (BMI) are not well understood. This study examined whether parenting related to the physical and social context of children's food consumption helped to explain associations between maternal educational level and child BMI trajectory. METHODS The study used data from 2957 families in a nationally rep...

BACKGROUND Evidence for the effect of dietary energy on BMI z-scores in young children is limited. We aim to investigate cross-sectional and longitudinal effects of daily energy intake (EI) on BMI z-scores of European boys and girls considering growth-related height dependencies of EI using residual EI. METHODS To investigate cross-sectional and longitudinal effects of daily energy intake (EI...