Setting weights for fifteen CHNRI criteria at the global and regional level using public stakeholders: an Amazon Mechanical Turk study
JOURNAL OF GLOBAL HEALTH
Authors: Wazny, Kerri; Ravenscroft, John; Chan, Kit Yee; Bassani, Diego G.; Anderson, Niall; Rudan, Igor
Abstract
Introduction Stakeholder involvement has been described as an indispensable part of health research priority setting. Yet, more than 75% of the exercises using the Child Health and Nutrition Research Initiative (CHNRI) methodology have omitted the step involving stakeholders in priority setting. Those that have used stakeholders have rarely used the public, possibly due to the difficulty of assembling and/or accessing a public stakeholder group. In order to strengthen future exercises using the CHNRI methodology, we have used a public stakeholder group to weight 15 CHNRI criteria, and have explored regional differences or being a health stakeholder is influential, and whether the criteria are collapsible. Methods Using Amazon Mechanical lurk (AMT), an online crowdsourcing platform, we collected demographic information and conducted a Likert-scale format survey about the importance of the CHNRI criteria from 1051 stakeholders. The Kruskal-Wallis test, with Dut tn's test for posthoc comparisons, was used to examine regional differences and Wilcoxon rank-sum test was used to analyse differences between stakeholders with health training/background and stakeholders without a health background and by region. A Factor Analysis (FA) was conducted on the criteria to identify the main domains connecting them. Criteria means were converted to weights. Results There were regional differences in thirteen of fifteen criteria according to the Kruskal-Wallis test and differences in responses from health stakeholders vs those who were not in eleven of fifteen criteria using the Wilcox-on-rank-sum test. Three components were identified: improve and impact results; implementation and affordability; and, study design and dissemination. A formula is provided to convert means to weights for future studies. Conclusion In future CHNRI studies, researchers will need to ensure adequate representation from stakeholders to undue bias of CHNRI results. These results should be used in combination with other stakeholder groups, including government, donors, policy makers, and bilateral agencies. Global and regional stakeholder groups scored CHNRI criteria differently; due to this, researchers should consider which group to use in their CHNRI exercises.
Built-in self test of high speed analog-to-digital converters
IEEE INSTRUMENTATION & MEASUREMENT MAGAZINE
Authors: Santin, Edinei; Oliveira, Luis B.; Goes, Joao
Abstract
Signals found in nature need to be converted to the digital domain through analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) to be processed by digital means [1]. For applications in communication and measurement [2], [3], high conversion rates are required. With advances of the complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology, the conversion rates of CMOS ADCs are now well beyond the gigasamples per second (GS/s) range, but only moderate resolutions are required [4]. These ADCs need to be tested after fabrication and, if possible, during field operation. The test costs are a very significant fraction of their production cost [5]. This is mainly due to lengthy use of very expensive automated test equipment (ATE) to apply specific test stimuli to the devices under test (DUT) and to collect and analyze their responses.