12,883 research outputs found
The SF-36: a simple, effective measure of mobility disability for epidemiological studies
No full textBackgroundMobility disability is a major problem in older people. Numerous scales exist for the measurement of disability but often these do not permit comparisons between study groups. The physical functioning (PF) domain of the established and widely used Short Form-36 (SF-36) questionnaire asks about limitations on ten mobility activities.ObjectivesTo describe prevalence of mobility disability in an elderly population, investigate the validity of the SF-36 PF score as a measure of mobility disability, and to establish age and sex specific norms for the PF score.MethodsWe explored relationships between the SF-36 PF score and objectively measured physical performance variables among 349 men and 280 women, 59-72 years of age, who participated in the Hertfordshire Cohort Study (HCS). Normative data were derived from the Health Survey for England (HSE) 1996.Results32% of men and 46% of women had at least some limitation in PF scale items. Poor SF-36 PF scores (lowest fifth of the gender-specific distribution) were related to: lower grip strength; longer timed-up-and-go, 3m walk, and chair rises test times in men and women; and lower quadriceps peak torque in women but not men. HSE normative data showed that median PF scores declined with increasing age in men and women.ConclusionOur results are consistent with the SF-36 PF score being a valid measure of mobility disability in epidemiological studies. This approach might be a first step towards enabling simple comparisons of prevalence of mobility disability between different studies of older people. The SF-36 PF score could usefully complement existing detailed schemes for classification of disability and it now requires validation against them
The reliability and validity of the SF-8 with a conflict-affected population in northern Uganda.
No full textBACKGROUND: The SF-8 is a health-related quality of life instrument that could provide a useful means of assessing general physical and mental health amongst populations affected by conflict. The purpose of this study was to test the validity and reliability of the SF-8 with a conflict-affected population in northern Uganda. METHODS: A cross-sectional multi-staged, random cluster survey was conducted with 1206 adults in camps for internally displaced persons in Gulu and Amuru districts of northern Uganda. Data quality was assessed by analysing the number of incomplete responses to SF-8 items. Response distribution was analysed using aggregate endorsement frequency. Test-retest reliability was assessed in a separate smaller survey using the intraclass correlation test. Construct validity was measured using principal component analysis, and the Pearson Correlation test for item-summary score correlation and inter-instrument correlations. Known groups validity was assessed using a two sample t-test to evaluates the ability of the SF-8 to discriminate between groups known to have, and not have, physical and mental health problems. RESULTS: The SF-8 showed excellent data quality. It showed acceptable item response distribution based upon analysis of aggregate endorsement frequencies. Test-retest showed a good intraclass correlation of 0.61 for PCS and 0.68 for MCS. The principal component analysis indicated strong construct validity and concurred with the results of the validity tests by the SF-8 developers. The SF-8 also showed strong construct validity between the 8 items and PCS and MCS summary score, moderate inter-instrument validity, and strong known groups validity. CONCLUSION: This study provides evidence on the reliability and validity of the SF-8 amongst IDPs in northern Uganda
SF Gospel: Blog contents, 2006-2015
No full textSF Gospel (2006-2015) was a blog exploring religious and theological themes in science fiction and popular culture by Gabriel Mckee, author of The Gospel According to Science Fiction. The primary PDF contains the textual content of the blog, along with most images that accompanied the original posts. The appendix PDF contains guest posts written by Mckee for other blogs and websites (including SF Signal, Holy Heroes, Nerve.com, and Religion Dispatches) during the course of SF Gospel's existence
Using Query Term Order for Result Summarisation
No full textWe report on two experiments performed to test the importance of Term Order in automatic summarisation. Experiment one was undertaken as part of DUC 2004 to which three systems were submitted, each with a different summarisation approach. The system that used document Term Order outperformed those that did not use Term Order in the ROUGE evaluation. Experiment two made use of human evaluations of search engine results, comparing our Query Term Order summaries with a simulation of current Google search engine result summaries in terms of summary quality. Our QTO system’s summaries aided users’ relevance judgements to a significantly greater extent than Google’s
Additional Files for Master Thesis "Framing Diets for Policy to Fight Climate Change"
No full textAdditional files for Master Thesis "Framing Diets for Policy to Fight Climate Change: Using video messages to measure the effect of goal framing on attitudes and intentions to reduce beef and dairy consumption to fight climate change"
Datasets
Intervention Framed Videos
Written within the M.Sc. Public Policy and Human Development at Maastricht University MGSoG/UNU-MERIT
Author: Sten Ritterfeld
Supervisor: Michelle González Amador
Submission date: July 12, 202
Evaluating Web Search Result Summaries
No full textThe aim of our research is to produce and assess short summaries to aid users’ relevance judgements, for example for a search engine result page. In this paper we present our new metric for measuring summary quality based on representativeness and judgeability, and compare the summary quality of our system to that of Google. We discuss the basis for constructing our evaluation methodology in contrast to previous relevant open evaluations, arguing that the elements which make up an evaluation methodology: the tasks, data and metrics, are interdependent and the way in which they are combined is critical to the effectiveness of the methodology. The paper discusses the relationship between these three factors as implemented in our own work, as well as in SUMMAC/MUC/DUC
