Tag Archives: quality

Robofish Grace Glides with the Greatest of Ease

A high-tech robotic fish hatched at Michigan State University has a new look. A new skill. And a new name.

MSU scientists have made a number of improvements on the fish, including the ability to glide long distances, which is the most important change to date. The fish now has the ability to glide through the water practically indefinitely, using little to no energy, while gathering valuable data that can aid in the cleaning of our lakes and rivers. (more…)

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Television: Chronicle of a Death Foretold?

Not only is TV not endangered, but it also has a unifying social impact on the nuclear family across the country. This is the main conclusion of a cross-Canada study—Are the Kids All Right?on the television viewing habits of families with at least one child aged between 9 and 12 years. The study was conducted by a team of researchers led by André H. Caron, professor of communications at the Université de Montréal and Director of the Centre for Youth and Media Studies (CYMS).

“Young Canadians today live in a different world than that experienced by previous generations. In this context, many well-placed observers have predicted the impending death of television,” says Dr. Caron. “We wanted to test the veracity of this statement, so we set out to meet 80 different families (over 200 participants) to determine the current place of the small screen that has shaped so many childhoods since its creation.” (more…)

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Say Hi to a Magpie via New App

A new app which encourages people to say “good morning Mr Magpie” via their mobile phone will help scientists evaluate the benefits which birds bring to the quality of human life.

Whether you view them with sorrow or joy, using your smart device to help build up a national database of sightings of the distinctive black-and-white birds will feed into wider research by the University of Exeter to assess how much value people place on having birds in their gardens.

Dr Richard Inger, at the Environment and Sustainability Institute on the University’s Cornwall Campus, said: “We chose to study magpies because they’re one of the most common garden birds in the UK and are easily recognisable. Many people already acknowledge them for luck, and we’re asking them to go one small step further and log sightings on their mobile phones. Magpies are not everyone’s favourite birds, but by getting involved you can help us to gather crucial data which will help us establish how much time the birds spend in different habitats. (more…)

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Transforming America by Redirecting Wasted Health Care Dollars

Eliminating excessive spending could mean windfall for U.S., study suggests

The respected national Institute of Medicine estimates that $750 billion is lost each year to wasteful or excessive health care spending. This sum includes excess administrative costs, inflated prices, unnecessary services and fraud — dollars that add no value to health and well-being.

If those wasteful costs could be corralled without sacrificing health care quality, how might that money be better spent? (more…)

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Medication Beliefs Strongly Affect Individuals’ Management of Chronic Diseases, MU Expert Says

Health practitioners should use behavior-change tactics so patients take medications as prescribed

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Nearly half of patients taking medications for chronic conditions do not strictly follow their prescribed medication regimens. Failure to use medications as directed increases patients’ risk for side effects, hospitalizations, reduced quality of life and shortened lifespans. Now, a University of Missouri gerontological nursing expert says patients’ poor adherence to prescribed medication regimens is connected to their beliefs about the necessity of prescriptions and concerns about long-term effects and dependency.

MU Assistant Professor Todd Ruppar found that patients’ beliefs about the causes of high blood pressure and the effectiveness of treatment alternatives significantly affected their likelihood of faithfully following prescribed medication regimens. In his pilot study, Ruppar focused on older patients’ adherence to medication treatments that control high blood pressure, a condition that affects nearly 70 million adults in the U.S. and can lead to heart disease and stroke. (more…)

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Doctors Wary of Studies Funded by Pharmaceutical Industry, Study Shows

Physicians are about half as willing to prescribe drugs tested in pharmaceutical-industry funded trials than those in NIH-funded studies, a new study finds.

Physicians are less likely to trust the results of clinical trials when they know those trials were funded by pharmaceutical companies, regardless of the quality of the research, a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine shows.

The study, led by Dr. Aaron Kesselheim of the Harvard Medical School in Boston and co-authored by University of Arizona associate professor of law Christopher Robertson, evaluated physicians’ confidence in the results of drug trials conducted with a high, medium or low level of methodological rigor. It then looked at how their confidence in those same results changed when a trial’s funding source was revealed as either the National Institutes of Health or a company in the pharmaceutical industry, versus when no funding source was disclosed. (more…)

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Three Easy Ways to Solve USB Troubles

One of the things that made digital technology evolving is the fact that the quality of videos and images are continuously improving through the years. With this, you need to have the best space to accommodate such changes. People all over the world can’t get stuck with a small space on their computer and for this reason, external memory for backup was made. Floppy discs are already a thing of the past. Now, flash drives and other compact but efficient devices have replaced these things.

USB is now the most modern way to transfer data and even to install new hardware. From your mouse to your keyboard, all of these things are now connected to the PC or laptop in this way. USB stands for universal serial bus. This device allowed almost every person to transfer their data or to connect hardware easily without thinking whether or not it would fit into a port. (more…)

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Bing Challenges Nation to ‘Bing It On’

Study suggests people prefer Bing’s Web search results nearly 2-to-1 over Google.

REDMOND, Wash. — Sept. 6, 2012 — Beginning today, America can click and choose which Web search results it prefers by participating in the Bing It On Challenge, available at Bing.com. Based on research that indicates people prefer Bing Web search results over Google, Bing is inviting consumers to come and see for themselves with an online test designed to show that the quality of Bing’s Web search results has surpassed Google’s.

Although most people identify themselves as Google searchers, an independent study commissioned by Microsoft Corp. shows people chose Bing Web search results over Google nearly 2-to-1 in blind comparison tests.* Given those findings, Bing decided it is time to let people see for themselves that there is a better option in search. (more…)

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