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Proper Definition (proper + definition)
Selected AbstractsSerious Games: Broadening Games Impact Beyond EntertainmentCOMPUTER GRAPHICS FORUM, Issue 3 2007Ben Sawyer Computer and videogames for many years has been an island of technology and design innovation largely left to itself as it morphed from a cottage business into a global media and software industry. While there have been pockets of derivative activity related to games and game technology only in the last half-dozen years has there been a real movement toward exploiting this industry in many new and exciting ways. Today the general use of games and game technologies for purposes beyond entertainment is collectively referred to as serious games. The Serious Games Initiative was formed in 2002 and since its inception has been among a number of critical efforts that has helped open up the world and many disciplines to the ideas and innovations that may be sourced from the commercial, independent, and academic game fields. This has been a person-by-person, project-by-project effort that not only has informed us about the potential of games but also in how you merge innovation and innovators from one discipline with those in another. In this talk we will explore the total gamut of the serious games field identifying past the obvious how games and game technologies are being applied to problems in a wide array of areas including healthcare, productivity, visualization, science, and of course training and education. Once a proper definition of serious games is established the talk will focus on the current state of the field as it relates to research and infrastructure issues that are needed to make the difference between seeing serious games take hold as a major new practice or having it devolve into another trend of the moment lost to history. [source] Quality of equine veterinary care: Where can it go wrong?EQUINE VETERINARY EDUCATION, Issue 3 2008A conceptual framework for the quality of equine healthcare, based on court cases against equine practitioners in The Netherlands Summary Quality control and client satisfaction are topics of considerable current interest in both human and veterinary healthcare. Crucial to this discussion is a proper definition of ,quality of care'. This study applied, to (equine) veterinary care, a conceptual framework designed for assessing the quality of human healthcare and featuring structural deficiency, procedural inadequacy and disappointing outcome as key elements. This was done using court cases against equine practitioners as a yardstick for client dissatisfaction. Applying a system for evaluating the quality of healthcare may be a good way of monitoring and improving (equine) veterinary services, particularly once reliable indices for client satisfaction have been validated. [source] Growing decision trees in an ordinal settingINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS, Issue 7 2003Kim Cao-Van Although ranking (ordinal classification/regression) based on criteria is related closely to classification based on attributes, the development of methods for learning a ranking on the basis of data is lagging far behind that for learning a classification. Most of the work being done focuses on maintaining monotonicity (sometimes even only on the training set). We argue that in doing so, an essential aspect is mostly disregarded, namely, the importance of the role of the decision maker who decides about the acceptability of the generated rule base. Certainly, in ranking problems, there are more factors besides accuracy that play an important role. In this article, we turn to the field of multicriteria decision aid (MCDA) in order to cope with the aforementioned problems. We show that by a proper definition of the notion of partial dominance, it is possible to avoid the counter-intuitive outcomes of classification algorithms when applied to ranking problems. We focus on tree-based approaches and explain how the tree expansion can be guided by the principle of partial dominance preservation, and how the resulting rule base can be graphically represented and further refined. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source] Bayesian statistics in medical research: an intuitive alternative to conventional data analysisJOURNAL OF EVALUATION IN CLINICAL PRACTICE, Issue 2 2000AStat, Lyle C. Gurrin BSc (Hons) Summary Statistical analysis of both experimental and observational data is central to medical research. Unfortunately, the process of conventional statistical analysis is poorly understood by many medical scientists. This is due, in part, to the counter-intuitive nature of the basic tools of traditional (frequency-based) statistical inference. For example, the proper definition of a conventional 95% confidence interval is quite confusing. It is based upon the imaginary results of a series of hypothetical repetitions of the data generation process and subsequent analysis. Not surprisingly, this formal definition is often ignored and a 95% confidence interval is widely taken to represent a range of values that is associated with a 95% probability of containing the true value of the parameter being estimated. Working within the traditional framework of frequency-based statistics, this interpretation is fundamentally incorrect. It is perfectly valid, however, if one works within the framework of Bayesian statistics and assumes a ,prior distribution' that is uniform on the scale of the main outcome variable. This reflects a limited equivalence between conventional and Bayesian statistics that can be used to facilitate a simple Bayesian interpretation based on the results of a standard analysis. Such inferences provide direct and understandable answers to many important types of question in medical research. For example, they can be used to assist decision making based upon studies with unavoidably low statistical power, where non-significant results are all too often, and wrongly, interpreted as implying ,no effect'. They can also be used to overcome the confusion that can result when statistically significant effects are too small to be clinically relevant. This paper describes the theoretical basis of the Bayesian-based approach and illustrates its application with a practical example that investigates the prevalence of major cardiac defects in a cohort of children born using the assisted reproduction technique known as ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection). [source] The small airways and distal lung compartment in asthma and COPD: a time for reappraisalALLERGY, Issue 2 2010M. Contoli To cite this article: Contoli M, Bousquet J, Fabbri LM, Magnussen H, Rabe KF, Siafakas NM, Hamid Q, Kraft M. The small airways and distal lung compartment in asthma and COPD: a time for reappraisal. Allergy 2010; 65: 141,151. Abstract The involvement of small airways in the pathogenesis of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) has been debated for a long time. However, a proper definition of small airway disease is still lacking, and neither a widely accepted biomarker nor a functional parameter to assess small airway abnormalities and to explore the effect of tested compounds on small airways is available. Aiming towards increased knowledge and consensus on this topic, this perspective paper intends to (i) strengthen awareness among the scientific community on the role of small airways in asthma and COPD; (ii) examine the pros and cons of some biological, functional and imaging parameters in the assessment of small airway abnormalities; and (iii) discuss the evidence for distal airway pharmacological targeting in asthma and COPD. [source] | |||||||||||||