Search PubMed⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search PubMed

Results for “Information Distribution”

Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 523 records · Page 29Linked to original sources
PubMed2005

PRIME: a graphical interface for integrating genomic/proteomic databases.

Data mining, finding and integration of information about proteins of interest, is an essential component in modern biological and biomedical research. Even when focusing on a single organism and only on a small number of proteins, there are often dozens fo data sources containing relevant information. We are developing PRIME, a protein information environment, to serve as a virtual central database which integrates distributed heterogeneous information about proteins (linked by common identifier). PRIME has powerful capabilities to visualize all kinds of protein annotation in specialized views. These views can be displayed side by side at the same time and can be synchronized in order to show simultaneously different aspects of identical proteins. These features allow a quick and comprehensive overview of properties of single proteins or protein sets.

Computational Biology↗
PubMed1990

Locus of information in words and the right visual field effect.

The right visual field (RVF) advantage found for the identification or classification of words has usually been interpreted as evidence for left hemisphere language functions. It has more recently been explained as the result of the fact that the most informative part of the word, presumably the beginning, is in a region of better visual acuity. It is not clear from existing evidence that the beginnings of words are in fact more informative. The present study assessed the locus of information in words by deleting either the initial or terminal one or two letters. Subjects were required to generate a completion. Regardless of whether subjects were scored as correct for generating the original target word (as would be appropriate in a naming study) or for producing any legitimate word (as would be appropriate for a lexical decision study), the results indicated that most words have more information in the initial letters. Nevertheless, there are exceptions to this rule, and some words have more terminal information. Equal numbers of words with more initial information and with more terminal information were selected for two visual field studies in order to assess the effect of the locus of information on visual laterality. In neither a lexical decision study nor a naming study did locus of information affect the commonly observed right visual field superiority. Thus the distribution of information is not likely to be a major confounding variable in laterality studies employing horizontally presented words.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1989

The role of occupational and non-occupational factors in workers ill-health.

In most European countries occupational health and public health have developed separately, the reasons behind this are mainly historical and political. Although this may be understandable, even today, due to the political factors involved, it is amazing that the research on the morbidity and mortality of people of working age does not aim at comprehensive analyses of etiological factors behind these types of health outcomes. Our knowledge on the health needs of workers is limited, in most countries we even lack any information on distribution of the major illnesses amongst the various occupational categories. Some information, however, is currently being gathered, based on the need to make operational the concept of work-related diseases which has been put forward by WHO. The US NIOSH programme on work-related diseases, or the Danish TOP-11-Programme, serve as examples for these types of developments. Additional need to study the causes of ill-health, and ways to counteract them amongst the working population, results from the health promotion action that has also been developed as a part of the HFA 2000. The aim of this overview is to study the importance of occupational and non-occupational factors in the etiology of the ill-health of workers. Evidently, such analyses are premature today. However, some anecdotal examples will be mentioned. The major emphasis of the paper is, however, laid on the needs for the coordination and evaluation of occupational health and other health programmes concerning those of working age. Some assumptions will also be made on the development of occupational health and the consequences of this development for those who are occupational health practitioners.

Europe↗
PubMed1997

Consumer involvement in nutritional issues: the role of information.

Finding a strategy to improve-diets is a concern of many politicians and health promoters. Distribution of information is one strategy, but seems to be relatively unsuccessful. There is public awareness of the role of diet in health, but this awareness has not led to sufficiently improved eating habits. What people buy and eat depends not only on individual but also on social, cultural, economic, and environmental factors. These factors are interrelated and food choice is a complex process, which explains why information supply on its own is insufficient as a strategy to promote healthy eating. Public health professionals in eight European cities therefore decided to use the health promotion approach as an alternative strategy to promote healthy eating. The essence of this approach is community action in which participation and multisectoral collaboration are key elements. Each of the sectors, such as consumers, supermarket managers, social workers, school teachers, restaurant keepers, and health workers, try to undertake actions that support positive individual behavior change. This so-called SUPER project has been running for 5 y and results to date are promising. Nutrition is emphasized in several places in the community. In this way people are involved in the process and become interested in and curious about healthy eating. Experiences of working with this strategy and opportunities for primary care physicians to apply this approach are presented.

Community Participation↗
PubMed2005

A human-centered design and evaluation framework for information search.

