Background : - The past two decades has seen an increasing emphasis placed on basing health care on the best available evidence. However, existing research has come under increasing scrutiny, which suggests its quality was often poor. This problem has been exacerbated by the ever increasing volume of health care literature. To address these difficulties systematic reviews have emerged as one of the most important ways by which research is summarised and communicated to its end-users. However, as these reviews have been primarily concerned with effectiveness, they have focused almost exclusively on randomised controlled trials. As a result, systematic reviews have excluded much of the research of nurses. Purpose : - The purpose of this study was to develop a process to systematically collect, appraise, summarise and synthesise the findings of a range of different types of research. Conceptual Framework : - To aid in the development of these expanded review methods, a conceptual framework was developed that addressed effectiveness, appropriateness and feasibility. Method : - A search of the literature was undertaken to identify published reviews of different types of research, and discussions in the health care literature related to the conduct of research reviews. These reviews and discussion papers served as the basis for developing the expanded review methods. Evaluation : - To evaluate the expanded review methods, two systematic reviews were conducted. The protocol and results of the first review on the use of music in hospitals are presented to demonstrate how the conceptual framework and expanded review methods enabled a broader evaluation of the topic. Selected results from the second review on the use of physical restraint are presented to demonstrate how the findings from a number of methodologically different types of research were incorporated into a systematic review. Conclusion : - The conduct of the two systematic reviews clearly demonstrated that the proposed expanded review process was able to rigorously collect and summarise a range of different types of research. Additionally, the conceptual framework underpinning these reviews enabled each of the studies to be located logically and coherently during the synthesis of data. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Department of Clinical Nursing, 2001.

Thesis (M.Sc. (Nutrition)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2008.

INTRODUCTION Antioxidant micronutrients may help alleviate oxidative stress in cystic fibrosis (CF) lung disease. To determine treatment effect, systematic reviews (SR) synthesize available evidence. Cochrane SRs are known for being methodologically rigourous, however, may have limited generalizability. OBJECTIVES To assess effectiveness of antioxidant micronutrients in CF lung disease using Cochrane and non-Cochrane SR methodology; to determine whether Cochrane SRs trade relevance for rigour METHODS The first SR followed Cochrane-preferred methods, while the non-Cochrane SR employed a broader search strategy and nclusion criteria. Reviews were contrasted regarding yield of search, treatment effect (efficacy and safety) and risk of bias. RESULTS Neither SR had enough data to support or refute efficacy or safety of antioxidant supplementation in CF lung disease. Compared to the Cochrane SR, the non-Cochrane SR had four more included studies, more precise estimates of efficacy, additional harms data and a similar risk of bias. CONCLUSION Broader search strategies and inclusion criteria may improve relevance of Cochrane SRs without compromising rigour. / Clinical Epidemiology

This thesis is a collection of three essays in empirical studies on derivatives. In the first chapter, I investigate whether credit default swap spreads are affected by how the total risk is decomposed into the systematic risk and the idiosyncratic risk for a given level of the total risk. The risk composition is measured by the systematic risk proportion, defined as the proportion of the systematic variance in the total variance. I find that a firm’s systematic risk proportion has a negative and significant effect on its CDS spreads. Moreover, this empirical finding is robust to various alternative specifications and estimations. Therefore, the composition of the total risk is an important determinant of CDS spreads. In the second chapter, I estimate the illiquidity premium in the CDS spreads based on Jarrow’s illiquidity-modified Merton model using the transformed-data maximum likelihood estimation method. I find that the average model implied CDS illiquidity premium is about 15 basis points, accounting for 12% of the average level of the CDS spread. I further investigate how this parameter is affected by CDS liquidity measures such as the percentage bid-ask spread and the number of daily CDS spreads available in one month. I find that both liquidity measures are significant determinants of the model implied CDS illiquidity premium. In terms of relative importance, the bid-ask spread is more important than the number of daily CDS spreads statistically and economically. In the third chapter, I investigate the impact of the systematic risk on the volatility spread, i.e, the difference between the risk-neutral volatility and the physical volatility. I find that the systematic risk proportion of an underlying asset has a positive and significant impact on its volatility spread. The risk-neutral volatility in this study is measured with the increasingly popular approach known as the model-free risk-neutral volatility. The surprising positive systematic risk effect was first documented in Duan and Wei (2009) using the Black-Scholes implied volatility. I show that this effect is actually more prominent using the clearly better model-free risk-neutral volatility measure.

