368 research outputs found

    The Five Factor Model of personality and evaluation of drug consumption risk

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    The problem of evaluating an individual's risk of drug consumption and misuse is highly important. An online survey methodology was employed to collect data including Big Five personality traits (NEO-FFI-R), impulsivity (BIS-11), sensation seeking (ImpSS), and demographic information. The data set contained information on the consumption of 18 central nervous system psychoactive drugs. Correlation analysis demonstrated the existence of groups of drugs with strongly correlated consumption patterns. Three correlation pleiades were identified, named by the central drug in the pleiade: ecstasy, heroin, and benzodiazepines pleiades. An exhaustive search was performed to select the most effective subset of input features and data mining methods to classify users and non-users for each drug and pleiad. A number of classification methods were employed (decision tree, random forest, kk-nearest neighbors, linear discriminant analysis, Gaussian mixture, probability density function estimation, logistic regression and na{\"i}ve Bayes) and the most effective classifier was selected for each drug. The quality of classification was surprisingly high with sensitivity and specificity (evaluated by leave-one-out cross-validation) being greater than 70\% for almost all classification tasks. The best results with sensitivity and specificity being greater than 75\% were achieved for cannabis, crack, ecstasy, legal highs, LSD, and volatile substance abuse (VSA).Comment: Significantly extended report with 67 pages, 27 tables, 21 figure

    Adjustment to colostomy: stoma acceptance, stoma care self-efficacy and interpersonal relationships

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    ‘The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com.’ Copyright Blackwell Publishing. DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2648.2007.04446.xThis paper is a report of a study to examine adjustment and its relationship with stoma acceptance and social interaction, and the link between stoma care self-efficacy and adjustment in the presence of acceptance and social interactions.Peer reviewe

    Towards a Better Understanding of the Relationship between Probabilistic Models in IR

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    Probability of relevance (PR) models are generally assumed to implement the Probability Ranking Principle (PRP) of IR, and recent publications claim that PR models and language models are similar. However, a careful analysis reveals two gaps in the chain of reasoning behind this statement. First, the PRP considers the relevance of particular documents, whereas PR models consider the relevance of any query-document pair. Second, unlike PR models, language models consider draws of terms and documents. We bridge the first gap by showing how the probability measure of PR models can be used to define the probabilistic model of the PRP. Furthermore, we argue that given the differences between PR models and language models, the second gap cannot be bridged at the probabilistic model level. We instead define a new PR model based on logistic regression, which has a similar score function to the one of the query likelihood model. The performance of both models is strongly correlated, hence providing a bridge for the second gap at the functional and ranking level. Understanding language models in relation with logistic regression models opens ample new research directions which we propose as future work

    An Exploratory Quantitative Study into the Relationship between Catholic Affiliation and the Development of Social Entrepreneurship Education in the USA

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    Catholic educationalists have long stressed the role of Catholic universities in advancing the cause of social justice to counter the increasing commodification of business relationships and the lack of social responsibilities of the business world. Is this rhetoric or reality? In this empirical paper involving 501 USA universities that have an Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) accredited business school, we examine the relationship between Catholic affiliation and the universities’ decisions to offer social entrepreneurship and non-profit management courses to business students. Our study found that universities with Catholic affiliation are significantly more likely to offer both non-profit management and social entrepreneurship courses to business students. Our results offer evidences that Catholic universities are indeed working towards making a difference, with the vision and flexibility to do so

    Awareness, Accuracy, and Predictive Validity of Self-Reported Cholesterol in Women

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    BACKGROUND: Although current guidelines emphasize the importance of cholesterol knowledge, little is known about accuracy of this knowledge, factors affecting accuracy, and the relationship of self-reported cholesterol with cardiovascular disease (CVD). METHODS: The 39,876 female health professionals with no prior CVD in the Women’s Health Study were asked to provide self-reported and measured levels of total and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol. Demographic and cardiovascular risk factors were considered as determinants of awareness and accuracy. Accuracy was evaluated by the difference between reported and measured cholesterol. In addition, we examined the relationship of self-reported cholesterol with incident CVD over 10 years. RESULTS: Compared with women who were unaware of their cholesterol levels, aware women (84%) had higher levels of income, education, and exercise and were more likely to be married, normal in weight, treated for hypertension and hypercholesterolemia, nonsmokers, moderate drinkers, and users of hormone therapy. Women underestimated their total cholesterol by 9.7 mg/dL (95% CI: 9.2–10.2); covariates explained little of this difference (R(2) < .01). Higher levels of self-reported cholesterol were strongly associated with increased risk of CVD, which occurred in 741 women (hazard ratio 1.23/40 mg/dL cholesterol, 95% CI: 1.15–1.33). Women with elevated cholesterol who were unaware of their level had particularly increased risk (HR=1.88, P <. 001) relative to aware women with normal measured cholesterol. CONCLUSION: Women with obesity, smoking, untreated hypertension, or sedentary lifestyle have decreased awareness of their cholesterol levels. Self-reported cholesterol underestimates measured values, but is strongly related to CVD. Lack of awareness of elevated cholesterol is associated with increased risk of CVD
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