Information search in a distributed environment is an interactive process between the user and the artifact. How the information is distributed across the user and the artifact determines the efficacy of information search. Using a human-centered method, UFuRT, we developed an information search model and a taxonomy of search tasks. Further, we developed prototypes to investigate the relationship between search tasks and interface types. Preliminary results of analysis reveal the requirement of distributed information for search tasks and help understand the complexity of the tasks in different types of interfaces.

Humans↗
PubMed1993

How do nurses assess the information received by breast cancer patients?

The aim of the study was to clarify how nurses assess the information targeted at breast cancer patients before, during and after hospitalization. The sample group consisted of 176 nurses from surgical and radiological wards and clinics in southwest Finland. The study used responses to a questionnaire investigating breast cancer patients' recovery. Of the sample, 71% responded to the questionnaire. Log-linear modelling was used for the final statistical analysis of the results. The findings obtained by log-linear modelling showed a cumulative effect. Various associations were seen in the responses of the nurses on how they assessed the information received by patients. Patients who were considered well-informed before hospitalization were similarly considered during their hospital stay. Nurses consider that they give their patients insufficient information. Further, nurses are not clear about their own role in the distribution of information.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗
PubMed1997

Counseling patients about prescribed medication: 12-year trends.

OBJECTIVES: The authors determined patients' report of prescription drug counseling activities after withdrawal of the pilot program to require patient package inserts in 1980 and implementation of Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 counseling requirements in 1993. METHODS: Four cross-sectional national telephone surveys were conducted in the fall of 1982, 1984, 1992, and 1994. Telephone households were chosen by random-digit dialing. Subjects had obtained a new prescription for themselves or for a family member at a retail pharmacy during the previous 4 weeks. Verbal counseling rates at physician offices and pharmacies for five information categories and the distribution of written information at those locations were determined. RESULTS: Spontaneous verbal counseling at the physician's office has increased slightly, with the largest increases focused on the delivery of side effect and precautionary information. Slightly larger increases in pharmacy-delivered information regarding directions for use and precautions have occurred. Patient questioning has remained at single digit levels at both sites. The percentage of patients receiving any written information has increased from 5% to 15% at the physician's office and from 16% to 59% at the pharmacy. CONCLUSIONS: The data indicate small increases in verbal counseling but larger increases in the delivery of written information provided at the pharmacy. In light of Healthy People: 2000 goals for patient counseling and legislation encouraging private-sector initiatives, these data should help to refocus attention on the continuing need for effective patient education interventions.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Histogram method to obtain heat capacities in lipid monolayers, curved bilayers, and membranes containing peptides.

Lipid monolayer chain melting transitions were simulated using a two-state Doniach model, and experimental melting profiles of lipid vesicles were analyzed. We sampled the information of a Monte Carlo simulation into a single broad histogram containing complete information about the distribution of states. The information of the monolayer histogram was first used to calculate the melting behavior of a bilayer constructed from two uncoupled monolayers. We then fitted calorimetric heat profiles of various preparations of dipalmitoyl phosphatidylcholine vesicles. This analysis was extended to lipid bilayers. A fixed mean bilayer curvature was shown to result in a broadening of bilayer melting profiles. We furthermore used the histogram method to obtain the chain melting behavior of simple lipid-peptide mixtures.

1,2-Dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine↗
PubMed2005

Temporally nonadjacent nonlinguistic sounds affect speech categorization.

Speech perception is an ecologically important example of the highly context-dependent nature of perception; adjacent speech, and even nonspeech, sounds influence how listeners categorize speech. Some theories emphasize linguistic or articulation-based processes in speech-elicited context effects and peripheral (cochlear) auditory perceptual interactions in non-speech-elicited context effects. The present studies challenge this division. Results of three experiments indicate that acoustic histories composed of sine-wave tones drawn from spectral distributions with different mean frequencies robustly affect speech categorization. These context effects were observed even when the acoustic context temporally adjacent to the speech stimulus was held constant and when more than a second of silence or multiple intervening sounds separated the nonlinguistic acoustic context and speech targets. These experiments indicate that speech categorization is sensitive to statistical distributions of spectral information, even if the distributions are composed of nonlinguistic elements. Acoustic context need be neither linguistic nor local to influence speech perception.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

How to select a clinical information system.

