Joint venture healthcare system as common practice in developing countries : game changing on assessing health services

To explore the essence of game changing on applying joint venture (JV) approach for healthcare system improvement in developing countries. This is cross-sectional study exploring the factors influencing the successful implementation of JV for the healthcare services in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The study included: Qatar Statistical Authority, CIA fact book, Ministry of Health Annual Report, Hamad Medical Corporation Annual Report, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development information, and Qatar's healthcare system history. The research indicated that the LMIC healthcare system would benefit from affiliation with leading technology partner for healthcare reform. The findings support the view of LMIC healthcare systems' needs to incorporate joint venture approach in implementing JV concept for process improvement and knowledge transfer to contribute in country economic growth, development, and stability. Current study explored evidence supporting decision maker and management control of JV trends in different ways in comparison with developed countries. JV can also help the organization to share the risk and cost of large capital investment. The present study supports observations on expending the use of JVs as approach for improvement in LMIC healthcare system. The current study confirmed the advantages of JV which include helping businesses grow faster, increasing productivity, and generating greater profits, both parties sharing the risks and costs, accessing new markets and distribution networks. [Abstract copyright: Copyright: © 2020 International Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Rediscovery Datasets: Connecting Duplicate Reports

The same defect can be rediscovered by multiple clients, causing unplanned outages and leading to reduced customer satisfaction. In the case of popular open source software, high volume of defects is reported on a regular basis. A large number of these reports are actually duplicates / rediscoveries of each other. Researchers have analyzed the factors related to the content of duplicate defect reports in the past. However, some of the other potentially important factors, such as the inter-relationships among duplicate defect reports, are not readily available in defect tracking systems such as Bugzilla. This information may speed up bug fixing, enable efficient triaging, improve customer profiles, etc. In this paper, we present three defect rediscovery datasets mined from Bugzilla. The datasets capture data for three groups of open source software projects: Apache, Eclipse, and KDE. The datasets contain information about approximately 914 thousands of defect reports over a period of 18 years (1999-2017) to capture the inter-relationships among duplicate defects. We believe that sharing these data with the community will help researchers and practitioners to better understand the nature of defect rediscovery and enhance the analysis of defect reports

Hotel Pro Forma in a European context

In the following Bener discuss some examples of how the aesthetics of Kirsten Dehlholm and Hotel Pro Forma relate to  tendencies in the European performing arts. All established stage auteurs of course have their unique artistic idiom, so although we can detect certain correspondences and similarities between Dehlholm and other artists, they will only concern specific aspects

The distribution of the ABO blood groups among the diabetes mellitus patients

Background: There is strong evidence in the literature that there is an association between ABO blood group and certain diseases.Aim: The aim of this study was to investigate any association between the ABO blood groups and diabetes mellitus (DM) in Qatar.Design: This was a sex.matched case.control study.Setting: This study was carried out in the diabetic outpatient clinics and blood bank of the Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) from April 2011 to December 2012.Subjects and Methods: The study included 1633 diabetic patients and 1650 nondiabetic apparently healthy controls. Atotal of 2148 adult patients above 18 years of age were selected consecutively from the diabetic clinics of the hospitals and 1633 patients gave consent to take part in this study, thus giving a response rate of 76%. Atotal of 2150 nondiabetic healthy adults above 18 years of age were recruited from the blood bank and 1650 individuals agreed to take part in this study, giving a response rate of 76.7%. Blood group of the recruited subjects was taken from the database of the Blood Bank, Central laboratory, HMC.Results: The data revealed that the blood group B was significantly more common in diabetic patients as compared with healthy population (25.7% vs. 20.4%; P < 0.001). Blood group O was significantly less common in diabetic patients compared with nondiabetics (38.5% vs. 45.4%; P < 0.001). Among diabetic men, the frequency of only blood group B was significantly higher, while on the contrary among diabetic women the  frequency of both A and B (29.7% vs. 24.8%; P = 0.03 and 25.5% vs. 20%; P < 0.009, respectively) were significantly higher as compared with nondiabetic healthy population.Conclusion: The findings in this study suggest that ABO antigens are associated with DM. DM is more common in individuals with blood group B.Key words: ABO blood groups, case.control, diabetes mellitus, prevalenc

