OBJECTIVE To elicit European healthcare policy-makers' views, understanding and attitudes about the implementation of frailty screening and management strategies and responses to stakeholders' views. DESIGN Thematic analysis of semistructured qualitative interviews. SETTING European healthcare policy departments. PARTICIPANTS Seven European healthcare policy-makers representing the Europe...

Making Iranian Schools Smart: From Policy to Practice E. Talaa’ee, Ph.D. N. Ansaari M. Pahlavaan Z. Abootaalebi To assess both the essence and ways of operationalization of a recently adopted policy by the MOE with the aim of making Iranian schools smart, four such schools were purposefully selected, observed, and questioned. The collected data have been analyzed using th...

PROBLEM • Monotonically improve a parametric gaussian policy πθ in a continuous MDP, avoiding unsafe oscillations in the expected performance J(θ). • Episodic Policy Gradient: – estimate ∇̂θJ(θ) from a batch of N sample trajectories. – θ′ ← θ+Λ∇̂θJ(θ) • Tune step size α and batch size N to limit oscillations. Not trivial: – Λ: trade-off with speed of convergence← adaptive methods. – N : trade-off...

A large class of computational problems are characterized by frequent synchronization, and computational requirements which change as a function of time. When such a problem must be solved on a message passing multiprocessor machine, the combination of these characteristics lead to system performance which decreases in time. Performance can be improved with periodic redistribution of computatio...

The secretary problem with uncertain selection, considered by Smith, is generalized to allow for the rejection probability to be rank-dependent. That is, if an offer of employment is given to the j-th best applicant, she rejects it with probability q j , 1 < j <, n (n is the number of applicants to appear). The optimality equations can be derived with the objective of maximizing the probability...

OBJECTIVE To explore the validity, reliability, and applicability of using a short, psychometrically sound survey instrument to measure population attitudes toward tobacco control policies. DESIGN Surveys. SUBJECTS AND SETTING Student respondents attending university in Australia (n = 403), Hong Kong (n = 336), the Netherlands (n = 351), South Africa (n = 291), the United Kingdom (n = 164) ...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of a province-wide physical education (PE) policy on secondary school students' moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA). METHODS Policy: In fall 2008, Manitoba expanded a policy requiring a PE credit for students in grades 11 and 12 for the first time in Canada. The PE curriculum requires grades 11 and 12 students to complete...

Although most smokers want to quit, the long-term success rate of quit attempts remains low; research is needed to understand the policy and environmental influences that can increase the success of cessation efforts. This paper uses regression methods to investigate self-reported exposure to policy and environmental influences on quit attempts, maintenance of a quit attempt for at least 6 mont...

Can different political ideologies explain policy preferences regarding asylum seekers? We focus on attitudes regarding governmental policy towards out-group members and suggest that perceptions of threat help to shape these policy attitudes. Study 1 compared public opinion regarding asylum policy in Israel (N = 137) and Australia (N = 138), two countries with restrictive asylum policies and wh...