Modern computer-based hospital information systems are mostly distributed with several information subsystems connected together by communication services. A single subsystem may be developed or purchased ("make" or "buy"). Before the purchase of hard- and software it is necessary to check out whether the product fits the requirements concerning the functionality and especially the integration in the hospital information system. This selection process is difficult and tedious and requires thus a simple and flexible technique. An appropriate approach for the comparison of clinical information systems before implementation based on the SMARTER method is described here, in hospital and its practicability is demonstrated with an example.

Cost-Benefit Analysis↗
PubMed2001

Use of satellite remote sensing and geographic information systems to model the distribution and abundance of snail intermediate hosts in Africa: a preliminary model for Biomphalaria pfeifferi in Ethiopia.

Geographic information system (GIS) risk models for the snail-borne diseases caused by Schistosoma spp. and Fasciola spp. have recently been developed based on climate and satellite-retrieved data on temperature and vegetation coverage. By using these models, it was possible to describe a relationship between vegetation index (Normalized Differences Vegetation Index (NDVI)), land surface temperature (T(max)) and disease prevalence, but little reference was made to the distribution of the corresponding intermediate host snail. Presence of the intermediate host snail is a key factor determining distribution of the disease in sub-Saharan Africa and a good snail distribution mode would probably mirror the endemic area of schistosomiasis. In the present analysis, it was shown that snail distribution data corresponds with schistosomiasis prevalence data in relation to a forecast model based on NDVI and T(max) data derived from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) onboard the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite series. The 'best fit' model included NDVI values from 125 to 145 and a T(max) data range of 10-32 degrees C. This model included 92.3, 90.4 and 94.6% of the positive snail sample sites in GIS query overlay areas extracted from annual, dry season and wet season composite maps, respectively. For other sites in Africa, other NDVI and T(max) ranges may be more appropriate, depending on the species of snail present, a topic that will be examined in further studies.

Africa↗
PubMed1998

An efficient fault-tolerant order entry management information system based on special distributed client/server architecture.

An automatic order entry system is very important for the processing of out-patient information, not only helping doctors to enter their orders directly but also reducing errors of communication. Many hospitals are anxious to set up a direct order entry system but are concerned about possible system failures. In this paper we report on an effective and efficient fault-tolerant order entry management system which satisfies the requirements for out-patient order entry. From the results of experiments on a prototype we found that the system was user friendly and reduced the time taken. Doctors are able to enter their orders more easily, accurately and quickly by selecting from the standardized and personalized menus to be found in the system.

Computer Systems↗
PubMed2005

Speech prosody, voice quality and personality.

The 'individuation' of oral language is still largely an unknown territory, especially with respect to the individual use of speech prosody (rhythm, intonation and intensity). An initial study (Zellner Keller, 2004) has suggested an interesting relationship between speakers' prosodic styles and their personality profiles, as perceived by listeners. In this study, it is shown for 34 male speakers that distributions of F0 (for the intonation) and dB (for the intensity) give interesting information. F0 distributions among speakers are not similar, whether the speech task is the same or not, but intensity distributions are nearly perfectly superposed on each other. Individual intonational styles in relationship with personality styles are then examined in two tasks: reading texts and spontaneous speech.

Humans↗
PubMed2002

Use of mifepristone as an example of conflicting and misleading medical information on the internet.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the accuracy and reliability of medical information available on the internet regarding medical abortion using mifepristone, with special emphasis on the possible bias of the internet websites providing the information. METHODS: A systematic search of the internet identified patient-oriented websites distributing medical information about mifepristone. The sites were divided into three groups according to their views of the drug (i.e. in favour, against or indifferent). RESULTS: Forty sites met the criteria for inclusion in our analysis: 15 sites (37.5%) were in favour of using mifepristone, 16 (40%) were against and nine (22.5%) were indifferent. Incorrect information, found in 12 sites (30%), was significantly more common (P < 0.006) in websites that opposed the use of mifepristone than in websites that favoured it, 56.3% and 6.7%, respectively. Websites against the use of mifepristone provided significantly more (P < 0.05) graphic descriptions (31.3% vs 0%) and significantly fewer (P < 0.03) links (18.8% vs 60%), than the sites in favour of the use of mifepristone. CONCLUSIONS: We found that information provided on the internet regarding the use of mifepristone was significantly less complete and accurate and included more graphic descriptions when the site opposed medical termination of pregnancy. These findings reinforce the concerns regarding the reliability and credibility of medical information on the internet and the need for quality control.