Systematic investigation of gastrointestinal diseases in China (SILC): validation of survey methodology
No full textBackground: Symptom-based surveys suggest that the prevalence of gastrointestinal diseases is lower in China than in Western countries. The aim of this study was to validate a methodology for the epidemiological investigation of gastrointestinal symptoms and endoscopic findings in China. Methods: A randomized, stratified, multi-stage sampling methodology was used to select 18 000 adults aged 18-80 years from Shanghai, Beijing, Xi'an, Wuhan and Guangzhou. Participants from Shanghai were invited to provide blood samples and undergo upper gastrointestinal endoscopy. All participants completed Chinese versions of the Reflux Disease Questionnaire (RDQ) and the modified Rome II questionnaire; 20% were also invited to complete the 36-item Short Form Health Survey (SF-36) and Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS). The psychometric properties of the questionnaires were evaluated statistically. Results: The study was completed by 16 091 individuals (response rate: 89.4%), with 3219 (89.4% of those invited) completing the SF-36 and ESS. All 3153 participants in Shanghai provided blood samples and 1030 (32.7%) underwent endoscopy. Cronbach's alpha coefficients were 0.89, 0.89, 0.80 and 0.91, respectively, for the RDQ, modified Rome II questionnaire, ESS and SF-36, supporting internal consistency. Factor analysis supported construct validity of all questionnaire dimensions except SF-36 psychosocial dimensions. Conclusion: This population-based study has great potential to characterize the relationship between gastrointestinal symptoms and endoscopic findings in China.Xiaoyan Yan, Rui Wang, Yanfang Zhao, Xiuqiang Ma, Jiqian Fang, Hong Yan, Xiaoping Kang, Ping Yin, Yuantao Hao, Qiang Li, John Dent, Joseph Sung, Duowu Zou, Saga Johansson, Katarina Halling, Wenbin Liu and Jia H
John Courtney Murray and Martin Luther on the Relationship between Church and State
No full textIn this Article, the views on the relationship between church and state of the twentieth century American Jesuit, John Courtney Murray, are compared with those of the sixteenth century theologian, Martin Luther. The author notes striking similarities between Murray\u27s position and that of Martin Luther as manifest in Luther\u27s doctrine of the two kingdoms. John Courtney Murray is credited with developing the theories that have enabled the Roman Catholic Church to establish a new and effective modern relationship with the state
The Creolizing Genre of SF and the Nightmare of Whiteness in John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?”
No full textThe alien in science fiction has not often been seen as part of an imperial colonial discourse. By examining John W. Campbell’s founding golden age SF text, “Who Goes There?” (1938), this paper explores the ways in which the alien adheres to an invisible mythos of whiteness that has come to be seen through a colonizing logic as isomorphic with the human. Campbell’s alien-monster comes to disseminate and invade both self and world and as such serves as an interrogation of what whites have done through colonization. It is thus part and parcel of imperial domination and discourse and appears as the very nightmare of whiteness in the form of its liminal and estranged shadow side. Part of what has made Campbell’s text so influential is that it offers a new type of alien invasion in the figure of “contagion,” which speaks “to the transition from colonial to postcolonial visions of modernity and its attendant catastrophes” (Rieder, 124), and which can be further examined as a race metaphor in American SF—indeed, as the white man’s fear of racial mixing that has a long and dehumanizing history. Through its threat of mixture, I read the alien as a creolizing figure that both troubles and undoes the white/black, human/nonhuman binary in science fiction, which I also read as being a creolizing, i.e., hybrid and plastic, genre
On the use of structure functions to study blazar variability: caveats and problems
No full textThe extensive use of the structure function (SF) in the field of blazar variability across the electromagnetic spectrum suggests that characteristics time-scales are embedded in the light curves of these objects. We argue that for blazar variability studies, the SF results are sometimes erroneously interpreted leading to misconceptions about the actual source properties. Based on extensive simulations, we caution that spurious breaks will appear in the SFs of almost all light curves, even though these light curves may contain no intrinsic characteristic time-scales, i.e. having a featureless underlying power spectral density (PSD). We show that the time-scales of the spurious SF breaks depend mainly on the length of the artificial data set and also on the character of the variability i.e. the shape of the PSD.The SF is often invoked in the framework of shot-noise models to determine the temporal properties of individual shots. We caution that although the SF may be fitted to infer the shot parameters, the resultant shot-noise model is usually inconsistent with the observed PSD. As any model should fit the data in both the time and the frequency domain, the shot-noise model, in these particular cases, cannot be valid.Moreover, we show that the lack of statistical independence between adjacent SF points, in the standard SF formulation, means that it is not possible to perform robust statistical model fitting following the commonly used least-squares fitting methodology. The latter yields uncertainties in the fitting parameters (i.e. slopes, breaks) that are far too small with respect to their true statistical scatter. Finally, it is also commonly thought that SFs are immune to the sampling problems, such as data gaps, which affects the estimators of the PSDs. However, we show that SFs are also troubled by gaps which can induce artefacts
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