International consensus on terminology to be used in the field of echinococcoses

Echinococcoses require the involvement of specialists from nearly all disciplines; standardization of the terminology used in the field is thus crucial. To harmonize echinococcosis terminology on sound scientific and linguistic grounds, the World Association of Echinococcosis launched a Formal Consensus process. Under the coordination of a Steering and Writing Group (SWG), a Consultation and Rating Group (CRG) had the main missions of (1) providing input on the list of terms drafted by the SWG, taking into account the available literature and the participants’ experience; and (2) providing independent rating on all debated terms submitted to vote. The mission of the Reading and Review Group (RRG) was to give an opinion about the recommendation paper in terms of readability, acceptability and applicability. The main achievements of this process were: (1) an update of the current nomenclature of Echinococcus spp.; (2) an agreement on three names of diseases due to Echinococcus spp.: Cystic Echinococcosis (CE), Alveolar Echinococcosis (AE) and Neotropical Echinococcosis (NE), and the exclusion of all other names; (3) an agreement on the restricted use of the adjective “hydatid” to refer to the cyst and fluid due to E. granulosus sensu lato; and (4) an agreement on a standardized description of the surgical operations for CE, according to the “Approach, cyst Opening, Resection, and Completeness” (AORC) framework. In addition, 95 “approved” and 60 “rejected” terms were listed. The recommendations provided in this paper will be applicable to scientific publications in English and communication with professionals. They will be used for translation into other languages spoken in endemic countries.

Want to gain height? How body motion makes you taller.

Body height and expansiveness of body motion both affect perceived dominance and status. We investigated whether expansiveness of body motion also has a direct impact on perceptions of height. For two independent rating experiments we turned the body movements of politicians giving a speech into short clips of animated stick-figures. In experiment one, participants judged these stimuli on dominance, trustworthiness, and competence. In experiment two participants assessed the stick-figures’ heights. Perceptions of stick-figure heights were related to ratings of dominance even after controlling for actual stimulus height. We concluded that perceived height was influenced by motion cues. Detailed analyses of hand and torso movements revealed that expansive vertical arm movements made our stimuli appear taller. In conclusion, our findings indicate that motion cues do not only affect attributions of personality traits but also distort perceptions of physiognomic features such as body height.

Creating the mobile apps independence rating

Nowadays the mobile apps market is experiencing unprecedented growth. The quantity of mobile applications, which is proposed for installation, has exceeded 6 million. It causes, that it’s difficult for common consumers to choose a safety and high-quality product from this amount. The proposed independent rating called up for helping ordinary consumers. It is based on the special standard of mobile apps quality requirements and group of test procedures, that allow to evaluate the quality of mobile software.

KURUMSAL YÖNETİM ENDEKSİ KAPSAMINDAKİ İŞLETMELERİN FİNANSAL PERFORMANS ANALİZİ

According to regulations of Capital Market Board (CMB), Corporate Governance Principles Compliance Notes are given by independent rating institutions to companies whose shares are traded on Borsa İstanbul. Via those notes the 50 most successful companies on corporate governance are determined. In order to obtain indicators for the price and yield analysis, the 50 most successful shares are included in the Borsa İstanbul Corporate Governance Index. In this study with the exception of financial sector companies, financial performance ranking of 34 out of 50 companies of the Corporate Governance Index is performed by TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) method. TOPSIS method was used based on the 10 financial ratios of the companies. 5 year performance rankings covering the years 2011-2015 were obtained and the ranking changes were examined. Finally, the 5-year average performance rankings were calculated and financial performance ratings of the companies in the index for 5 years is revealed.

Incredibly Good Performance

Initiatives to boost public trust of government often rely on better reporting of the efforts and accomplishments of government agencies. But if citizens disbelieve the performance reports of agencies, especially information about good performance, then these initiatives may be do little to enhance trust. We ask the following questions: Do citizens find performance information from government agencies to be credible, or do they trust more in independent sources? Do they believe some agencies more than others? And does credibility of the agency itself as a source depend on the level of performance that is being reported? To address these questions, we designed an experiment to test the credibility of a customer satisfaction index for two U.S. federal agencies, with random allocation of the specific agency (one politically less attractive, the other more so), the source of the index (the federal agency itself or an independent rating firm), as well as the level of performance reported in the index. Results from an online sample of nearly 600 U.S. adults show that credibility is lower for the politically less attractive agency and that citizens are especially doubtful about good performance reported by the government agency itself (as opposed to the independent rating firm). These results suggest that independent sources can boost credibility when reporting good news about government performance.

SimLex-999: Evaluating Semantic Models With (Genuine) Similarity Estimation

We present SimLex-999, a gold standard resource for evaluating distributional semantic models that improves on existing resources in several important ways. First, in contrast to gold standards such as WordSim-353 and MEN, it explicitly quantifies similarity rather than association or relatedness so that pairs of entities that are associated but not actually similar (Freud, psychology) have a low rating. We show that, via this focus on similarity, SimLex-999 incentivizes the development of models with a different, and arguably wider, range of applications than those which reflect conceptual association. Second, SimLex-999 contains a range of concrete and abstract adjective, noun, and verb pairs, together with an independent rating of concreteness and (free) association strength for each pair. This diversity enables fine-grained analyses of the performance of models on concepts of different types, and consequently greater insight into how architectures can be improved. Further, unlike existing gold standard evaluations, for which automatic approaches have reached or surpassed the inter-annotator agreement ceiling, state-of-the-art models perform well below this ceiling on SimLex-999. There is therefore plenty of scope for SimLex-999 to quantify future improvements to distributional semantic models, guiding the development of the next generation of representation-learning architectures.

Brief scale for measuring the outcomes of emotional and behavioural disorders in children

BackgroundFollowing the development of a child and adolescent version of the Health of the Nation Outcome Scales (HoNOSCA), field trials were conducted to assess their feasibility and acceptability in routine outcome measurement.AimsTo evaluate the reliability, validity and acceptability of HoNOSCA in routine outcome measurement.MethodFollowing training, 36 field sites provided ratings on 1276 cases at one time point and outcome data on 906. Acceptability was assessed by way of written feedback and at a debriefing meeting.ResultsHoNOSCA demonstrated satisfactory reliability and validity characteristics. It was sensitive to change and its ability to measure change accorded with the clinicians' independent rating. HoNOSCA was reasonably acceptable to clinicians' from a range of disciplines and services.ConclusionsProvided that training needs can be met, HoNOSCA represents a satisfactory brief outcome measure which could be used routinely in child and adolescent mental health services.