This thesis is a collection of three essays in empirical studies on derivatives. In the first chapter, I investigate whether credit default swap spreads are affected by how the total risk is decomposed into the systematic risk and the idiosyncratic risk for a given level of the total risk. The risk composition is measured by the systematic risk proportion, defined as the proportion of the systematic variance in the total variance. I find that a firm’s systematic risk proportion has a negative and significant effect on its CDS spreads. Moreover, this empirical finding is robust to various alternative specifications and estimations. Therefore, the composition of the total risk is an important determinant of CDS spreads. In the second chapter, I estimate the illiquidity premium in the CDS spreads based on Jarrow’s illiquidity-modified Merton model using the transformed-data maximum likelihood estimation method. I find that the average model implied CDS illiquidity premium is about 15 basis points, accounting for 12% of the average level of the CDS spread. I further investigate how this parameter is affected by CDS liquidity measures such as the percentage bid-ask spread and the number of daily CDS spreads available in one month. I find that both liquidity measures are significant determinants of the model implied CDS illiquidity premium. In terms of relative importance, the bid-ask spread is more important than the number of daily CDS spreads statistically and economically. In the third chapter, I investigate the impact of the systematic risk on the volatility spread, i.e, the difference between the risk-neutral volatility and the physical volatility. I find that the systematic risk proportion of an underlying asset has a positive and significant impact on its volatility spread. The risk-neutral volatility in this study is measured with the increasingly popular approach known as the model-free risk-neutral volatility. The surprising positive systematic risk effect was first documented in Duan and Wei (2009) using the Black-Scholes implied volatility. I show that this effect is actually more prominent using the clearly better model-free risk-neutral volatility measure.

Finding novel or non-standard metabolic pathways, possibly spanning multiple species, has important applications in fields such as metabolic engineering, metabolic network analysis, and metabolic network reconstruction. Traditionally, this has been a manual process, but the large volume of metabolic data now available has created a need for computational tools to automatically identify biologically relevant pathways. This thesis presents new algorithms for automatically finding biologically meaningful linear and branched metabolic pathways in multi-genome scale metabolic networks. These algorithms utilize atom mapping data, which provides the correspondence between atoms in the substrates to atoms in the products of a chemical reaction, to find pathways which conserve a given number of atoms between desired start and target compounds. The first algorithm presented identifies atom conserving linear pathways by explicitly tracking atoms during an exploration of a graph structure constructed from the atom mapping data. The explicit tracking of atoms enables finding branched pathways because it provides automatic identification of the reactions and compounds through which atoms are lost or gained. The thesis then describes two algorithmic approaches for identifying branched metabolic pathways based upon atom conserving linear pathways. One approach takes one linear pathway at a time and attempts to add branches that connect loss and gain compounds. The other approach takes a group of linear pathways and attempts to merge pathways that move mutually exclusive sets of atoms from the start to the target compounds. Comparisons to known metabolic pathways demonstrate that atom tracking causes the algorithms to avoid many unrealistic connections, often found in previous approaches, and return biologically meaningful pathways. While the theoretical complexity of finding even linear atom conserving pathways is high, by choosing the appropriate representations and heuristics, and perhaps due to the structure of the underlying data, the algorithms in this thesis have practical running times on real data. The results also demonstrate the potential of the algorithms to find novel or non-standard pathways that may span multiple organisms.

Electrical mobile cart,one of low-speed small four-wheel vehicles, is becoming unsubstituted in the aged society recently. As we know, wheel Steering System plays an important role in riding comforts, stability of handling, and safety. The purpose of this study is to develop a systematic design procedure for the steering system of low-speed small four-wheel vehicles. First, to investigate the basic requirements and characteristics of low-speed small four-wheel vehicles. Second, to generalize the essential characteristics and establish the requirement book of steering systems. Third, kinematic design the original steering system by design procedure. Finally, kinematic design the single-A suspension steering system by design procedure.

¡@¡@The transmission system of manpower-drive vehicles always plays an important role in promotion of riding performance and enjoyment. The purpose of this research is to develop a systematic methodology for the design of the transmission system of the manpower-drive vehicles. First, analyzing the patents of manpower-drive vehicles. Drawing the function structure of the transmission and concluding the basic characteristic. Second, getting several innovative ideas of transmission systems by systematic methodology and comparing with products in patents. Third, according to the requirement charts to design steering systems and frames. Fourth, all design concept variant can be created by using morphological chart method. Several design concepts can be created for new manpower-drive vehicles. Finally, using computer software to assist drawing the models and manufacturing the models. And to establish a simple systematic procedure.

It was an age of pursuing customer satisfaction since 1980, and moreover chasing customers` value in 21century. But how can customer satisfaction improve firm`s value? This article combines marketing and finance together through analyzing interaction between customer, systematic risk and cost of capital. The empirical evidence presented in this article implies that customer satisfaction can surely lower systematic risk and there is nonlinear relationship between CSI and systematic risk. Comparing the results for the service and nonservice industry sectors, we observe that, customer satisfaction has a greater effect on systematic risk of service sectors. In addition to satisfaction, the analysis also include advertising expense as another explanatory variable and reveals that when putting satisfaction and advertising expense into model together, systematic risk will be the lowest. When using lisrel model, it shows that customer satisfaction can lower cost of capital through cost of debt and equity together then maximize shareholder`s value.

Thesis (M.S.)--Ohio State University, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 68-76).