Introduction As recently as three decades ago, the use of experimental methods was a rarity in the disciplines of political science, sociology, and communications. Beginning in the early 1980s, a surge of interest in the interdisciplinary field of political psychology set in motion a trickle of experimental methods into several sub-fields of political science, including political communication....

The interest in drug combinations is growing rapidly due to the opportunities they create to increase the therapeutic effect and to reduce the frequency or magnitude of undesirable side effects when single drugs fail to deliver satisfactory results. Considerable effort in studying the mechanisms leading to the benefits of the joint action of drugs has been matched by the development of relevant...

Experimentation is a powerful methodology that enables scientists to empirically establish causal claims. However, one important criticism is that experiments merely provide a black-box view of causality and fail to identify causal mechanisms. Specifically, critics argue that although experiments can identify average causal effects, they cannot explain the process through which such effects com...

Page 1 Rough Draft A Bestiary of Experimental & Sampling Designs In an experimental study, we have to decide on a set of biologically realistic manipulations that include appropriate controls. In an observational study, we have to decide which variables to measure that will best answer the question we have asked. These decisions are very important, but they are not the subject of this chapter. ...

Presentation Quality Improvement (QI) research may be defined as “the design, development and evaluation of complex interventions aimed at the re-design of health care systems to produce improved outcomes”. The challenge of QI lies in bridging the gap between knowing what needs to happen at an individual patient level and implementing this at a systems level. The inherent complexity of systems ...

The main purpose of this study is to compare the performance of a group of second-order designs such as Box-Behnken, face-center cube, three-level factorial, central composite, minimum bias, and minimum variance plus bias for estimating a quadratic metamodel. A time-shared computer system is used to demonstrate the ability of the designs in providing good fit of the metamodel to the simulation ...

In biology, localisation is function: knowledge of the localisation of proteins is of paramount importance to assess and study their function. This supports the need for reliable protein sub-cellular localisation assignment. Concomitant with recent technological advances in organelle proteomics, there is a requirement for more rigorous experimental and analysis design planning and description. ...

We compare eleven methods for finding prototypes upon which to base the nearest Ž prototype classifier. Four methods for prototype selection are discussed: Wilson Hart a . condensation error-editing method , and three types of combinatorial search random search, genetic algorithm, and tabu search. Seven methods for prototype extraction are discussed: unsupervised vector quantization, supervised...

A Latin square is an arrangement of v copies of v symbols into a v× v square so that (i) each symbol occurs once in each row, and (ii) each symbol occurs once in each column. Three distinct Latin squares of order v = 4 are shown in Example 1. Other than for small v, the number of distinct (non-identical as matrices) Latin squares is not generally known, though it is known that it grows rapidly ...