background : the aim of training midwifery student is to increasing scientific and practical abilities in trainees in order to present caring health services and so the evaluation tools of these abilities has a great importance. for evaluating considered tools and for the reason of midwifery theoretical special courses importance this study tries to evaluate content validity, criterion validity...

BACKGROUND Evidence on the detrimental health effects of prolonged sedentary behavior is accumulating. Interventions need to have a specific focus on sedentary behavior in order to generate clinically meaningful decreases in sedentary time. When evaluating such intervention, the question whether a participant improved or deteriorated their behavior is fundamental and instruments that are able t...

Randomized trials (RTs) are used to learn about treatment effects. This paper studies identification of average treatment response (ATR) and average treatment effect (ATE) from RT data under various assumptions. The focus is the problem of external validity of the RT. RT data need not point identify the ATR or ATE because of selective participation in the RT. The paper reports partial identific...

BACKGROUND Sedentary behaviour is a public health concern that requires surveillance and epidemiological research. For such large scale studies, self-report tools are a pragmatic measurement solution. A large number of self-report tools are currently in use, but few have been validated against an objective measure of sedentary time and there is no comparative information between tools to guide ...

1. SMART FARMS SET PERFORMANCE GOALS There is an old saying that you can’t get to your destination unless you know where you are going. Many farms that start on the path to milking excellence don’t make it because they don’t have clear quality goals for their farms. Many dairy farms consistently produce high quality milk. In 1998, over 1,800 Wisconsin dairy farms had average bulk tank somatic c...

Temporal diierence methods solve the temporal credit assignment problem for reinforcement learning. An important subproblem of general reinforcement learning is learning to achieve dynamic goals. Although existing temporal diierence methods, such as Q learning, can be applied to this problem, they do not take advantage of its special structure. This paper presents the DG-learning algorithm, whi...

the strategies to reduce the consumption of non-renewable energies in buildings are becoming increasingly important. in the meantime, nature-inspired approaches have emerged as a new strategy to achieve thermal comfort in the interiors. however, the use of these approaches in architecture and buildings requires a proper understanding regarding the features of ecosystems. although acquiring this...