BACKGROUND Physicians need strategies for addressing patient requests for medically inappropriate tests and treatments. We examined communication processes that physicians use to deal with patient requests of questionable appropriateness. METHODS Data come from audio-recorded visits and postvisit questionnaires of standardized patient visits to primary care offices in Sacramento and San Franc...

One of the major goals of the Sustainable Agriculture Farming initiatives at UC Davis is to provide information about the feasibility of adopting conservation tillage and cover cropping at the farm level. The project includes two tillage schemes: standard tillage (ST) and conservation tillage (CT), and three farming methods: conventional, organic, and winter legume cover crop. All three product...

Global biodiversity continues along a trajectory of decline despite enormous conservation efforts (Rands et al., 2010). This is also true in China, one of the most biodiversity-rich countries in the world (Liu and Raven, 2010; Ministry of Environmental Protection of China, 2010a). To fundamentally change this trajectory, it is essential to understand complex interactions among various forces af...

In this paper, we study the problem of designing motion strategies for a team of mobile agents, required to fulfill request for on-site service in a given planar region. In our model, each service request is generated by a spatio-temporal stochastic process; once a service request has been generated, it remains active for a certain deterministic amount of time, and then expires. An active servi...

The present study examined the different levels of (im)politeness strategies in expressing request, apology, and refusal speech acts across intermediate and advanced Iranian EFL learners to identify their attitudinal ratings of their produced structures in terms of pragmatic success and (im)politeness mannerism. A discourse completion test including 2 Likert scales on attitudinal appropriatenes...