A comparison of five multi attribute utility instruments

Abstract This paper presents the results of the validation study carried out to evaluate the Assessment of Quality of Life (AQoL) Instrument for the measurement of health related quality of life and utility. It involves, inter alia, the largest comparison of utility instruments that has been carried out to date. The five instruments included in the study are the AQoL, the Canadian HUI III, the Finnish 15D, the EuroQoL (EQ5D) and the SF36 with UK utility weights as quantified by Brazier (1998). The paper compares: (i) the absolute utility score obtained by different sub-populations; (ii) instrument sensitivity; (iii) the incremental differences in utility between different health states; (iv) the structural properties of descriptive systems; and (v) a limited comparison with a Time Trade-Off (TTO) assessment of own health by individuals. Using these criteria the AQoL performs very well. Its predicted utilities are very similar to those obtained from the HUI. There is evidence that the AQoL has greater sensitivity to health states than other instruments and its psychometric properties, as usually judged, are excellent. Despite this, it is concluded that, at present, no single MAU system can claim to be the gold standard and that researchers should select an instrument that is sensitive to the health states which they are investigating and that caution should be exercised in treating any of the instrument results as representing a utility score which truly represents a trade-off between life and health related quality of life

Microbial Similarity between Students in a Common Dormitory Environment Reveals the Forensic Potential of Individual Microbial Signatures.

The microbiota of the built environment is an amalgamation of both human and environmental sources. While human sources have been examined within single-family households or in public environments, it is unclear what effect a large number of cohabitating people have on the microbial communities of their shared environment. We sampled the public and private spaces of a college dormitory, disentangling individual microbial signatures and their impact on the microbiota of common spaces. We compared multiple methods for marker gene sequence clustering and found that minimum entropy decomposition (MED) was best able to distinguish between the microbial signatures of different individuals and was able to uncover more discriminative taxa across all taxonomic groups. Further, weighted UniFrac- and random forest-based graph analyses uncovered two distinct spheres of hand- or shoe-associated samples. Using graph-based clustering, we identified spheres of interaction and found that connection between these clusters was enriched for hands, implicating them as a primary means of transmission. In contrast, shoe-associated samples were found to be freely interacting, with individual shoes more connected to each other than to the floors they interact with. Individual interactions were highly dynamic, with groups of samples originating from individuals clustering freely with samples from other individuals, while all floor and shoe samples consistently clustered together.IMPORTANCE Humans leave behind a microbial trail, regardless of intention. This may allow for the identification of individuals based on the "microbial signatures" they shed in built environments. In a shared living environment, these trails intersect, and through interaction with common surfaces may become homogenized, potentially confounding our ability to link individuals to their associated microbiota. We sought to understand the factors that influence the mixing of individual signatures and how best to process sequencing data to best tease apart these signatures

Ugaritic parallels to the Old Testament.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University

Police reform, research and the uses of ‘expert knowledge’

This paper examines the interplay between research and police reform. Focussing on the creation of Scotland’s national police force in 2013 it examines the role of research as ‘expert knowledge’ in the political and policy debate leading up to the reform and the on-going evaluation of the impacts and implications of the new police force. The paper also situates the relationship between research and reform in the context of the role played by the Scottish Institute for Policing Research, a strategic collaboration between Scotland’s universities, Police Scotland and the Scottish Police Authority. The analysis is informed at a conceptual level by the work of Boswell and her consideration of the different ways in which bureaucratic organisations make use of expert knowledge. This focuses attention on both instrumental uses (ensuring decisions are based on sound reasoning and empirical understanding) and symbolic uses where knowledge plays a role in enhancing legitimacy or helping substantiate policy preferences in areas of political contestation. These different uses of expert knowledge have important implications for thinking about the role of police-academic partnerships

Prospectus, June 16, 1999

https://spark.parkland.edu/prospectus_1999/1016/thumbnail.jp