Educated guess

Optic disc swelling is a manifestation of a broad range of processes affecting the optic nerve head and/or the anterior segment of the optic nerve. Accurately diagnosing optic disc oedema, grading its severity, and recognising its cause, is crucial in order to treat patients in a timely manner and limit vision loss. Some ocular fundus features, in light of a patient's history and visual symptoms, may suggest a specific mechanism or aetiology of the visible disc oedema, but current criteria can at most enable an educated guess as to the most likely cause...

This study examines whether the socio-demographic factors and cognitive sign features can be used for envisaging safety signs comprehensibility using predictive machine learning (ML) techniques. This study will determine the role of different machine learning components such as feature selection and classification to determine suitable factors for safety construction signs comprehensibility. A total of 2310 participants were requested to guess the meaning of 20 construction safety signs (four items for each of the mandatory, prohibition, emergency, warning, and firefighting signs) using the open-ended method...

The score profiles could be used to measure learners' skills proficiency via cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs) for predicting their performance in the future examination. The prediction results could provide important decision-making supports for personalized e-learning instruction. However, facing the possible complexity of skills, the uncertainty of learners' skill proficiency and the large-scale volume of score profiles, the existing CDMs have limitations in the measurement mechanisms and diagnostic efficiency...

There have been many algorithms created and introduced in the literature inspired by various events observable in nature, such as evolutionary phenomena, the actions of social creatures or agents, broad principles based on physical processes, the nature of chemical reactions, human behavior, superiority, and intelligence, intelligent behavior of plants, numerical techniques and mathematics programming procedure and its orientation. Nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms have dominated the scientific literature and have become a widely used computing paradigm over the past two decades...

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A key goal of health communications designed to prevent smoking initiation during adolescence is for the tobacco-related information to be retained in memory beyond immediate message exposure. Here, we test the role for epistemic emotions, specifically curiosity and surprise, in facilitating memory for tobacco-related health information. Participants ( n  = 294 never-smoking adolescents, ages 14-16 years) performed a trivia guessing task wherein they guessed the answers to general trivia and smoking-related trivia questions...

INTRODUCTION: In 2015, our university hospital pharmacy acquired the PharmaHelp robot system to automate part of its chemotherapy production. Complex technical use, downtime periods, and insufficient training caused a drop in motivation and disparities in operators' knowledge. We created a short, playful, standardized, gamed-based training program to address this, and evaluated its impact. METHODS: Operators were classified as trainers or trainees according to their knowledge about Information and Communication Technologies...

A significant challenge faced by atomistic simulations is the difficulty, and often impossibility, to sample the transitions between metastable states of the free-energy landscape associated with slow molecular processes. Importance-sampling schemes represent an appealing option to accelerate the underlying dynamics by smoothing out the relevant free-energy barriers, but require the definition of suitable reaction-coordinate (RC) models expressed in terms of compact low-dimensional sets of collective variables (CVs)...

As researchers in the social sciences, we are often interested in studying not directly observable constructs through assessments and questionnaires. But even in a well-designed and well-implemented study, rapid-guessing behavior may occur. Under rapid-guessing behavior, a task is skimmed shortly but not read and engaged with in-depth. Hence, a response given under rapid-guessing behavior does bias constructs and relations of interest. Bias also appears reasonable for latent speed estimates obtained under rapid-guessing behavior, as well as the identified relation between speed and ability...

Changepoints are abrupt variations in a sequence of data in statistical inference. In educational and psychological assessments, it is essential to properly differentiate examinees' aberrant behaviours from solution behaviour to ensure test reliability and validity. In this paper, we propose a sequential Bayesian changepoint detection algorithm to monitor the locations of changepoints for response times in real time and, subsequently, further identify types of aberrant behaviours in conjunction with response patterns...

BACKGROUND: Single-choice items (eg, best-answer items , alternate-choice items , single true-false items ) are one type of multiple-choice items and have been used in examinations for over 100 years. At the end of every examination, the examinees' responses have to be analyzed and scored in order to derive with an information about examinees' true knowledge . OBJECTIVE: The aim of this paper is to compile scoring methods for individual single-choice items described in the literature...