Preliminary analysis of the effects of confirmation bias on software defect density

In cognitive psychology, confirmation bias is defined as the tendency of people to verify hypotheses rather than refuting them. During unit testing software developers should aim to fail their code. However, due to confirmation bias, most defects might be overlooked leading to an increase in software defect density. In this research, we empirically analyze the effect of confirmation bias of software developers on software defect density

Association between Childhood Atopic Disease and Parental Atopic Disease in a Population with High Consanguinity

The aim of the study was to investigate the association between asthma, allergic rhinitis, and eczema in Qatari schoolchildren with allergic conditions in their parents. A cross-sectional study was conducted among 3500 Qatari schoolchildren aged 6–14 years in period: February, 2003–February, 2004. A questionnaire was used to collect the clinical history of asthma and allergic rhinitis in their parents and siblings. It was found that 21.6% of asthmatic children had mothers with asthma and 18.2% fathers with asthma. This contrasted with 6.8% of non-asthmatic children who had fathers with asthma and 9.4% mothers with asthma. As for allergic rhinitis, 26.5% of asthmatic children had mothers with allergic rhinitis and 25.3% fathers with allergic rhinitis. The frequency of either parent of the asthmatic children having allergic rhinitis was 41.8% and for both parents was 10.0%. The frequency of siblings having asthma was 36.6%, allergic rhinitis 16.4%, and eczema 29.1%. The present study revealed a strong association between respiratory allergies and eczema in parents, and their asthmatic children

The Use of Blog Activities to Promote Reflection in an ELT Practicum

Informed by the theories of critical reflection and community of practice, this study aimed to explore the integration of blogs to promote reflection among eighteen pre-service English language teachers registered in a practicum course at a public university in Turkey. Fourteen blog activities were designed and implemented to guide the reflective process of student teachers. Data were collected through archival documents of participants’ blog entries, two focus group interviews and two surveys. A total of 457 entries were analysed in terms of depth of reflection and the analysis revealed evidence of medium or high level reflection in most (61%) of the entries and highest level of reflection in 12% of the entries. The results indicated that the blog activities guided and systematically promoted reflectivity among pre-service teachers and thus have given them an opportunity to engage in deeper levels of reflection

Empirical analyses of the factors affecting confirmation bias and the effects of confirmation bias on software developer/tester performance

Background: During all levels of software testing, the goal should be to fail the code. However, software developers and testers are more likely to choose positive tests rather than negative ones due to the phenomenon called confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is defined as the tendency of people to verify their hypotheses rather than refuting them. In the literature, there are theories about the possible effects of confirmation bias on software development and testing. Due to the tendency towards positive tests, most of the software defects remain undetected, which in turn leads to an increase in software defect density. Aims: In this study, we analyze factors affecting confirmation bias in order to discover methods to circumvent confirmation bias. The factors, we investigate are experience in software development/testing and reasoning skills that can be gained through education. In addition, we analyze the effect of confirmation bias on software developer and tester performance. Method: In order to measure and quantify confirmation bias levels of software developers/testers, we prepared pen-and-paper and interactive tests based on two tasks from cognitive psychology literature. These tests were conducted on the 36 employees of a large scale telecommunication company in Europe as well as 28 graduate computer engineering students of Bogazici University, resulting in a total of 64 subjects. We evaluated the outcomes of these tests using the metrics we proposed in addition to some basic methods which we inherited from the cognitive psychology literature. Results: Results showed that regardless of experience in software development/testing, abilities such as logical reasoning and strategic hypotheses testing are differentiating factors in low confirmation bias levels. Moreover, the results of the analysis to investigate the relationship between code defect density and confirmation bias levels of software developers and testers showed that there is a direct correlation between confirmation bias and defect proneness of the code. Conclusions: Our findings show that having strong logical reasoning and hypothesis testing skills are differentiating factors in the software developer/tester performance in terms of defect rates. We recommend that companies should focus on improving logical reasoning and hypothesis testing skills of their employees by designing training programs. As future work, we plan to replicate this study in other software development companies. Moreover, we will use confirmation bias metrics in addition to product and process metrics in for software defect prediction. We believe that confirmation bias metrics would improve the prediction performance of learning based defect prediction models which we have been building over a decade