No abstract

We are very pleased to know that our fellow colleague had interesting point [1] of view on the article [2] ''Effects of electro-acupuncture on labor pain management''.The comment is given as follows:1. Acupuncture technique is different from electroacupuncture method. It focuses on palpation of acupoints, as the fine needles are needed to be inserted into the acupoints to exert therapeutic effects. However, in our article we used transcutaneous electrical acupoint stimulation machine (HANS-100B), which has electrode pads attached onto skins that covered the area containing the therapeutic acupoints. Hence, we used the unit centimeters to identify the area not the specific points; same methodology was used in 3. It might be appropriate to describe acupoints using ''cun'', but the definition and characterization of acupoints remained controversial [5]. It was not appropriate to use the title ''Electro-acupuncture effectiveness on labor pain management'', since the paper focused on acupuncture instead of electroacupuncture method. It was also not appropriate to use the term ''utmost accuracy'' to describe ''cun'' in the conclusion part, as we never see an acupuncturist use a calculator and a ruler to pinpoint acupoints, usually they use their own figures to palpate the acupoints. 4. Furthermore, electro-acupuncture method and acupuncture technique are different, the variation of applications and methodology are understandable.

No abstract

Approval-based committee (ABC) voting rules elect a fixed size subset of the candidates, a so-called committee, based on the voters' approval ballots over the candidates. While these rules have recently attracted significant attention, axiomatic characterizations are largely missing so far. We address this problem by characterizing ABC voting rules within the broad and intuitive class of sequential valuation rules. These rules compute the winning committees by sequentially adding candidates that increase the score of the chosen committee the most. In more detail, we first characterize almost the full class of sequential valuation rules based on mild standard conditions and a new axiom called consistent committee monotonicity. This axiom postulates that the winning committees of size can be derived from those of size − 1 by only adding candidates and that these new candidates are chosen consistently. By requiring additional conditions, we derive from this result also a characterization of the prominent class of sequential Thiele rules. Finally, we refine our results to characterize three well-known ABC voting rules, namely sequential approval voting, sequential proportional approval voting, and sequential Chamberlin-Courant approval voting.