Irrational prescribing is a global problem. Rational prescribing cannot be defined without a method of measurement and a reference standard. The former is now available but the latter needs further development. Proven effective interventions to promote rational prescribing in developed countries are treatment protocols based on wide consultation and consensus, properly introduced and with a pos...

The prevention of traveler's diarrhea by use of pharmacologic agents has been of great interest since the early 1960s. It was not until the discovery of enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli as the dominant causative organism of travelers' diarrhea, however, that rational antimicrobial therapy could be studied. Selected antimicrobials have proven to be highly efficacious, but, by consensus, are not ...

Since no optimal structure exists, organizations have to be exible to dynamically react towards environment changes. In an economic context, agents are strongly autonomous and weakly rational and have to deal with cooperation and competition , as in task repartition domain. This paper proposes an open and distributed protocol based on exchange of preferences computed using qualitative and quant...

We introduce a new approach to aggregating the beliefs and preferences of many individuals to form models for democratic decision-making. Traditional social choice functions used to aggregate beliefs and preferences attempt to find a single consensus model, but produce inconsistent results when a stalemate between opposing opinions occurs. Our approach combines the probabilistic beliefs of many...

A consensus needs to be reached on a rational approach to infertile men with varicocele-associated nonobstructive azoospermia. Future studies are warranted to understand the mechanism behind the variable influence of varicocele on testicular function, which causes partial or complete damage of spermatogenesis in some cases and leaves it unaltered in others.

Vaccines designed to prevent or to treat hepatitis C viral infection must achieve maximum cross-reactivity against widely divergent circulating strains. Rational approaches for sequence selection to maximize immunogenicity and minimize genetic distance across circulating strains may enhance vaccine induction of optimal cytotoxic T cell responses. We assessed T cell recognition of potential hepa...

The EU has firmly moved beyond what is termed an intergovernmental organisation. But how can supranationalism be explained action theoretically? Political integration is a process where actors shift their loyalties and activities towards a new centre with the authoritative right to govern in the interest of all. Because the decision-making system of the EU possesses rather weak instruments to b...

BACKGROUND Continuing medical education (CME) is compulsory for physicians in Iran. Recent studies in Iran show that modifications of CME elements are necessary to improve the effectiveness of the educational programmes. Other studies point to an inappropriate, even irrational drug prescribing. Based on a needs assessment study regarding CME for general physicians in the East Azerbaijan provinc...

We consider stationary consensus protocols for networks of dynamic agents with fixed topologies. At each time instant, each agent knows only its and its neighbors’ state, but must reach consensus on a group decision value that is function of all the agents’ initial state. We show that the agents can reach consensus if the value of such a function is time-invariant when computed over the agents’...