BACKGROUND: Pharmaceutical pictograms are standardized images used to visually convey medication instructions. Very little is known about the ability of Africans to interpret these images. OBJECTIVES: Thus, the aim of this study was to assess the guessability (ability to correctly guess meaning) of selected International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP) and United States Pharmacopoeia (USP) pictograms in members of the Nigerian public. METHODS: A cross-sectional survey was carried out between May and August 2021 on 400 randomly sampled members of Nigerian public...

BACKGROUND: The Progress Test Medizin (PTM) is a 200-question formative test that is administered to approximately 11,000 students at medical universities (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) each term. Students receive feedback on their knowledge (development) mostly in comparison to their own cohort. In this study, we use the data of the PTM to find groups with similar response patterns. METHODS: We performed k-means clustering with a dataset of 5,444 students, selected cluster number k = 5, and answers as features...

BACKGROUND: Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists have begun to actively use models to determine the epidemiological characteristics of the pathogen. The transmission rate, recovery rate and loss of immunity to the COVID-19 virus change over time and depend on many factors, such as the seasonality of pneumonia, mobility, testing frequency, the use of masks, the weather, social behavior, stress, public health measures, etc. Therefore, the aim of our study was to predict COVID-19 using a stochastic model based on the system dynamics approach...

To reduce the chance of Heywood cases or nonconvergence in estimating the 2PL or the 3PL model in the marginal maximum likelihood with the expectation-maximization (MML-EM) estimation method, priors for the item slope parameter in the 2PL model or for the pseudo-guessing parameter in the 3PL model can be used and the marginal maximum a posteriori (MMAP) and posterior standard error (PSE) are estimated. Confidence intervals (CIs) for these parameters and other parameters which did not take any priors were investigated with popular prior distributions, different error covariance estimation methods, test lengths, and sample sizes...

BACKGROUND: Access to accurate, timely and age-appropriate information about menarche is an essential part of menstrual health. Reliable evidence shows that girls primarily obtain information from their mothers and/or other female family members, therefore, it is important to determine parents' knowledge and their predictions about other parents' knowledge of the age of menarche. METHODS: To this end, we performed a pre-registered study with data collected from 360 households in Santa Rosa de Copán, Honduras...

BACKGROUND: Diagnostic tests are important in clinical medicine. To determine the test performance indices - test sensitivity, specificity, likelihood ratio, predictive values, etc. - the test results should be compared against a gold-standard test. Herein, a technique is presented through which the aforementioned indices can be computed merely based on the shape of the probability distribution of the test results, presuming an educated guess. METHODS: We present the application of the technique to the probability distribution of hepatitis B surface antigen measured in a group of people in Shiraz, southern Iran...

BACKGROUND: Health professionals are known to use various combinations of knowledge and skills, such as critical thinking, clinical reasoning, clinical judgment, problem-solving, and decision-making, in conducting clinical practice. Clinical reasoning development is influenced by knowledge and experience, the more knowledge and experience, the more sophisticated clinical reasoning will be. However, clinical reasoning research in dentistry shows varying results . AIMS: This study aims to observe the clinical reasoning pattern of undergraduate dental students when solving oral health problems, and their accordance with their knowledge acquisition...

Graduate education is a critical period in shaping and fostering graduate students' awareness about the importance of responsible conduct of research and knowledge and skills in doing good science. However, there is a lack of a standard curriculum and assessment framework for graduate students in Taiwan. The aim of this study was to develop a literacy-based research integrity (RI) assessment framework, including five core RI areas: (1) basic concepts in RI, (2) RI considerations in the research procedure, (3) research ethics and research subject protection, (4) publication and authorship, and (5) conflict of interest...

We consider correlation functions of single trace operators approaching the cusps of null polygons in a double-scaling limit where so-called cusp times t_{i}^{2}=g^{2}logx_{i-1,i}^{2}logx_{i,i+1}^{2} are held fixed and the 't Hooft coupling is small. With the help of stampedes, symbols, and educated guesses, we find that any such correlator can be uniquely fixed through a set of coupled lattice PDEs of Toda type with several intriguing novel features. These results hold for most conformal gauge theories with a large number of colors, including planar N=4 SYM...