Abortifacient Agents, Steroidal↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Harvesting chemical information from the Internet using a distributed approach: ChemXtreme.

The Internet is a comprehensive resource of chemical information which is at the same time largely unstructured. It provides a wealth of scientific information such as experimental data and requires a suitable automated data mining and analysis tool for its meaningful exploration. The Java based software presented here, ChemXtreme, is developed for harvesting chemical information from the Internet employing the Google API in combination with a distributed client/server text analysis architecture based on JavaRMI. It represents the first and until now the only toolkit for automated structured data retrieval from the Internet which is itself open source. ChemXtreme employs the "search the search engine" strategy, where the URLs returned from the search engine are analyzed further via textual pattern analysis. This process resembles the manual analysis of the hit list, where relevant data are captured and, by means of human intervention, are mined into a format suitable for further analysis. ChemXtreme on the other hand transforms chemical information automatically into a structured format suitable for storage in databases and further analysis and also provides links to the original information source. The query data retrieved from the search engine by the server is encoded, encrypted, and compressed and then sent to all the participating active clients in the network for parsing. Relevant information identified by the clients on the retrieved Web sites is sent back to the server, verified, and added to the database for data mining and further analysis. The distributed further analysis of URLs in a client/server architecture scales very favorably, thus producing only minimal overhead.

Chemistry↗
PubMed1996

Multiple-trait Gibbs sampler for animal models: flexible programs for Bayesian and likelihood-based (co)variance component inference.

A set of FORTRAN programs to implement a multiple-trait Gibbs sampling algorithm for (co)variance component inference in animal models (MTGSAM) was developed. The MTGSAM programs are available to the public. The programs support models with correlated genetic effects and arbitrary numbers of covariates, fixed effects, and independent random effects for each trait. Any combination of missing traits is allowed. The programs were used to estimate variance components for 50 replicates of simulated data. Each replicate consisted of 50 animals of each sex in each of four generations, for 400 animals in each replicate for two traits. For MTGSAM, informative prior distributions for variance components were inverted Wishart random variables with 10 df and means equal to the simulation parameters. A total of 15,000 Gibbs sampling rounds were completed for each replicate, with 2,000 rounds discarded for burn-in. For multiple-trait derivative free restricted maximum likelihood (MTDFREML), starting values for the variance components were the simulation parameters. Averages of posterior mean of variance components estimated using MTGSAM with informative and flat prior distributions for variance components and REML estimates obtained using MTDFREML indicated that all three methods were empirically unbiased. Correlations between estimates from MTGSAM using flat priors and MTDFREML all exceeded .99.

Algorithms↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Distributed heterogeneous inspecting system and its middleware-based solution.

There are many cases when an organization needs to monitor the data and operations of its supervised departments, especially those departments which are not owned by this organization and are managed by their own information systems. Distributed Heterogeneous Inspecting System (DHIS) is the system an organization uses to monitor its supervised departments by inspecting their information systems. In DHIS, the inspected systems are generally distributed, heterogeneous, and constructed by different companies. DHIS has three key processes-abstracting core data sets and core operation sets, collecting these sets, and inspecting these collected sets. In this paper, we present the concept and mathematical definition of DHIS, a metadata method for solving the interoperability, a security strategy for data transferring, and a middleware-based solution of DHIS. We also describe an example of the inspecting system at WENZHOU custom.

Computer Communication Networks↗
PubMed2001

Efficiency and complexity in neural coding.

Neural coding in the retina and lamina of fly compound eyes is amenable to detailed anatomical, physiological and theoretical analysis. This approach shows how identified cell signalling systems are optimized to maximize the transmission of information. Optimization reveals three familiar constraints, noise, saturation and bandwidth, and shows how coding can minimize their effects. Experiments reveal a fourth constraint, metabolic cost, whose properties favour the distribution of information among multiple pathways. The advantages of distributed codes will be offset by increasing complexity and the build up of noise. The optimization of coding in fly retina suggests that both noise and complexity will be reduced by matching each step in the system's operations to the input signal, and to the logical requirements of the network's ultimate function, pattern processing. This line of argument suggests tightly organized networks, laid out that information flows freely and independently, yet patterned so that the necessary contacts and transactions are made quickly and efficiently.

Animals↗