There have been recent calls for a shift to an evidence-based paradigm in environmental management, grounded in systematic monitoring and evaluation, but achieving this will be complex and difficult. Evaluating the educational components of environmental initiatives presents particular challenges, because these programs often have multiple concurrent goals and may value 'human outcomes', such a...

The Medicare Beneficiary Health Status Registry (MBHSR) is a proposed new survey program that would collect health status indicators annually from large probability samples of Medicine beneficiaries. For reasons of economy, the MBHSR would use mail survey procedures with telephone follow-up of nonrespondents. Because of concerns about response rates and the validity and reliability of the data ...

Concerns about rising health care costs and the often incremental nature of improvements in health outcomes continue to fuel intense debates about 'progress' and 'value' in cancer research. In times of tightening fiscal constraints, it is increasingly important for patients and their representatives to define what constitutes 'value' to them. It is clear that diverse stakeholders have different...

PURPOSE To validate a survey research measure of subjective income, as measured by perceived income adequacy, in an international context. DESIGN AND METHODS The study population comprised persons aged 50 years and older in 12 countries from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (n = 28,939). Perceived difficulty in making ends meet was regressed on sociodemographic variables,...

Levels and causes of mortality in mothers and babies are intrinsically linked, occurring at the same time and often to the same mother-baby dyad, although mortality rates are substantially higher in babies. Measuring levels, trends and causes of maternal, neonatal and foetal mortality are important for understanding priority areas for interventions and tracking the success of interventions at t...

Plants of six wheat varieties (Damani, Hashim-8, Gomal-8, DN-73, Zam-04, and Dera-98) were grown under three water regimes i.e. 100% Field Capacity (FC), 35% FC and 25% FC. Results of this experiment showed highly significant difference among wheat varieties in all the studied traits and water stress conditions decreased them significantly. The superior variety Hashim-8 which indicated higher r...

Tolerance allocation influences product performance especially for miniature precise assembly device. The purpose of this paper is to explore an approach to optimize manufacturing tolerances by combining the reliability of product performance indicators under actual working condition. The paper describes the principle and ways of tolerance handling in the finite element control equations for th...

Selection for drought tolerance typically involves evaluating genotypes for either high yield potential or stable performance under drought stress. In order to select drought tolerant land races of bread wheat an experiment was conducted in a randomized complete block design (RCBD) with three replications under two different rainfed and irrigated conditions during the growing season 2010-2011. ...